Newbie needs advice

[Karmacode]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to digital retouching. I hope to start a career in it someday.

I got Katrin's book and the chapter I'm most intrugied with is glamour retouching. I've read some of the techniques but I still feel a little lost.

For example:

http://i5.tinypic.com/23kc1ma.jpg

The skin in this photo...where would I start by making it look like...

http://www.digitalretouch.org/3editi..._dual_skin.jpg

Am I supposed to start with the healing brush- if so I tried that. It's working okay for getting rid of the wrinkles but what do I do when I reach the part of her face where it has the light glare on it? The healing brush doesn't seem to work then.

Also- am I supposed to heal every pore to make it match a certain texture?

Thanks for taking time to read my post

Hopefully someone can help me out!

[PatrickB]

Hi there and welcome to RP!

You can find a bunch of tutorials and tips about skin-retouching in the tutorial section here

To answer your question about the light glare:

It's a tricky thing to get rid of them, it depends on how far you want to go. For a good start the easy method is to press ctrl-alt-` which selects the luminosity of the picture and then paint in this selection with a soft brush at around 5% to 10% opacity over the glare with a sampled skin-tone. It gives you a pretty good result but only works to a certain point, useful for portrait-retouching. If you really want to go so far to make a glamour-picture from such a bad picture, there is nothing left but cloning some other part of the skin, placing it over the glare and carefully matching it to the face with dodge & burn. In other words you repaint the lights and shadows of this part of her face manually.

In a usual retouch you certainly do not have to clone every pore away. In fact it would make the skin look too flat! But if you face very deep pores which look too disturbing, put a blurred layer on top, mask it completely and then paint in the mask where you want to texture to reduce. The smaller your steps, or in other words how low the opacity of the brush determines how obvious the result will be and if it will look overdone at the end so take your time and be careful when doing so.

Hope I could help some?