This is my first post on this site--been a web developer for past 7 years and hoping make career change to retoucher very soon. In the attached image, one of 7 shots of the same girl w/varying looks, she has a very hairy face. My objective is to make her face smooth but real looking. Any advice on how to remove much facial hair? Original image is MUCH larger so the hair is much more visible. Thanks in advance...

Hi there

You may try the Katrin technique to remove beard shadow from men.

You duplicate the background

Apply a dust/scratch filter until the hair is gone.

Define a pattern of the whole picture

Undo the dust/scratch filtering

Set healing brush to pattern and aligned…choose your newly made pattern of the picture.

Reduce the duplicate layer opacity to 50 percent.

Then just brush where needed.

Butch

I use a similar method...

i run the Dust & Scratches filter at these settings,

Dupe the original layer,

Radius: 6

Threshold: 7

Add a hide all mask to that layer, and paint over the hair spots with a white brush.

I think you both did a great job, but I am especially impressed with KR's. I wonder if Ro's de-grunging would work as well?

Ill try it out and post.

Nope - your technique is best. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks so much for the feedback. One problem, when I tried KR's version on the full sized image, the hair especially on the chin and upperlip are not really being fully concealed. It worked great on the nose, however. I did it also with the healing brush but that made it somewhat plastic-y. Any other suggestions?

did you try increasing the settings on the larger file size?

This is what I got after, think the chin looks fake. Anyone agree?

How about the good old d&b on each hair to remove them?

hey daviskw, the method you sent works great for the larger file size and the skin still looks real. This site is amazing, thank you all so much for the help!

Here is another option

Make a duplicate layer and name it blur.

Use the healing brush on the blur layer and heal until all hair is gone. Do not worry how much blur because you can bring detail back.

Open a neutral layer above and fill with noise about 1.5 to 2 pixels... apply small gaussian blur about .3 to .7 pixels.

Turn off the blur layer and click on the background layer.

Use the lasso and select all the areas you used the healing brush on. Apply a fair amount of feather… say 8 pixels.

Now go to the edit menu and copy merged. When you paste this layer call it the composit layer.

Turn off the noise layer…turn on the blur layer.. paste the composite layer above the blur layer.

Now as you reduce the composite layers opacity detail comes back… see if you can find a compromise point.

Butch

Glad it worked... I must have been typing the second option when you posted.

Butch

Hi,

Using the method Butch described, I made two observations.

1. Did not know this, maybe only in v7. I had my brush set to Other dynamics, opacity pen pressure. The healing brush reacted as size pressure. Changed my brush so that there was no pen pressure. The healing brush reactied as if no pressure. So it seems that the healing brush uses pen pressure or not depending upon the setting of the brush tool.

2. I observed quite a bit of color shift in the mid tones. They became reddish. Changed the layer I was healing to luminosity and the color shift was gone. I suggest that if you do this, you do the healing at the start of your retouching. Have two layers, background and the duplicate you are healing. Set the duplicate to luminosity. Complete the healing to your satisfaction, opacity etc.
Then duplicate the background again, under the first dup. Merge the two duplicates. The blending will change back to normal, but the luminosity effect will be there. If you leave this first dup as luminosity, you can get a nasty supprise latter if you come back to this layer and clone or use certain other techniques. Make the second dup to merge so that the origianl image is preserved.

Larry

About healing brush. Forget No. 1. Duh! It has its own settings found when you click the little triangle in the options bar. At the bottom is the setting to turn pressure on or off. For some reason, I got the effect I described.

The second comments refer to Butch's first post.

Butch, your second method is it not the same as dup layer, do healing. Reduce opacity to taste. No selection and feather required. For noise, if desired, create 50% gray layer, overlay mode, add noise, slight blur. Add hide all mask, and paint in areas that were healed or need noise. Seems quicker and more versitile unless I am missing something your method does. I tried both and did not see any difference.

Larry

Hi Larry

No different really just in control maybe ... Say you want the cheek and nose a different amount of blending between the healed layer and the original..as an example. If you made separate layers, as I offten do, you could individually change opacity to get the best overall blending.

Butch

Butch,

You can add a mask to the dup layer and then use a percentage gray to reduce certain areas if you want.

Larry

Always more way than one... but much eaiser to just slide opacity then to try out different grays

Butch