A great tutorial on Skin

[pure]

please dont get me wrong,
i am only repeating what the photographers told me.

they expect 100% quality and sharpness, at minimal effort.
i think a professional retoucher with some 5 or 10 years of experience working at high class studios or retouching offices could deliver that as he might have techniques which i am not aware of at my current level.

thats still a miracle for me. its like me working always 50% at overtime or overexpense for the money i get.



by the way: what do you think of using the stamp tool at 20% and a very big radius at radical blotchy skin parts and bringing back the pores with highpass?

[PatrickB]

Originally Posted by pure

thats right, except that i cant deliver a picture which is kind of blurry in any region of skin. the photographers wont accept it, they want to see every pore and detail. so 90% of the working examples here in this forum are looking blurred slightly.

Sorry Spezi,

you missed the whole point in my posting

I try explaining it with teachers method:

What is a blemish? It's one or more pixels with a different luminosity than the surrounding area. And what's a pore or skin detail? It's one or more pixels with a different luminosity than the surrounding area. So the difference between blemish and pore in scientific terms of photoshop is: zip!

Looking at it from a different angle a blemish is merely a detail of skin with the main aspect "annoying". So the most obvious way to get rid about blemishes while keeping the overall details is to approach each blemish one by one instead of wiping out every single detail and bringing those details then back in by doing noise overlays and stuff.

And you will most certainly follow my statement that d&b is merely another method of blurring away those unwanted pixels

As a description I retouched a part of our example girlfriend pic with three different methods as written on the pictures.

Originally Posted by pure

so 90% of the working examples here in this forum are looking blurred slightly.

i dont want to offend or dislike your examples, as i also did it like you and i liked it a bit blurred. its only that the client wont accept it. its his opinion.

Please don't compare our examples here with any high-quality work in magazines. Most certainly nobody delivers his final-results in a 100k-limited jpg-file

Talking about my examples (I estimate you are talking about the website), it's the sam eproblem of resizing the pictures for the web. Plus you can't turn shit to candy, thus a bad picture cannot be made perfect by nobody. Just compare the top picture (Anja looking to the side) with the one in the right bottom corner (Christiane's eye). Latter was heavily cropped and shot under bad light conditions while the other one was a clean outdoor headshot.

[pure]

thanks patrick, i guess i missed it sorry. may i ask what was your main subject you wanted to express in the end? i am bit confused in the moment.

i am still searching for the right english word for the areas of normal skin that are looking like the skin of a cow. (bad example, but i think you know what i mean)

is it "blotchy" as my dict. says? everyone has it, its normal, but it looks not even on a commercial shoot, lets say.

i dont know if you cant compare the work of the people here and the professional work of studios. there are a lot of good people here, and i appreciate the work of them also, i also experienced that you sometimes get weak quality )not technical, more like the lights are wrong or the shot is done in a hurry) from good photographers, as everyone makes mistakes, so its natural to get bad image quality with very bad models skins, in my opinion. also the models are not caressing their bodies so well sometimes.
sure, JPG artifacts and small images are a different pair of shoes thats right. for real.

[PatrickB]

My "expression in the end" was that I consider it a lot easier to spot heal over a blemish than having two adjustment layers where to paint in

And I didn't want to be a critic about other people's work, but hard fact is that a portrait picture downsampled and resized to fit the 100kByte limit will hardly show enough detail like pores and will make it very difficult to spot differences

PS: I often reduce the cow effect by using the red channel or overlay with a technique similar to the d&b method, haven't found a better way either!

[pure]

sure
got it...

[LESider]

I've just come upon this method which is similar to most of the other methods explained in this thread and the other skin threads. What is different from all the others is the use of add noise filter and using " monochromatic gausian" to give that noise skin texture that I've seen examples of on the "orange peel" thread.
I've been playing with this method after I have been doing the D&B method and am finding the results very close to some of the "Dior" ads.

Read this thread and link up to his site to see his examples.
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/re...essage=7928247

[shellby]

Not a lot of detail there. That is like the Glitter Guru's method.

See these:

Smoothed out skin

and:

Glitter Guru Method

The clone stamp at big sizes also smoothes out detail. If you do not want to loose detail only use brushes that are exactly the same size as the blemish you wish to remove. The same goes with dodge and burn. Do not use huge brushes as this will start to look soft. Zoom right in... and I mean at pixel level, then dodge and burn - darken the light areas and lighten the dark areas. Then you can do a high pass sharpen after this at a low opacity.

[LESider]

Shellby

I completely agree the D&B method is what I have been doing and is my chosen method of retouching. But if you are looking for that smooth skin feel and with some photos that have a little too hot of lighting using this method but not as strong as shown on his website can really even out a photo and smooth things out without loosing much detail at all, the noise monochromatic gaussian really brings things back. To me the results were better than the Glitter Guru method.

[shellby]

I was actually responding to Pure's request for no blur and realistic retouching. I put the links to the Glitter Guru and the other one to Illustrate that these methods all cause a loss of detail.

His photogrpaher does not want any blur or loss of detail whatsoever

[pure]

so, at this point, i ’d like to say a big thanks to everyone here, as i learned a lot in this forum for this short period of time i discovered it...

in the end, it saved me hours not unless to say days of working hours, for my actual work, especially the "high pass" is one of my best discovers.

