I need help with this old pic of my dad...

[reeforbust]

This is the original...
http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d8...st/tuffguy.jpg

My shot at fixing...
http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d8...t/tuffguya.jpg

The problem is my dad doesn't like the face....He thinks its blotchy.

[dataflow]

just use the "healing brush tool" with a small brush size and go around the edges of the blotches untell they blend together

[Kraellin]

welcome to RP, reeforbust.

i've attached a bit i did on your dad's head. the trick with noisy images like this, where they are already splotchy, is to be very light with your cloning and smoothing. you didnt mention how you'd gotten what you got, but it looks like you were a bit 'heavy' on the clone. this tends to produce a splotchiness all by itself, leaving overlap marks of the cloning.

when i use clone on something like your image, i set it no more than about 40% followed up by something around 24%, depending. on the 40, i use a very small brush which just barely overlaps the area i want to clone. on the 24%, i use a large brush to 'smooth' out my cloning and some of the noise. the 24% will correct a lot of clone errors.

but, that's not all i used on this. paint shop pro has a tool called 'push'. it's a very useful tool for things like splotchiness. the tool has no direct equivalent in photoshop, but i'm told it similar to a heavy smudge tool, where the opacity of the smudge is set way up. i dont really know. but push can work wonders when set at a fairly low opacity, like in the 20 to 40% range, sometimes even less. what it does is essentially grab the 'paint' from one area and 'push' it into another. it also retains that original grab color and maintains it for as long as you hold down the mouse button. then you simply pick up or grab another color and bleed and blend that into another area. so, it's sort of like treating the whole image as if it were wet and you're simply pushing the wet paint around. when set on a very low opacity, this can give you some very nice smoothing and blending.

i also used a tiny bit of airbrush. this was for increasing the definition on the eyes and a bit on the hair in places. i also used a 1% opacity to add some shadowing along the side of his face. this can also be used to add a bit of texture back to a face when you set the density of the brush down from 100%.

i shld also mention the use of the eraser tool. this can be very important when using a smudge or push. it's very easy to go overboard with those two. so, the trick here is to do all those actions on a separate blank layer with 'use all layers' checked on. this essentially paints all your smudging and pushing onto that blank layer rather than on the actual image area. so, if you overdo the smudging and pushing, you can take your eraser tool and set it to a very light opacity, like 5% or under and erase just a tiny bit of your work. this will allow a bit of your original to bleed back through your smudging and get rid of some of the 'pasty' look that smudging/push can create.

and one last remark about the push tool. it's often a better choice than cloning when working with very small, tight areas. clone can be used on small areas, but i just find it easier to use the push brush.

oh, and one other thing i did before doing anything else. i used a brightness/contrast adjustment layer to bring the image out more. it was set to something like 11 bright and 18 contrast.

so, there's a little mini-tutorial on handling this sort of image or at least the skin blotchiness.