Help with Hair removal

[bohngy]

Hi all, thanks for all of you who helped me out with my last thread on tonality, I'm still working on that one. This one is asking for a bit of direction with removal of facial hair.

I shot this image as a favour for a friend, she's a makeup artist and would like some beauty images in her book. My problem is that I can't remove the fine hair on her forehead without it looking terrible.

The picture is about 1/4 done, so I know there is still loads that is wrong with it. I've removed hair on her top lip by blurring a copy of the area and then adding skin texture with a new layer comprising of a selection from her cheek, running a high pass filter, then overlay mode.... thanks to godmother's vid for that one!
The problem is that it isn't working on her forehead, and I don't like the loss of texture on her lip, in the area I have done. dodge and burn techniques aren't working due to the different tones.

Could anyone provide some advice/guidance on what to do? I'm not asking people to do it for me, just throw some ideas in my direction, on how to achieve a really professional result.

also, if you've got any ideas on how to fix the skintones! they look a bit horrible at the moment.

Thanks, Bohngy
http://www.benlawrencephoto.co.uk/forehead1.jpg

[edgework]

Is that the full sized image? What does the original look like?

[KR1156]

if it's very minor, sometimes you can cheat with a little, carefully done, dust & scratches, followed by a little noise and additional D&B for cleanup. if not, i usually just make a curve that really hits the highlights and darkens them in to match the midtones, and just paint in each hair.

[bohngy]

it's been resized for the web, and cropped a little, how come edgework?

[mistermonday]

Bohngy, this technique should work well on your image:
http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=213Regards, Murray

[Daviskw]

Hi there

Added a texture layer grouped with a masked snapshot of median filter layer

Butch

[Gary]

Copied a section from the right side of her forehead, flipped horizontally, moved it over-top of the hair and lowered the opacity to suit; healing brush tool to blend in the blemishes; painted with a low opacity soft brush on a blank layer in Overlay mode using the skin color from the right side of her face for the skin tone; enhanced her eyes using masked duplicate layers in color burn and color dodge modes, sharpened.

[cricket1961]

I wouldn't remove the hair at all. I might darken it down slightly though.

Chris

[bart_hickman]

Butch, that's a nice job. Your method sounds very similar to mine.

I duplicated the original and used surface blur to remove the hair. Duplicated the original again and used the pattern maker from a sample of her own skin, highpass, and slight blur to create a layer with the new texture. Combined the new texture layer with the blurred skin layer using linear light and put both of them into a group that is selectively masked.

Bart

[MatthewMarshall]

do you realy want her to look like a plasic barbie doll? Sometimes if you cant get a realistic version, leaving it alone is best. I agree with cris, darkening the strands is a nice idea. So here is an example of a very light hair removal. I still think the original photo is nice by its self. But as you can see i did other things to the photo like soften the lace, ect. I used neat image to even the skin, (as a layer painted in) and cleaned up the rest with just burn tool and color corected areas.

[Daviskw]

Thanks Bart... your technique looks good...I'll have to try the pattern maker..sounds like it could work good.

I think this is a very nice shot... it can be strong colorful and bold... or muted and mysterious.

I always like the bold as you can tell and I like the eyes half hidden and colorful…lol… I personally think this would be a great candidate for the Soft Doir Technique.

However it works great bothways...I like Matthew's as well

Butch

[cainam]

A bit late, but liked the photo.

[idreno]

i thought i'd also do some minor changes. lots could be done on this. it's a great photo. the skinjob corrected the hairy forehead problem. afterwards i had some freetime to do a nosejob and color correction. hope i could help. here's the link to compare.
before/after

[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?

[superkoax]

here is mine....

[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