problematic skin work

[Linus]

Hi Everyone!


I have tried for a couple of hours to fix a photo from an art project of mine, now i´m giving up and reaching out..

The model has perfect skin all over exept her forehead.
I just cant fix it, i´m ending up with airbrushy/blurry effects.
The hard part is that it should look untouched, ie skin texture and grain structure has to be kept.


if any talent out there is feeling helpful a 100% crop (which i then can paste into the full image) from the highres original can be found at: www.linus.cn/forehead.zip

please help!
thanks
/Linus

[edgework]

Usually the only thing you need for work like this is the healing brush. Cloning is a disaster, for the reasons you already discovered: blurry, texture-less blobs of color.

The trick, if there is one, is to start out close up, in this case 200%, and work with a brush no bigger than the original artifacts that you're trying to smooth over. An aspect of the healing brush, that falls in the "Is it a bug, or a feature?" category, is that if you work too closely to an area of strickingly different lightness, the tones from the nearby region will get sucked into the area you are working in and it can be a mess. It can also be a great way to smooth out what are essentially unwanted variations in lightness and darkness that the various peaks and valleys of acne create over the surface of the skin.

When using the healing brush, sample often, and vary your direction and stokes. Working the same area too many times creates weird sharpening of the pixels. Beyond that, just keep working as many variations as you can. Then zoom out to the next level, and increase the brush size, and do it again. Photoshop will often reveal artifacts at, say, 50% or 25% that don't appear at 100%. The tendency is to dismiss these as merely the result of screening issues, but my experience is that they are there in the image and often show up in print.

[Kraellin]

welcome to RP, linus!

i did this one up on your attached image.

duplicated the background.
did some very light clone and makeover brush work first to get the worst things.
made a mask at 55% on the forehead, changed the mask to a selection and used the digital camera noise removal tool. this is paint shop pro's answer to Neat Image.
keeping the mask/selection in place, i added uniform noise at about 9.
deselected selection.
cloned a bit more very lightly.
used the lighten/darken brush to blend some shadows better.
added an adjustment layer of contrast/lighten to give more contrast and pump things up a bit.
then a bit more clone to even out some off lines.

done.

this was done in paint shop pro 10.

Craig

edit: oh, i also fixed under her right eye a bit.

[Linus]

wow!
two answers in 1½ hour, that´s really quick.

Originally Posted by edgework

Usually the only thing you need for work like this is the healing brush. Cloning is a disaster, for the reasons you already discovered: blurry, texture-less blobs of color. .

See that is what i was trying to do, no cloning, but i just couldn´t work it even with the healing brush (which i always use for these kind of things). I think i need to practise, practise and practise..
Your suggestions surely are very helpful, i usually just work at 100% with i guess too big brushes.


If you guys could send me what you did i would be very thankful
either to:

ftp.linus.cn
user: retouch@linus.cn
pass: retouch

or by mail to linus@linus.cn

If i can get get it back in the same colorspace and 16bit i can just paste back to the original, would be fantastic!

Originally Posted by Kraellin

added an adjustment layer of contrast/lighten to give more contrast and pump things up a bit..

And as for color i´m going to tweak it after i finsih skin/cleaningwork
i already have a couple of curves/levels worked out.


thank you guys!

/Linus

[philbach]

I adjusted the color initially by using a levels adjustment layer. Then I used a high G blur around 40 and used the history brush in lighten and darken blending modes. Later I did some painting on a separate layer using luminosity for the blending mode.

[Dreamypix]

I went a different route and decided to use a smooth softening technique instead. There was a lot of noise so I thought this might tone down the noise as well and I didn't use the healing/clone brush at all.

First I fixed the levels and the blue color cast (I think this moniter makes it worse than it really is?) After that I did the skin smoothing technique as follows:

1-Duplicate the image,
2- Filters>Noise>Median- Radius 17 Click ok
3- Filters>Texture>Grain- Enlarged, I can't remember the exact numbers not too contrasty though. See attachment
4- Now you need to make a hide all mask or a black mask, hold alt+click on the mask icon to make a black mask.

Now with a soft white brush at an opacity of 30% paint on the new skin. I did it all over, not just the face to make it look more even and it softened the noise on her skin. Hope it helps.

~Amber~

[Cassidy]

This initially seemed fairly tricky however, using a guassian blur and then history erasing everything but the forehead I then introduced both monochromatic and non monochromatic noise and then overlaid the blur layer reducing the opacity to achieve what I think looks like a natural and non toutched fix