Hello can anyone help me,

I have photoshop version 6 and took a pic of a gentelmen that has serious pock marks. How would be the best way to smooth them out? I am freshly new to photoshop so I would need a step by step.

Thank you.

There are numerous ways this can be done. I simply used the patch tool which is in with the healing brush. On the left side of the face there is an area that can be sampled. I just selected a small section and moved it to the area. As the corrected area grows you can select larger portions of the area and move them to the area.

dc

Oh that looks wonderful. Unfortunately I do not have the patch tool in my version, I was looking for that tool earlier tonight. Darn I am thinking I am going to have to break down an buy the newest version of photoshop.

Hi,

What exactly are you using. Is it Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or something else?

dc

Here is the picture done this time with the healing brush.

(I must have been sleeping!! You started your post with the answer to my question.) Sorry

Remember, whatever method you use to diminish those pockmarks, you don't want to eliminate them entirely. This is a candid snapshot and not a woman's face in skin commercial. You want to ameliorate them, draw attention away from them, make them look less visible but still let the person be recognisable. You want people who don't know the person never to notice his skin and people who do know to think that it is not so bad after all. It should be done in such a way that it looks good and real at the same time.

My advice to you is to learn all you can about Dodge and Burn. The highlights and shadows are all over the place on the forehead in that shot and need to be evened out before you do anything else. You could then smooth things out with the clone tool (seeing you don't have a healing brush) and lastly you could dial back some of the texture by placing a copy 0f the original over your retouched version, setting the blend mode to Overlay and running the High Pass filter on it.

Let me know if you need any more details.

Syd

As Syd already mentionned: Don't make it seem unnatural.

Here's a way you can set yourself up to have an easier time of it before you get into the cloning. As Syd points out, your lights and darks are splattered all over the place, and cloning will be a pain. Here are a couple of easy steps you can take to even things out before moving in to work on the fine detail.

Dupe the image into a new layer.
Invert the layer (CMD/CNTRL I—Macs use CMD, Windows uses Control)
Open Hue/Saturation and pull the Saturation slider all the way to the left.
Set the blending mode of this layer to Overlay.
Create a layer mask filled with black to completely hide it.
Now paint white into the mask with a low opacity brush. Focus on the extrem texture areas that you want to smooth out.

When you have what looks like the best result you can obtain, copy everything into a new layer. In Photoshop 6 you'll need to create an empty layer, then go to your layer palette options and, holding down the Option key, choose Merge Visible.

Now, with this new layer, repeat the entire process.

Draw a rectangular marquee around the whole area and Copy Merged (Shift-CMD-C).
Create a new layer (with the marquee still active) and paste.
Now turn off your two overlay layers.
Set the blending mode of your latest layer to luminosity. (This will eliminate any color drifts from the overlay operation.)

It's not perfect, but it's a better place to start from. Now, instead of a minefield of random texture, you have specific points that you can zero in on and eliminate. Don't be afraid to use the clone tool with a tiny brush and attack each imperfection separately. It's time consuming, but so is everything with good retouching. There is no quick solution.

Here's the before and after using the steps above:

http://edgework.tripod.com/samples/before_after.jpg

Like others have mentioned, keep it natural. You don't want to turn a man into a woman, unless that's his request. Also, you don't need to go out and drain your wallet in the latest of version of Photoshop in order to retouch this image or similars. It doesn't matter what version you have if the skills aren't there. You can still do some advanced skin retouching even with version 3 using dodging and burning, but I wouldn't recommend you jump straight into d/b until you're very familiar with the program. Here's a technique that I used to use before the introduction of the healing tool in PS7 and before I knew about d/b.
Use the clone stamp and set its opacity and flow below 60%. Set its mode to Darken to target the lighter pixels that are 50% or lighter and clone away. After you're done with the lighter pixels, change its mode to Lighten to target the darker pixels that are 50% or darker this time to even out. Try not to go too heavy handed or you'll get that obvious smudging effect from the tool. It's easy, quick, and simple...and it should give you something to start with before you're ready to begin learning more advanced techniques.

