Found a great outfit to go with your skin, but don't know how to use it! Let me teach you!

The Guide below will teach you how to go from this, to this!

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Tools you'll need:
Editing Tool: MSPaint and Skin Editing softwares will unfortunately not work for this. I would recommend the use of a tool such as Paint Tool SAI, Medibang Paint, etc, that have the ability to save with transparent backgrounds and work with layers.
Base Skin of Choice: The skin on the right above this text is my skin of choice from a while back. Your skin does not have to have underwear or shoes, by the way, I just like keeping everything PG.
Clothing of Choice: Any outfit will do. Just be sure you've checked the page to make sure you're allowed to use it. Some skin makers will ask that you not use the clothing they've uploaded as they're made for someone in particular or themselves.
Understanding of your Program: This kind of thing, unfortunately, isn't the easiest to do without the knowledge to use your program. But just keep practicing!

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Step One: Find your Outfit

To begin, you'll be needing an outfit. You can either get this by making it yourself or finding it online such as on PMC. For this example I'll be using my Tanzanite's Dress.



Once you've downloaded the skin, open it up in your program of choice. You should see something like this.


Note: My skins are saved with a 'null' texture where the skin should be. The instructions below will show you how to get rid of it.

Step 1.5: Remove extra textures

Some skinners like me will put textures where the base skin should be (either due to program limitations or to mark clearly where the outfit stops and the endless void of nothingness begins). In this example, the null texture is a bright, flashy pink and straight black. All you need to do in this case is erase it!



Now, remember, some programs' erasers have an aspect of transparency to them, causing it to erase parts of the skin you don't want it to. In that case, you'll want to find a tool such as the Binary Eraser I have on my copy of SAI. This will delete pixels entirely rather than leaving half-erased marks in your skin.

Step 2: Copy + Paste

After you've done everything you need to to set up your outfit, now it's time to move this outfit over to your skin. In order to do this, you'll first need to select the entire outfit, and hit Ctrl+C. This will copy the outfit to your clipboard on your program.



Now, find your base skin that you'd like to apply the outfit to.



Now, finally, press Ctrl+V to paste the outfit over the skin. If it's done right, it'll look something like this:



Now, just wait. You're not done quite yet.

Step 3: Hair

Something that's a little troublesome when using skins like these is that the hair does not stay on top of the skin at all times. As you can see, all the hair on her chest and back have vanished under her dress.

In this case, set the layer that your outfit is on to less than 100% opacity. It's not really important how transparent you make your skin, as long as you can see the base below the outfit.



Now you can see the hair! Now all you need to do is get out that Binary Eraser again and erase the pixels of the outfit that are over the hair (and anything else, of course. You can erase pieces of the outfit too such as gloves or armor overlays).

After you've done that, set your outfit layer back to 100% opacity, and check your results. If it looks like the image below, congratulations! Your skin is now ready to go.



Step 4: Check your results

After you've done the steps above, it's time to save the skin. Hit Ctrl+S (or whatever button your program uses) to save the skin under the name of your choice. I recommend sending your skin to your Pictures folder so that it's easy to access from the Minecraft launcher.



Now, the two skins should be one! Congrats!

I hope this tutorial helped. Let me know if you need any more.