Help with Hair removal

[superkoax]

Originally Posted by crazyfly1

Butch and Bart, I have tried making a pattern with skin and I don' get a good result. Would one or both of you go into a little detail about the method please?

You can try to blur out the area and lighten it and color management(to make it more balanced from the rest of the skin)...then copy a good area with clean skin on to a new layer and move it over the blurred area, use blend mode linear light and then use highpass filter to get more texture back...

[Cassidy]

A couple of things come to mind to reduce the hairiness, you could copy the area to a new layer and then use a surface blur, drop the opacity of that layer to blend until the hairs are just starting to show through, or create a copy merged layer, take a snapshot, guassian or surface blur ever so slightly the affected area and then using the history brush, at low opacity, brush back the details. Just a couple of other thoughts in addition to the others

[bart_hickman]

Originally Posted by crazyfly1

Butch and Bart, I have tried making a pattern with skin and I don' get a good result. Would one or both of you go into a little detail about the method please?

We are only dealing with the fine textures here--ie., features less than about 5 pixels in size. In fact, the skin texture we want is more like 2 pixels. So before using the texture filter, duplicate the image and perform a highpass with a radius of about 1.5 to 2 pixels. This gets rid of the contours of her face. This is what we'll use to generate texture.

Now you can pick a small area on her face that already has no hair texture--I chose a spot in the center of her forehead just above her brow (see fig 2). Copy (ctrl-c) to put it into the clipboard. Then create a new blank layer and run the pattern maker. Check "use clipboard as sample" and click generate. Next click okay. You now have your texture--should look nice and uniform with no blotchiness.

Because of the mathematics of the highpass filter and linear light blend, this texture is actually twice as strong as you want--so you need to set the fill on this new texture to 50%.

Now when you linear-light combine it with the surface-blurred version, the texture strength will match what was already there except the hair is gone.

You can make further adjustments to that 50% fill if you want more or less strength in the texture. You can also re-do the highpass with a smaller radius to make the texture finer.

Bart