You might want to try the quick skin degrunge tutorial by Ro found at the link below. It is quick and does a good job here. I applied the process and then lowered the opacity of the degrunge layer leaving what I thought was realistic looking, however you have a great degree of lattitude. (disclainmer: did this on the road with a crappy laptop LCD display).
http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=213
Regards, Murray

I want to thank all you for your ideas. It is so nice to find a forum where people are willing to help out to not so knowledgeable ones. I am going to try a few of the suggestions and see which works for me.
Edgework,
I have been working yours and his forehead looks much better. I have on last question for you when I am done with these steps do I flatten the image or merge visible? I am going to have to do the research to find out the difference between the two.
MisterMonday thank you as well for the tutorial I am going to check that out too.

If you Flatten the image, all layers are reduced to one layer. Merge Visible will merge all layers with the eye icon turned on into a single layer. Best, if you are going to be retouching always go to image duplicate and then work on the copy of your image. Then if anything goes wrong you still have your original image. What I like to do is hold down the ALT key and while holding the ALT key down click on Merge Visible and that saves all of your layers and puts the merged layer at the top of the stack.
dc

Is this similar to pixel density matching technique?

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Use the clone stamp and set its opacity and flow below 60%. Set its mode to Darken to target the lighter pixels that are 50% or lighter and clone away. After you're done with the lighter pixels, change its mode to Lighten to target the darker pixels that are 50% or darker this time to even out. Try not to go too heavy handed or you'll get that obvious smudging effect from the tool. It's easy, quick, and simple...and it should give you something to start with before you're ready to begin learning more advanced techniques.[/QUOTE]

I want to thank all you for your ideas. It is so nice to find a forum where people are willing to help out to not so knowledgeable ones. I am going to try a few of the suggestions and see which works for me.
Edgework,
I have been working yours and his forehead looks much better. I have on last question for you when I am done with these steps do I flatten the image or merge visible? I am going to have to do the research to find out the difference between the two.
MisterMonday thank you as well for the tutorial I am going to check that out too.Merge Visible will flatten the visible layers into one layer and leave any layers that aren't visible as they are. If you hold down the Option key, you can copy the merged layers into a new layer. CS2 will do it automatically for you. CS1 and earlier require you to create a new, empty layer, and then run the command with that layer active (and the Option key down).

Flatten reduces all visible layers to a single background layer.

I personally merge to a new layer all the time. I don't usually delete the prep layers that go into the merge; rather I'll put them into their own group and turn it off, then name the merged layer in such a way that I know what point in the process it represents. If all I'm doing is retouching, healing, cloning etc, I'll probably not do a lot of merging. But for a procedure like the one I used on your image, I'll put everything into its own layer once I'm happy with it at that stage. I've found that the healing brush doesn't alwasy blend smoothly when it's done on its own layer (though I haven't really come up with a specific cause or situation that triggers it) so I sometime will merge everything just because it seems to make healing easier. Probably falls under the heading of personal quirk, but it's our quirks that get us through the day, yes?

Is this similar to pixel density matching technique?

-----
Use the clone stamp and set its opacity and flow below 60%. Set its mode to Darken to target the lighter pixels that are 50% or lighter and clone away. After you're done with the lighter pixels, change its mode to Lighten to target the darker pixels that are 50% or darker this time to even out. Try not to go too heavy handed or you'll get that obvious smudging effect from the tool. It's easy, quick, and simple...and it should give you something to start with before you're ready to begin learning more advanced techniques.Using the same approach also works with the healing brush, without the smudging of texture.

Is this similar to pixel density matching technique?

-----
Use the clone stamp and set its opacity and flow below 60%. Set its mode to Darken to target the lighter pixels that are 50% or lighter and clone away. After you're done with the lighter pixels, change its mode to Lighten to target the darker pixels that are 50% or darker this time to even out. Try not to go too heavy handed or you'll get that obvious smudging effect from the tool. It's easy, quick, and simple...and it should give you something to start with before you're ready to begin learning more advanced techniques.

It basically gives you more control over the pixels by targeting the lights and darks separately. I rarely work this way anymore, except on hair. I posted it since the original poster is using PS6.