need help with skin work

[Imagefusion]

Hey All !
I have a session that I did with a young lady that has a very hash case of dermatitis.

The facial blotches I have been able to clean pretty well but the areas of her middle arms (and other body parts) is making me insane. I cant seem to get it matched correctly to blend the very dark blotches.

The session went very well but the blotches on the arms are really screwing up some great images that I have of her.

I am attaching a unretouched (at all) image... If someone can give me an idea (in steps if possible) of how to fix her I would be very grateful

[Ken Fournelle]

What I did for this image is as follows:

1. Duplicated the background layer
2. Made an emptly layer and set the blending mode to color
3. Selected a soft brush
4. Sampled a good section of color on her right arm.
5. Set the brush opacity to 80% and painted over the discolored areas
6. Made another empty layer and selected the Healing Brush, sampling
a good section of skin on the upper arm and painted over the discolored
areas.
7. I did this also for her left arm, sampling areas on that arm.
8. Made another emptly layer and selected the clone tool, set the opacity
to 20% and went over arm areas and neck.

k

[Dreamypix]

Ok, I gave it a go using a technique I found at shootsmarter.com over the weekend by Suzette Allen on how to magically erase bad acne. It's a really good article, you might have to sign up to access the link though, but it's free and full of neat information on photography. Here's the link to that article. http://www.shootsmarter.com/infocenter/sa027.html I used the technique in the article to erase the dermatitis. To smooth the skin duplicate the image and under filters>noise>dust and scratches make it good and blurry to where you see no details at all. Now go under Filters>textures>grain- enlarged grain. Now, make a hide all mask or a black mask, you can do this by holding the Alt key and clicking on the mask icon in your layer palette. Now with a soft white brush at a 30% opacity or lower, paint on the new smooth skin. If you feel like you oversmoothed the skin just lower the opacity of that layer in the layer palette menu ( I lowered it to approx 70%) that way your original skin shows through a bit. Something I did notice is that your picture is slightly overexposed, which is easy to do with a black background, your camera will try to make is 18% gray, so you might want to adjust that before you work on the skin and such.

I hope that helps you some!

~Amber~

[Imagefusion]

Thanks...
I am at home fighting off the flu so I will give this a shot !!!