[pure]

its me again:

talking about the healing brush. is there any advanced technique available for using it, other than the usual one? most problems occur when i use the healing brush at medium sizes and touch lighter or darker areas than the actual one. using it for repairing cow-like areas of the skin/body makes sometimes nice blendings from cow-like to normal skin.
sorry for "cow" i dont know the correct english expression for this kind of natural skin-problem

[MBChamberlain]

I tend to agree that nearly every retoucher (and I mean the pros too) tend to over smooth skin by a pretty good margin. It is really easy to do when you are working with pixels rather than with a negatives and airbrushes. No offense but the whole plastic skin thing doesn't work for me.

Here is a very fast porcelain skin retouch (just did the skin didn't touch anything else). I've described my technique many times on this forum, so I won't go into it again. (It really helps to have a higher resolution image to work from too.)

Michael

PS I try to avoid getting the catch lights in the pupils if I can.

[pure]

must read your technique. where did you describe it please?

slightly oversmoothing also for me sometimes a big problem, as it is very easy to oversmooth, right. i dont like it oversmoothed, but i tend to do it, as i want to blend away those largesurfaced cow-spotty areas in the skin, mostly in the areas of arms, legs, belly, shoulders, frowned forehaeds

blending back texture with highpass, which wont work perfectly with every kind of skin....unfortunately

overall i like your (you all) way of sharing experiences with people and friends. there must be a large number of pros who wont give any hint at all.
i also like to share everyting i know or have.

thanks

[MBChamberlain]

I describe my technique here

[Volvo]

Only a newby to both the site and to Photo editing so hope my question/questions dont come across a bit odd .
Saying that there are no silly questions but , and leave the rest unsaid.
Firstly with the term "Grunge?". Would i be correct in assuming it means to get rid of the rougness from texture??.
Secondly with some of the advice given here on "how to do" with the tutorials, would it be okay if i were to copy for further reading whilst attempting to work through the process??.
Just thought it may be best ask permission first??.
CHeers
Volvo

[byRo]

Originally Posted by Volvo

Firstly with the term "Grunge?". Would i be correct in assuming it means to get rid of the rougness from texture??.

I use the term to refer to blotches in the skin. Not to be confused with pores.
Have a look at a test "before / after" picture from the plug-in I'm working on.
Should be pretty easy to see the difference without the "grunge".

Secondly with some of the advice given here on "how to do" with the tutorials, would it be okay if i were to copy for further reading whilst attempting to work through the process??.

Anything you do for your own use, like copying, printing is a GOOD thing.
Posting stuff from RetouchPRO on any other site, without full permission, is a BAD thing.

OK?

Rô

[Volvo]

Thank you for the reply Ro , was only after use of info for my own excercise in learning ey..
Cheers
Peter

[meditom]

here is my attempt with the The techniques discribed.

tom

[Jeronimas]

Originally Posted by meditom

here is my attempt with the The techniques discribed.

tom

It would be great if there was original too .

[meditom]

sorry, here is the original.

[GerardHenninger]

Meditom :
Don't want to be an ass, but somehow she looks like a CG-character...

Could be my eyes :P

[meditom]

i just demonstrate a technique. normally i would reduce the effekt.

with greetings from germany

[byRo]

meditom, welcome to RetouchPRO,

That came out fine! (OK, yes, slightly exaggerated - but you already know that).

Something that does cause a strange impression - and nothing to do with the skin - is the eyes.
Somehow iris and pupil seem a little out of shape. The original also shows this strangeness but as you have enhanced the eyes, it calls more attention.

Look forward to seeing more of your work.

Rô

[pure]

byro, what technique did you use, posting your latest example?
thats very good. i would have needed that for skin today.
i had to clone the skin by big brush as no blur was good enough for that kind of skin, very difficult. sometimes i cant get rid of the blotches, they just get blurred. then i always use the clone stamp. this makes it also blur but at least the area looks even and plain like yours. the skin i did today was a nubian looking woman, like dark blotchy skin.

i wish for my example i had known a better way. its way to blurry, though hipassed, but i was running out of time.

by the way: color profile, is there any recommended RGB one?
i usually use ECI-RGB as it is good for skin tones, sometimes Adobe-RGB when no skin is there at all. yu?

[byRo]

Just the normal de-Grunge trick.

I am finishing a plug-in to automate the trick somewhat, as well as masking the edges.

In this case (atteached) I applied the trick twice, first radii 6 and 2, then radii 12 and 4.

Rô

[pure]

i wonder if there are plugins out there who utilize this "blur - highpass " feature.
as skin repair is a basic and everyday need, isnt it?

i looked at kodak, they have ASF tools.

http://www.asf.com/

are they any good?

[shellby]

You could record an action.

[MBChamberlain]

I'm not sure an action would save you much time at all, everything in the action would have to bring up the dialog box for adjustments anyway.

Michael

[maureeno]

Originally Posted by byRo

Just the normal de-Grunge trick.

I am finishing a plug-in to automate the trick somewhat, as well as masking the edges.

In this case (atteached) I applied the trick twice, first radii 6 and 2, then radii 12 and 4.

Rô

OK, here's the very, very beginner quesion: Where is the High Pass for the quick de-grunge in PS6?

Maureen

[byRo]

Can't be certain for PS6, but in PS7.0 you find it at Filter>Other>High Pass

Rô