Skin Work

anonymouscuban

I've been practicing my skin smoothing and healing technique for the last few and wanted to see what you all think. I used mostly the healing brush here to heal out a really gnarling zit she had on her forehead and I also used some Gaussian blur layers masked in lightly here and there with 7% soft brush just to even out things.

Here is a large crop for detail:



And the full portrait:

craig_d

Good job! She looks like an attractive woman probably wearing a bit of makeup to smooth her complexion, but she doesn't look like she's made of plastic the way people can when an image is processed too heavily. You've cleaned up the image deftly, with a suitable degree of subtlety. The lighting is very nice too.

There is just one spot that bothers me a little. Directly to the right of her nose, in the darkest part of the cheek, there are what look to me like some lighter brush strokes that seem not quite to fit. I'm not sure if that's the result of processing or not.

Nikolai

Looks good!
In general, for this type of work I do wholeheartedly recommend Portrait Professional. I mean, you can do the same stuff in PS, but in PP you can do it MUCH faster, and probably end up getting better results.

Qarik

just the slightest bit too smooth for me around the cheeks and nose

briandelion

Nice touch up work on a beautiful subject. An interesting alternative to Gaussian blur I stumbled upon recently:
-duplicate your bkgd layer. Now go filter>other>high pass.
-Set the radius slider(you'll have to experimentwith the exact setting but start fairly high). Hit OK and then CMD> I (or from the Menu bar, Select >Inverse ).
-Finally, set your blending mode on the duplicate layer to Soft Light or Overlay to get the effect. This will cause what is usually a sharpening effect to do the opposite by ignoring edges and softening everything else.
-Now add your Layer Mask and hide what you don't want. Once you get a setting that you like you can set up an Action that will do the whole thing in seconds. You can always back off the Opacity setting of the layer if the effect is too strong. Hope you find this mehtod useful.

reyvee61

Great job!
The close crop shows how well this worked.
I think this type of work is fairly easy with Color Efex Pro via Dynamic Skin Softener and the heal brush.
Probably as good of results in just seconds.......

anonymouscuban

Thanks all. I have a plugin called Portraiture that works pretty well but I find that if the face is not completely in focus, the results look odd. The nice thing is that it you can select the tones you want smoothed so it doesn't smooth everything. It adds a new layer so you can tweak the opacity or brush things out. Here is the same photo done with Portraiture plugin. The only thing extra I had to do was to use the healing brush a bit on the forehead pimple. Opacity was left at 100% and I didn't mask anything out:

reyvee61

Wow, will have to look into that plugin....
How much time does it take to render these?

anonymouscuban

reyvee61 wrote: »

Wow, will have to look into that plugin....
How much time does it take to render these?

The "manual job"... took me about 10-15 minutes. The plugin took me about 1 minute to run the plugin since I have a preset saved for my wife. and then maybe another 2 minutes to "heal" her zit from her forehead.

reyvee61

Thanks for the reply