Orange Peel Skin Texture - How to get

[superfrasky]

A good site about glamour and fashion retouch, and with sample about workflow

http://www.onemodelplace.com/newslet...ticle7_pg2.cfm

[ray12]

Here is a quick example of smooth blending with a soft texture. Its from another part of the forum. I used textures to keep from getting an overly smoothed "pasty" look.

I used "surface blur" to smooth out the skin.

Then added a "Soft Light" layer above the main image with blurred black and white areas to get the dark cheeks and the highlights.

Then added in some skin texture from a "Soft Light layer" that had a skin texture map on it. Blended this texture into the image using a mask.

Attached are examples of what the skin texture patches look like - and how to use them.

[Jeronimas]

Originally Posted by meok

This is a very interesting tread. I always felt that to get good (natural) texture you have to start with a file with decently good texture to start with. Introducing pores where there was none can affect the balance of the image. The lack of pores can often indicate that the area is out of focus, thus adding texture can make it look "off" from its surrounding and therefore, will not create an homogeneous result.

When I have an original file with decent skin texture, I usually retouch at the pore level by dodging, burning and cloning until I get an uniform texture. To emphasize them, I usually do some blending of the weak plate.Thats the technique I used for this: http://byloc.com/minifolio/page2/page2.html It is pretty time-consuming technique tho, so Im sure some the pro retouchers here have a more efficient way.

Very good retouch, could you explain it more detailed,.

[palomino]

the retouch posted by meok is excellent, and I too would like to know more about the method used. very subtle.

-Kate

[meok]

Hi Guys,
If I remember correctly, it was technically pretty simple. I started with a global color correction, then used the healing tool to fix up the most obvious skin defect, then added a 50% grey layer on softlight. On it, I used the burn and dodge tool to do some more work on the skin. Then I pushed and pulled some feature of her face (the most discreetly possible). I finished with blending some of the channels to get a little better detail in the skin and hair. Thats pretty much it.

[Jeronimas]

Originally Posted by meok

Hi Guys,
If I remember correctly, it was technically pretty simple. I started with a global color correction, then used the healing tool to fix up the most obvious skin defect, then added a 50% grey layer on softlight. On it, I used the burn and dodge tool to do some more work on the skin. Then I pushed and pulled some feature of her face (the most discreetly possible). I finished with blending some of the channels to get a little better detail in the skin and hair. Thats pretty much it.

How do you exactly blend channels?

[meok]

Jeronimas,
Blending channel is the process of modify the density of any perticular channel. It is commonly used to emplify low-contrast texture, reajust tonalities, fix certain color casts and is also great for fine-tuning masks. The Photoshop command to blend the channels is "Apply Image" and "calculations", both found in the "image" drop down menu. You can also use the channel mixer, which is a dumb-down version of those tools.

For more info on blending channels, I highly recommend Dan Margulis' "Professsional Photoshop" and "Photoshop LAB color". Also "Photoshop Channel Chops" which is also a great book to learn from. (altho, be ready to pay a pretty penny for it as it is a very rare and prised book.

hope this helps

[Jeronimas]

This is my try

http://img418.imageshack.us/img418/2...delcopy0gt.jpg

[buchner]

Hi,
I've been following it for quite a while, and applying what is been discussed here to achieve this look...
My dificulty is the same as many here: get a nice skin texture.
Another one is make the face tone even (forehead has a diferent color tone than cheek, nose, etc...) tones may vary to redish and yellowish.... How can I make it even, chosing a certain color on the face using eyedroper? I mean, lets say I want to color cheeks and nose using forehead color... But I want to alter only the undesired color (I want to keep the colors of shadows, highlights and areas that already look ok), no more, no less... anyone??

Here is my try ( I dont know if texture is visible due file size is limited to 100K).
Thanks

Ricardo

[Alehandro]

You'll have to do lot's of cloning first, to make skin looks perfect, then
Dan Margulis, and his channel mixing technique
(Loreal retouchers will never share their secrets)
This guy still amazes me, i was in his studio ones
www.akosphotography.com

Here's my result

[ray12]

Ricardo,

Nice Job! Well Done!!

There is a fairly easy way to even out the color without affecting the highlights or shadows too much and still have good control. That way is to paint on a transparent color. Color information only - not the luminance part of the brush.

Heres how: Choose a fairly soft medium size brush. Press the "alt" key and click on the color you want to use from the forehead - this will pick up whatever color is under the brush tip at the time. Go to the brush options bar and change the brush from Normal to Color Mode. This will now paint just with the chroma value of the color. Now paint only where you want the color to go (the cheeks and nose in your case). If you also make the brush 4-10% opacity - it will go on real smooth and will require a couple of strokes to bring it up to full color strength - you get great control and real smooth blending at these 4% to 20% brush opacities. Try painting at 100% opacity and it will look terrible.

