Metallic Skin

[Roman]

Anyone know how to make realistic metallic chrome human skin in in photoshop? I have tried photoshop filters, Eyecandy 4000 and Dreamsuite filters but can't seem to come up with a very realistic image. thanxs. al.

[DJ Dubovsky]

What about using the lighting effects? You've stoked my curiosity now. I think I know what you want but I'm not exactly sure how to go about creating it. I will look through some of my sources and see if I can find something if no one else comes up with something else first.
DJ

[Roman]

The closest I can describe what i am doing is this.
I am retouching a studio shot, a high fashion model wearing a metallic one piece bathing suit. I want to 'colorize' her to make her look metallic chrome.........

I would love to just use the colorize feature in the Hue/Saturation adjustment, but it turns out more grey than chrome......

al

[DJ Dubovsky]

That's because you're thinking of metalic as a color and it's not. Think of it as if she were wearing a mirror with a very reflective surface. I would think you would have to follow the curves of her body and the way the lights hit it and create your own crome surface. Since a body has many hills and valleys unlike lettering you have to follow those highs and lows with the highlights and shadow spots. Sounds like it will be a custom job.
DJ

[Roman]

i will try the lighting effects and see what i come up with.........
Dreamsuite has some nice chrome effects...........but can't seem to configure them to mold to the body as skin...........

[Rey Mendoza,Jr]

I have been experimenting a lot about these metallic effect on human skin. The best effect that I have come up with is using the displace filter.

Get a photo of a model (preferably nude, to wrap those metallic skin snugly) open it in photoshop, and desaturate. Gaussian blur it for about 2 radius and save it as another file(psd only). we will use it later.

Now open the original file again and create another layer. Fill that layer with chrome effect. Now with the chrome layer selected, now use filter>distort>displace.

when prompted use the file that we saved a while ago and experiment with the settings. I used ahigher setting to wrap the chrome tightly to the body.

Enjoy your chrome!

check out my own chrome lady......

[DJ Dubovsky]

Rey
You got me curious. Where is your chrome lady? I would love to see how your example turned out.
DJ

[Roman]

Rey.....I would love to see your lady too.........

also.....would love if you could clarify some of the steps you suggest....like filling the new layer with the chrome effect.......is that an empty layer.....because that doesn't work........or is it pasting the desaturated layer in the original image?


al

[NIK]

Here is a little help. I use Corel PhotoPaint. The menus look different. But I think you can still figure it out.

I really just play around in the Tone Curve. I messed with the red Tone curve. Then I desaturated the red channel getting the cool gray feel. The left over color was green I just used the hue slider to make it a good blueish tone. All this was done with a mask around the skin. It was a really fast mask so you can still see some of the original skin color

NIK

[Rey Mendoza,Jr]

Roman....

You have to create an empty layer above the original picture and create your chrome effect in that layer. You will have to displace that layer with the desaturated picture we saved earlier.

just remember to save that desaturated picture in psd file. It wont work if it is a jpeg file. And remember to apply gaussian blur to that desaturated pic., for some reason , the displace filter doesn't like sharp pics.

And apply a high setting in the pop up window of the displace filter (around 50-75)

here's a temporary url of my chrome lady:

http://www.100megspop2.com/jun/chrome_lady.html

[DJ Dubovsky]

Rey
Love the results you got. I thought I would give it a try also. Using Photoshop here's what I tried.

1. Magic wand set to 20% Select the lightest area and copy to it's own layer control - J Then go to Select > load selection and select the layer transparancy.

2. Filter > Sketch > Chrome Using the default colors. Detail set to 0 and Smoothness set to 10 Then deselect

3. Activate original layer and use the magic wand to select the next lightest area just out side the previously selected area. Follow the same steps until all shades of the image tone have been selected.

I flattened the image and selected the skin tone since it was a black and white and applied Hue / Saturation and checked the colorize box then moved the slider to achive the blue color and raised the saturation a bit. Here's what I got.
DJ

[PHI]

Here's a decent Chrome using WinImages. You should be able to get this result in photoshop too.

1) Select the skin

2) convert the skin to monochrome

3) apply brightness remap as shown in sample attachment

that's it.

Walt

[Mig]

All nice effects. I'm going to play with this, it's got a lot of potential.

DJ - almost looks like a little bit of plastic wrap; the effect is nice (whatever you did, your methods of making the selections, I guess) because it tempered the chrome filter. Gillian, right?

Mig

[DJ Dubovsky]

I tried plastic wrap also. Forgot why I went with chrome. I think because it conformed better to the curves of the selection.
DJ

[photophil]

boy that was great.. excellent tutor

[DJ Dubovsky]

This whole thread turned out to be a real thinker. It gave us reasons to explore and there are really some very good results because if it.

I had even thought to somehow apply a distorted image as a reflection to see if that gave it more realism but never got that far. It may be interesting to try. I would use paste into and maybe some filter that causes a distortion of the scene. It's definately got me thinking. I guess that's how neat techniques are born.
DJ

[stuart h]

Recently discovered this FANTASTIC site & will soon be uploading some of my challenge efforts.
I came here to ask a question & got distracted by this thread so here's my take on it:

I too made a displacement map by duping the figure, desaturating, blurring then adjusting levels. Loaded this into another copy of the figure which I chromed then ran through the glass filter, using my disp map as the texture. For the extra touches I did some selective cloning & painting white for highlights, before using a gradient in overlay mode to finish.

[DJ Dubovsky]

Welcome aboard Stuart. Wow, that's really cool. Makes me look forward to more of your examples in the future.
DJ