Need help with Acne removal

Jeff_Milo

Had a great shoot on Sunday with this very nice young lady who happens to be one of the Black Belts at my Dojo. She asked me to do my best to clear up her face, and on the farther away shots I have been able to use the healing brush & Totally Rad's "Pro-retouch" to do the job. I am not having nearly the same success with the close up shots. Can anyone offer any advise on how I can clear up her face. Any help at all is so very much appreciated!!

Svennie

You could use the clone tool to make the most obvious spots disappear. One trick is to:

1. duplicate the image
2. blur the new layer (set the amount of blur to own taste)
3. use a layer mask to keep only the skin
4. slide the opacity value back until you have the desired effect

Others probably use different techniques, so hopefully more people respond to your post
A ten minute quick-fix in Gimp gives:

Hackbone

Best way to go is Imagenomics Portratire. Yes it costs but how much is you time worth.

jarboedoggart

Hey everyone, I am new here (www.jarboedoggart.com, shameless plug) and figured I would just jump right in. I don't know about everyone else, but I use Lightroom. And I don't think there is any real great way of doing it other than taking the time.

Here is my attempt, took about 5 mins:





And like I said, it was a bit tedious...

Hackbone

Remember, when you use the patch tool you can drag the selection to any smooth texture. Meaning even clothing as long as it has a smooth texture. Try it

Sventekoz

I used Portrait Professional for this, and I can recommend it. I only did this quickly, so you could definitely achieve better results if you spent some time with it.

konomaniac

Sventekoz wrote: »

I used Portrait Professional for this, and I can recommend it. I only did this quickly, so you could definitely achieve better results if you spent some time with it.

Just looked at their website $39?? Seems like a no brainer to me (I don't do portraits and I'm tempted to buy it )

zoomer

First thing is to bring the exposure up as far as possible without blowing the skin out, that will clear up most of it. Then you can clone out the big issues that are left in a couple minutes.
Portrait Professional could clean this up in a few minutes, then anything left could be quickly cloned out....as already mentioned... I use it for my closeups, great tool.

Hackbone

30 sec of of patch tool and 10 sec or Portrature. http://www.imagenomic.com/pt.aspx

TenThirteen

Portrait professional is awesome, I purcased it and it's a great deal for sure. Easy to go overboard though, haha.

I think I have a 10% off coupon in my email if someone wants it, PM me :-)

jiro

A rough retouch. If you can send the raw or the large jpeg file to me I'd be more than willing to help a fellow dgrin member for a good cause.

Jeff_Milo

Thank you all very much for the excellent advise. I am looking forward to getting home tonight and trying them out.

Charles.... I downloaded the free trials form Portraiture to try them out, the one question I have is: it imported a bunch of actions into CS4, which now show up on my actions table with the Totally Rad & Kabota stuff I already have, but it does not give me the separate screen as it shows on the web site. Can you tell me which actions you used to get the effect you did? Also, are the patch too/ & healing tool the same? I don't remember seeing a patch tool.

Jiro, I appreciate the offer, I have a bunch of them to do (10 to 12) and would not want to burden you. I also need to learn how to do this and practice it so if I run into a Bride with the same complection I will know what to do.

Again, thank you all for the excellent advise! I very much appreciate you taking the time to help.

Hackbone

Jeff, the patch tool is under the healing brush tool. There is a little drop down arrow at the bottom right corner. You lost me on the stuff going on in the actions pallet. Mine is under filters then I get the window. Try going to windows and see if that is where it loaded. Which one did you download?

Hackbone

Jeff, got it figured out. You downloaded the portrature action and not the plug in. I am not familiar with the action. Go to the download tab and then the portrature plug in tab. You went to the droplet and actions one.

PorkysGotDGrin

1. Used The spot healing brush first to remove the acne and retain pore detail.

2. Create a duplicate of the image and apply a high pass filter (this layer will be the top layer and helps retain pore detail)

3. Duplicate orignal layer again and apply a surface blur to the layer (this becomes the middle layer and helps blend the skin tones)

4. Use layer masks as appropriate to bring back image detail where required

jarboedoggart

welp, you win this round. Well done.

PorkysGotDGrin

jarboedoggart wrote: »

welp, you win this round. Well done.

Thanks

Have to admit that I'm impressed with the results you got using Lightroom... Have always given up when trying to use the spot removal tool in there.

adbsgicom

Just to add to the mix...