If you are really into good control - put this painting on a blank layer above your image and paint on that layer.

Later on you can use the Hue/Saturation /Brightness control to alter its color to almost anything you want. If the edges look a little sharp where you painted - put some gaussian blur on the layer to smooth it out. You can also control the level of the applied color to whatever you like using the layers opacity slider. This lets you see the color at all kinds of various densities.

Below are some examples. Image 1 is your Dior example. Image 2 is the image with the smooth color technique applied. Image 3 is a darkened look that a lot of people seem to like these days. Youre right - the 100k jpeg file limit does reduce the quality of the images some.

Doin' Good!

Ray12

[buchner]

Ray:

Thanks for the tips! I will try that later on... Hows your tut going? Will it come to an end soon? We are looking forward it!!

Alehandro:

I think you just nailed it! The reflectance on skin (tiny specular highlights oposed to tiny dots of real skin color) is (for me) the desired effect... Coul you please explain in detail and (if you dont mind) post the original photo, before your retouching??

Thanks both again!!

Ricardo

[Alehandro]

Lot's of cloning and then, manipulation with LAB and RGB
First, duplicate original image and create two different documents one LAB other GRAYSCALE In original RGB you take two "strong" channels (for details on skin) it's GREEN and BLUE
copy and paste them into a GRAYSCALE document(where you may delete background layer), creating two layers, then paste
LIGHTNESS channel out of LAB doc. into GRAYSCALE doc. Now you got 3 layers
GREEN, BLUE and LIGHTNESS (leave Lightness untouched at the bottom)
Change opacity of Gr. and Bl, to get the desired skin pores, erase the rest of the face (if necessary) leaving skin only in this Gr. and Bl layers, then flatten image, then paste that grayscale into
original LAB documents LIGHTNESS cannel. It will take some time to practice and may not take care of the problem, everything depends on the original image
As a photographer myself, i shoot both digital and film, and when you use KODAK
EPR 64 film with Mamiya RZ and then drum-scan with Imacon, it's incompatible with snapshots that i take sometimes with my Cannon 20d
Sorry guys, but when we see covers of Vogue, Elle, itd. it wasn't shot with one time use point and shoot camera and model didn't do her own makeup . Sometimes the cost of this kind of shoot goes up to 100 thou
Thank you, everybody, great ideas, i'm not sure about 3d though, i think thats pushing it

[buchner]

Thanks so much for that, Alehandro!

Im trying with that image you posted (of course is a lower resolution image, and should not get the same results as a bigger file), but the final result brings me a darker image than you ended up with.

Theres a part Im getting trouble:

"Change opacity of Gr. and Bl, to get the desired skin pores, erase the rest of the face (if necessary) leaving skin only in this Gr. and Bl layers, then flatten image, then paste that grayscale into"

I slide both opacities (Green and blue) but it doesnt seem to reveal me more or less pores...

And what should I erase? Eyes, lips hair and foreground?

Anyone else sorted that out?

Thks!

Ricardo

[Alehandro]

Hey Ricardo, I'm sorry, i made a lil mistake, you have to put Lightness image on top of Bl and Gr. (try to fined out that balance with opacity between Bl and Gr) then when you merge em together it looks a lil darker then "Li", so what you do is, you curve that merged layer a lil, to make it more less look like "Li" layer, but with more details in skin texture, then you just erase those parts of skin on the "Li" layer that you need, then merge and paste the result into original "Li" of your LAB

[buchner]

Thanks one more time for your attention alehandro!!

Forgive my ignorance, but I am not finding a way to reveal the pores nicely as you did... I can find some extra contrast (showing the pores) but only blending blue n green channels. The very last part, Im not getting it (lightness on top layer, then erasin or masking other parts but skin). Doesnt seem to improve what I already got blending the two channels (G and B) and then ajust it (using curves) to approximatelly match the "lightness" layer tone...
I dont want to take your time, explaining something you already did (my ignorance is not your fault).
Do you know where I can study the subject (is that the Dan Margulis technique?) more deeply? maybe my doubts will be fullfilled...
Im searching under his name (lots of stuff) but coundnt find yet this very same subject (skin - channels - lab mode,etc)

Ricardo

[makeovermagic]

i thought i'd take a shot at alehandro's picture -- just curious if i'm achieving a good look -- this is a combination of many techniques, and i'm just learning.

