Hi, I was looking though the forum for tutorials and and thread about making plastic looking skin. The only thing I could find was making a model shot have more "plastic" skin. I'm after something mroe extreme and can't find any good resources for this.

I want to turn a picture of a persons face into white plastic. Sort of like the look of Star Wars Stormtroopers or the robots from the music Video "All is Full of Love" by Björk.

Here's my two failed tries:

1. I've tried using a completely white layer and different blending modes and that turned out more like clown paint.

2. Tried taking a desaturated version of the image and put on top of a white layer and mask away eyes and other importand features and keep the original for that but it just did not turn out like anything good at all.

Any ideas on how to achieve this? I don't have knowledge or access to any 3D applications. Only Photoshop CS3.

Maybe this is covered in some thread but I cant find it?

Thank you!

Plastic reflects in another way than skin does. Reflections and specular highlights are among the things makes us see difference between different materials. So you need to redraw the highlights to look like plastic highlights ( sharp edges if its a clean smooth reflective surface ). And smooth the skin to get rid of all pores.

Thank you for your tips.

First of all I'm not a pro and second I'm not much of a freehand painter and will definately fail big time atempting to draw sharp new highlights.

This is what I have so far:

http://www.mymessedupmind.com/images/porslin.jpg

I got this by blurring a desaturated layer of the face, copied it to a new layer and added the plastic wrap filter and used pin light as layerblending. I think the plastic wrap gave me highlights that are in the right direction and blurring the skin definately gave a less human look but this is still not in any way towards plastic... this looks more like porcelain.

Any pointers on how to go about from here?

Perhaps this tut will help and you could lighten the skin...?

http://www.worth1000.com/tutorial.asp?sid=161136

Use mesh in Illustrator.

Did I say I'm not a pro:)

Mesh in illustrator... is that somekind of manual semi 3d way of working? How does that help me get the right "surface look"?

Did I say I'm not a pro:)

Mesh in illustrator... is that somekind of manual semi 3d way of working? How does that help me get the right "surface look"?

No, it's mesh in Illustrator, which is, sort of, a 3D-but-flat vignette. All I can say is, get a recent copy of Illustrator, sit down with a good book, and practice. It's difficult to work with. I've only used it a few times, and I should go there more for highlight work.

A 3D mesh is one way to go. There are free and inexpensive 3D tools out there on the net. Search for Accutrans 3D, it is a good program to start out on and comes with good docs. You can just extrude the face to 3D and than apply a plastic mesh as you need. Than save in a raster format to put back into your coat and fine tune. One advantage to having the face in 3D is that you can easily contort or skew the face and add shadows or light.

hello.I am a Chinese. I hope to make friend with you. My English is very pool.

hello.I am a Chinese. I hope to make friend with you. My English is very pool.

What? ............

What? ............

In China they cant say the 'R' so thats why he probably said Pool instate of poor. they speak for a R, a L out.

I am sorry, I made a mistake. Should be poor, rather than pool .i am a retoucher. I hope I can improve my English.

Hi,

First of all... welcome luqingcc!

So basically you are all saying, if I don't want to freehand the highlights I have to go 3d? That's alright, a bit more timeconsuming than I would have hoped for but if that's the way to go then it's as it is and I thank you for the tips.

I'm surpriced though there's no tips on how do do this with filters in CS3 though.

Hi,

First of all... welcome luqingcc!

So basically you are all saying, if I don't want to freehand the highlights I have to go 3d? That's alright, a bit more timeconsuming than I would have hoped for but if that's the way to go then it's as it is and I thank you for the tips.

I'm surpriced though there's no tips on how do do this with filters in CS3 though.

I'm sure there is, and if I get a spare moment I can look into it. Is the look you are after represented somewhere that I can see an example? Is it more of a matte finish you are after, a semi-gloss or highly polished?

Chris

lnetzel, I think your china doll is brilliantly spooky. I don't have any solutions to your plastic problem but might try following your method for porceliening people!

This is just a quick attempt of how I 'd start, turning a face into plastic.


All I did here was surface blur on the face, and painting in the highlights. Highlights still should be refined, but that s one possibility of achieving it.

At the end I started to make the face white, but I stopped, because I got that pageant look.:shocked:

What I'm after is clean glossy white plastic. The style you can see in Björk's music video "All is Full of Love".