Image is in an unlisted directory so can't be found w/o this link.

Used partial process from Lee Varis' book "Skin".
1. Used Patch to get some of the more pronounced marks/zits
2. Used Lee's method to make a hue/saturation adjust layer, select the magentas, use the eyedropper to select a red region and then minus eyedropper other skin regions to close the range. Masked off the lips since red was sucked out. Collapsed the top layers. (kept my base untouched since I may have needed to go back)
3. Ran portraiture plugin to smooth and warm (+2). Seemed too much so set opacity at 75%, masked off hair/eyes/bg
4. Skin seemed too flat, so took another page from Lee and made a grey layer, added monochrome noise, embossed it and set it to overlay at 7% and masked off the eyes, lips, etc.

I think the last step might be a bit heavy around the chin so perhaps adding a mask and lightly brushing back the contribution would help.

briandelion

I tried a slightly different approach. I first used the lasso tool and a bit of healing brush and left the freckles on her nose. Next I duped the layer and applied a very subtle gaussian blur. I then made an adjustment layer set on screen blending mode at about 20% opacity to get brighter eyes and lighter skin tones, and masked areas where I didn't want the effect. Same thing again, this time multiply blending mode to get better contrast in a few key areas.

Seneca

Also added a little lip color.

cr8ingwaves

I really love seeing all of the different results. Great work dgrin!

Such a pretty young lady. Accutane would probably work wonders for her.

Prairiemaiden

Wow awesome job, you should do a tutorial, or sell it with a paypal cart.

jiro wrote: »

A rough retouch. If you can send the raw or the large jpeg file to me I'd be more than willing to help a fellow dgrin member for a good cause.

Stevemac

I used CS5's selective tool and applied to the facial area
then used imagenomics noiseware pro and applied it at 100%
getting rid of 90% of the acne then i used CS5's spot healing tool
over the acne areas to remove the rest and then lastly i used nik softwares glamour glow
preset to smooth the facial area took 10mins to get it to this.
http://www.dgrin.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=32716&stc=1&d=1295581160
steve.

reyvee61

Hmmm, some very cool examples guys.
You got me wondering how well Nik Software's Color Efex Pro would do....
I'm gonna give it a shot tonight when I get home....

Jeff_Milo

You Guys & Gals ROCK!!!!!!!!

Thank you so much for all of your help on this. I very much appreciate you all taking the time to impart your wisdom. I have learned so much reading through your posts. Here is a finished product from playing around with a combination of your techniques:



for this picture I bumped up the exposure and then used the patch tool to remove the major acne/blemishes. Then I used Totally Rad's "Pro retouch" action at 50% opacity to smooth out the skin. Then I used Portraiture's "fair skin" action at 75% opacity. Totally rad's "eye bump" for the eyes. Totally rads "rusty cage" at 10% opacity to give her just a bit of color and then i used a burned out layer for the slight vignette

Stevemac

You have done an awsome job jeff well done and no doubt your freind is going to really pleased with the finished images.

steve.

reyvee61

Nice job!

jiro

Good Job, Jeff. I'm pretty sure your friend would love this when she sees it.

zoomer

Just trying to help out for next time.
The last example is overdone at least by half. If your intent is to provide soft focus shot for a girl of her age then this is certainly a good example of that, however I am pretty sure that is not what a girl of her age is looking for.

First of all do not take pictures this close of girls with really bad skin.
In processing first thing to do is increase the exposure so the skin is very bright without blowing out, that will clear up half your problem right there. The darker the exposure the redder and more pronounced the acne becomes.
For people with acne like this Portrait Professional is a lifesaver....just don't over do it. Less is more with skin cleaning.
The girl knows she does not have perfect skin, don't make it perfectly pristine, people won't recognize her. Clean up about 90 percent of it, leave some skin detail. You can clone out the last of the large blemishes and you will still retain some sharpness in the photos.
I am attaching a photo of a girl with skin almost exactly like that of the girl in your thread...this is done in Portrait Professional and with some additional cloning to clean up big problem areas. Just to show that it is very possible to clean the skin and retain adequate sharpness in the photo, 5 minutes work:

jiro

Jeff, I got bored so I decided to work again on your first image and came up with this process. Maybe you can pick up some ideas using this tutorial and help you a little bit in the future.



Step 1: Make a copy of the original image and name this one > layer 1 - acne removal.