MOM

[Alehandro]

Hey Ricardo, i wish i could FTP to you that pdf file with Dan Margulis "Professional Photoshop.The Classic Guide To Color Correction", with over 400 pages of useful stuff, but unfortunately it's in russian, i think you can order that book at Amazon or Barns & Nobel. Or here is another solution, go to www.edonkey.com , download their software, install it, then search
for any "Dan Margulis" with "any" format selected, i see they got 3 kinds of pdf's now online, it's about 42-58 mg.
Here's a li sample of what i have in english
Nice job MOM keep up the good work

[Craig_H]

Originally Posted by makeovermagic

i thought i'd take a shot at alehandro's picture -- just curious if i'm achieving a good look -- this is a combination of many techniques, and i'm just learning. MOM

Skin looks nice, but you have smoothed out the lips, eyes and eyebrows. They're no longer sharp. You didn't use a layer mask I'm assuming?

[makeovermagic]

Craig,

Thanks for the feedback -- I did use a layer mask, but I left the opacity too high.

MOM

P.S. Thanks Alehandro for the nice comment and also for the articles; they are very informative.

[buchner]

Originally Posted by Alehandro

Here's a li sample of what i have in english
Nice job MOM keep up the good work

Wow, Alehandro!
Thanks a LOT for the file!!
Excuse me for not answering right away (I was traveling).
I will check that material.
Ricardo

[a-delusion]

Here's on i made

[eogg]

Hi all,

I've recently been messing around with two different skin technique, described in two excellent tutorial from here : ray12's (essentially, surface blur, color/light enhancement, and I've remained low-level in the important step of restoring some texture back) and Ro's (high-pass with quite a low radius, invert, linear light, blur).

First I did use Ro's. But the edge fringing is tiresome to get rid of, so I tried out ray12's. But the texture disappears very much...
And then, I was very interested by Panpan's post in page 1 of this thread : I realized there was more to the highpass / GB combination than what Ro told us !

--

As a matter of fact, the highpass filter can be used to "filter out" (more or less) whatever size of "imperfection" you wish to.

My initial problem was to get rid of obvious cellulite patterns in a thigh, but I wanted to keep as much natural texture as possible. OK ? And neither technique yielded excellent results...
In fact, both seemed to smooth out the surface of the skin (in fact, the small grain texture - less than 1 mm in size), but didn't really touch what I wanted (its larger texture - cellulite patterns must be something like 1 cm in typical size).

(Also : I understand that these techniques weren't meant to remove cellulite in the first place !)

So I tried several uses of the high pass filter (... and some FFT, too ! But that was too far-fetched it seems), and I came up with this : using byRo's technique with high-radiuses is... awesome !

My workflow to get rid of cellulite patterns is as is :
- duplicate layer
- run high pass. Select the smaller radius that reveals exactly the level of detail you want to "downplay" (or erase !). My tests have given me radiuses around 8 pixels for low-res pics
- desaturate (some color often comes in at these radiuses)
- change blend mode to linear light
- Image > adjustments > invert
- And now's a rather fun part... run a gaussian blur with preview on : there seems to be a very small range of radiuses that will enable the highpass layer to "destroy" the targeted range of imperfections. I've come up with radiuses around 3 to 4 pixels for that, which is consistent with byRo's one third rule.

Then, there is some (lot) of masking out to do, since the edges of the image (of the body, namely) will have an ugly "double fringe".
This masking can be partially automated (duplicate original, highpass, find edges, levels & curves, select dark areas, expand selection, fill with black, blur a little, paste the result into mask) but not entirely.

--

Another possible use of "high-passed" layers is, on the contrary, to have some texture stand out : namely, a high-pass layer with a very low radius (~.5 to 1 pixel for a 3 MP pic) that you *don't* invert before blending as linear light will have very little details stand out... like actual skin pores !

--

My conclusion for today is that high pass filter is incredibly powerful to downplay (or overplay !) elements of texture that have a coherent "typical size" (very little size = skin pores ; rather little size = superficial skin texture ; rather large size = cellulite patterns - for example).
The problem is in the handling of edges... sometimes, the induced fringe is very large. I need to investigate this !

[eogg]

In fact, here are some pics...

0 - Original
http://gcatshare3.free.fr/retouch/skincell_orig.jpg
(see what I'm meaning, by "cellulite patterns" ?)

1 - Surface blur
http://gcatshare3.free.fr/retouch/skincell_surfblur.jpg
(actually, cellulite is pretty much washed out, but isn't it too much)

2 - Surface blur + noise (quickly done, could be more crisp...)
http://gcatshare3.free.fr/retouch/sk...blur_noise.jpg

3 - High pass with a low radius (purely byRo's technique)
http://gcatshare3.free.fr/retouch/skincell_hpass1.jpg
(cellulite is still here...)