I've attached 3 sample pictures from that video and I've also put a link to the original baby picture image. It's a stock image from www.sxc.hu but it's a good face I believe to experiment with.

Something to play with.
http://www.mymessedupmind.com/images/babyface.jpg

What you need for the Bjork video look is too add a reflection to simulate a high gloss reflective surface. Kinda like recreating chrome, chrome is simulated by using an image to represent the reflective nature of the surface.

Here's a cool tutorial for Chrome (http://www.worth1000.com/tutorial.asp?sid=161155) (I know it's not what you're after, but it may help with the reflection aspect)

Good tutorial! Obviously chroming something like a cherry, that is almost round, is easier than chroming a face but I'm sure that's the way to go actually. Looking at the screen shoot from the video with Björk lying down you see a reflection from a machine on the top of her head and really that's the key I guess. Finding a proper image to use for reflection and then try to bend it around the face somehow. I'm sure some good old displace map work will give me something nearby. I'll get on this:)

What I'm after is clean glossy white plastic. The style you can see in Björk's music video "All is Full of Love".

I've attached 3 sample pictures from that video and I've also put a link to the original baby picture image. It's a stock image from www.sxc.hu but it's a good face I believe to experiment with.

Something to play with.
http://www.mymessedupmind.com/images/babyface.jpg

I started working on these right before this post, so what I did here was based from your original post. The robot in Bjork's video uses Subsurface Scattering: it's a very advanced shader that's able to retain light under its surface similar to the surface of our skin. You know what I mean if you try to place your fingers over a flashlight inside a darkroom. You'll need some very high-end render engine to achieve that effect. I doubt that you'll be able to recreate that effect in Photoshop, but I'm not saying it's impossible. If I had to do it, I'd go for the 3D route before I'd attempt to do it in 2D. The Stormtrooper on the other hand, to me, has a more matte finish than Bjork's robot. So, I aimed at something in between.
The left one is from Mark's post (Mark, I hope you don't mind I played with it). I first brought out the red channel via channel mixer, then I applied surface blur, plastic wrap filter, and refined it with a mask. The right one is just a 3D render that I made in Maya.

I thought this could be a fun challange, so i gave it a try.
A high glossy material get its look from the environment, so i dont think it is possible to make it perfect by Photoshop only. Maybe its enough to render out some surfaces from a 3d application, to use as material.

As a side note, i found the Björk reference to be a more matt material then i first thought it would be.

Well, here is my try...

hey... that's not bad at all mquest. What's your recipie for the highlights?

hey... that's not bad at all mquest. What's your recipie for the highlights?

Thanks.
Some of the highlights are created from the ones in his face already, then i borrowed some from another picture as i wanted more.

The ones i created was something like...
- make a copy of the channel with most contrast
- increase the contrast in that channel to separate the highlights
- blur it to remove noice and to smoothen
- increase the contrast ones again to sharpen the edges of the mask
- fill the mask with white color on a new layer
- adjust the size on the highlight using the filters maximum and minimum

Depending on how much you pull the contrast and blur etc. you will fake different kinds of glossyness.

Hope it helps!

Thought I would give this a try..

Thanks to Peter S for the help!

~~~Work Flow~~~

Background copy
uncheck eyeball on background
Filter>Noise>Median 13
Hue/Saturation layer>Saturation -100
Brightness/Contrast layer>brightness +59, Contrast+45
Select>all
Edit>Copy Merged
Edit>Paste
Move this new layer down and on top of the background layer
check the eyeball on the background layer
Add layer mask on the new layer
Paint with black to reveal colors, paint with white to clean up edges and visa-versa
copy background
select both eyes
Hue/Saturation layer>Check colorize> Hue 196, Saturation 44
Save for Web
Post

Well I'm not sure if this is what your after. I used cainam's original image (hope you don't mind).

It's a combination of noise reduction quite heavy, sharpening quite lightly and masking out everything but the skin, and then Hue and Sat plus levels ALs with Blend mode changed to Linear dodge on the H&S and the opacity lowered.
This was done quite quickly so the masking here is very rough and could have been better.

The blur brush was also used, set to 100% and with a hard edge to enable blurring right up to edges with out blurring them. Sharpening was kept to a minimum because if it generated halos they would have to be removed.

Hope this helps, if not it was fun trying.

Peter

mquest and granny should work together
that's what i pinned down by JUST merging your two images :D





Photoshop: mquest could you please go into detail, how you made it? i mean you even thought of reflections :D