Step 2. Using layer 1, use the spot healing brush to take away the acnes or pimples one by one. (I know, it's a lot of work but it pays well in the end. ) Note: Make sure you use a small brush size so can save some skin detail if possible.

Step 3. Once most of the skin imperfections are reduced in layer 1, copy layer 1 and name this new layer as > layer 2 - surface blur.

Step 4. Using layer 2, we will apply surface blur on this layer. Surface blur preserves some hard edge data on the image while applying some blur on the soft areas (in this case, the majority of the skin areas). The parameters on the surface blur command are the radius and threshold. I cannot tell you that you can apply the same settings on all images. The idea on the settings is that you want to even out the skin tones and at the same time still maintain good detail on the eyes, the hairs, and the lips. On your image the favorable settings would be Radius = 37 and Threshold would be = 25. We also need to apply a mask after we evened to skin tone. The mask will limit the effect of the surface blur on the skin areas only. Use a big, round brush with a soft edge and set the FLOW (not the opacity) to about 15%. This setting will allow you to slowly apply the skin evening effect "gradually" on the image.

As you can see on the mask the only areas affected (the white areas) are the skin areas. The eyes, hairs, and the lips are not covered since we want to keep the details on these areas.

Step 5. Now, the skin is almost even but you lost the natural texture of the skin. To "artificially" bring back the skin textures we will add some random gaussian noise to the image. To do this, copy layer 2 and name this new layer as > layer 3 - add noise. Now, click FILTER > NOISE > ADD NOISE > and set the value to 1.22

Since we copied layer 2, the mask is also copied together with the image. Therefore, the noise will only be added to the skin areas. Pretty neat, huh.

Step 6. This step is not that necessary but I normally do this in case I find the details on the lips and the eyes insufficient. Copy the original layer (the background layer) and place it on top of layer 3. Apply a mask and fill this mask with a black color. Now, using a white colored brush, slowly bring back some more original detail on the eyes, eyebrows, and lips by slowly painting the mask layer (not the image layer) with a soft medium sized and soft-edged brush. As I have said, when working with the mask layer use a white colored brush. Otherwise, you won't see the effect working.

Step 7. We're done! Now, all we need to do is to combine all the active layers into one layer. To do this there is a pretty neat shortcut to it. Right click on the top most active layer (in this case the added noise layer) and you will see the option > MERGE VISIBLE. Left mouse click this option and while keeping your hold on the left mouse click, press the ALT key and release the 2 together. Voila! A new combined layer! D

Step 8. Since the image lacks some contrast, we copied the combined layers and added some contrast adjustment to it.

Step 9. I added a new layer and then lightened the white part of the eyes to make it pop a little bit.

Step 10. To make the eyes 'pop' more, I selected only the eye area (excluding the white areas) on both the left and right eye and adjusted its level to make it lighter.

Step 11. I made a selection of the lip area and set it to a new layer. Then I made it a little bit darker.

Step 12. I am not totally content with the result so I applied a hue/saturation adjustment on the lip area and apply it. NOTE: You only need to apply this adjustment on the lip layer alone. To do this, there is another pretty photoshop trick to it without going to the layers adjustment menu.

Press the hue/adjustment layer on the layers pallete, then exactly position the cursor (you will now see the cursor change into a pointing hand icon) in between the hue/sat adjustment layer and the darken lips layer. The cursor must be exactly at that small dividing black line. Once the cursor is positioned there, press ALT and release the 2 together. Voila! The hue/sat adjustment layer is now applied ONLY TO THE LAST LAYER BELOW and not to all the layers below. It sounds complicated but really this is the easiest way to do it once you get the hang of it.

Step 13. I added some blush on to the left cheek of the image to add some color.

Step 14. I then added an S-curve on top to add some more contrast and detail on the overall color of the image. This S-curve will be applied on all layers below.

Step 15. And lastly, I liquified the lips a little bit to make it "nicer".

Sounds complicated? maybe. Sometimes retouching is very easy and sometimes it's tedious. It will all depend on how 'natural' you want your retouching to be. I hope this can help anybody on DGrin. If not, thanks for the time reading this.

zoomer

jiro
OMG somebody shoot me . Just kidding.
Really though some people enjoy that kind of involved process, they like working through all those steps. To each his own.
Just curious how long does that take to do one photo following all those steps?