And now, what I messed around with :

4 - High pass with a higher radius (edges masked out manually)
http://gcatshare3.free.fr/retouch/skincell_hpass2.jpg
(now, what do you think of that ?)

5 - Step 4 + step 3 added
http://gcatshare3.free.fr/retouch/skincell_hpass2+1.jpg

[slim_easy]

Hai, i am joko from indonesia, i have been studying photoshop intense lately, since i garaduated. I like it to be here among pro senior, wish to learn more...

btw, after reading the topic and learning, i have develop my own picture from the attachment above, please give me some advise..
The image only tweak for smothing skin and bring back the pores. I didnt do any application for the skin color ( still learning for enhancing skin tone color ).

Joko,

P.s : sorry my bad english..

[ranamosleh]

Hi every one I found this PDF its good..

have a look at it..

http://www.caip.rutgers.edu/~oanacula/cula-ijcv05.pdf#search='cheek%20texture%20patch'

[byRo]

Been reading eogg's posts and thought it's time to post a new version of the deGrunge.
I included a new sharpening layer which gives good and very quick results.
For those who like to see how everything works (if you don't just skip ahead), here's a step by step description .....

- Make a dulicate layer [<Ctl><J>]
- Invert [<Ctl><I>]
- Set Blending to Linear Light, opacity 50% (everthing just went grey now)
- Run Hi-Pass, starting with the lowest radius, increase until the pore texture is just gone but the "grunge" is visible (for me it was 0.8 here)
- Stamp to a new layer [<Ctl><Alt><Shift><E>] (obs. if using PS7 you'll need to do [<Ctl><Alt><Shift><N>] first)
- Duplicate this layer [<Ctl><J>]
- Run a GBlur on this new layer until the grunge is just gone. (I used 7.0) If there is some stubborn grunge, instead of increasing the GBlur radius, make a feathered selection and do a local GBlur (as in the middle of the cheek)
- Add a hide-all mask to this blurred layer [<Alt><New Mask>]
- Select your Hi-Pass layer and push it up to the top (looks wierd)
- Invert the layer[<Ctl><I>] and "Voilá" we're right back at the original
- (Now comes the fun) Select the mask of the blurred layer and paint in where you want to smooth the skin.

OK, up to now that's just the deGrunge, but wait..

- Duplicate [<Ctl><J>] the Hi-Pass layer and crank up the opacity to 100%
- Add a hide-all mask [<Alt><New Mask>] and paint in where you want to sharpen up (hair, eyebrows, eyes, nostril edge, lips)

I have (been nice and) posted an action which does all the setting-up, you only need to decide the Hi-Pass radius for the pores and the GBlur radius for the grunge - besides that, just paint the masks.

The attachment shows the finished layer set-up (I lowered the blurred layer's opacity to 70% to not look too "plasticky") and it is quick (I timed myself - it took a whole 73 seconds!)

Rô

[KR1156]

ByRo.....thanks for taking the time to make that action.

Another quick & esasy way to sharpen pore information is…

• Duplicate your bkgd layer

• Run unsharp mask on Red Channel

• Run unsharp mask on yellow channel

• Than set that layer that you duplicated to luminosity.

*you can always mask out any info that you don't want sharpened.

:::last image is a cleaned up versiion:::

[cspringer]

Originally Posted by ray12

Thanks for the inputs - very helpful.

byRo - thanks for link - i think it takes us an additional step closer. The idea of doing a displacement map or an emboss on multiple layers of noise is great. The final image was pretty good.

cameraken - these 3d guys have really done their homework lately it seems. I wonder if they have some bump screens that we can use for glamour kinds of things. Could they create 2200x2200pix skin texture screens on a flat plane with their stuff?

Below is an example of one of the images I was working on. A couple. The goal was to enhance the image. Its not done yet - but here are 3 stages of development. Original, pasty, then with just a little skin texture borrowed from a celebrity hi res image i found - cheek texture only. Just FYI.

Keep the ideas coming - theyre really great.

Ray12

find a leather purse, chair, etc. and take a picture. Paste to picture and try different layer modes/opacities or load in texturizer. Add a mask and tweak.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...r-skinfix2.gif

[pyromania]

Hi! I've been reading your comments. Thank you so much for all your advices. I came to here googling "creating real skin". I've been working on making a 3D model from an asian man, but what I found is tiny pictures, oftlenly blurry ....