As to how I got that skin-tone effect: I really like monotone pictures because of their extra dramatic impact -- I find that COLOR monotone pictures tend to be more dramatic than grayscale. I recently learned that if I use a muted red as my one color tint and greatly decrease its intensity to a near gray, after a whole lot of processing, the resulting color greatly resembles natural skin tones.
The trick is to work in monotone but with the color depth set as high as possible. I put the picture through several filters (usually just sharpen and edge definition), stopping after each filter to manually smooth all the pixels together, following the newly defined edges and usually working with a zoomed shot. When the whole picture is smoothed out manually (it doesn't get the same "natural" effect if you just use the soften filter), it goes through the whole process again, over and over until the desired effect is reached.
If the color depth is set at 16 million, after a few few times through the filters, small spots of color begin to pop up, other than the one color initially chosen. You know its time to stop when a whole bunch of the OPPOSITE color starts to appear (green, in the case of the initial red) -- for the skin-tone effect, you want to get it JUST to the point where the green starts to appear -- it gives a sort magical depth to the color and creates the illusion of a full color picture. If you keep going, you get very unslightly green blotches everywhere.