Quick technique for cleaning the skin up

[R_Leszczynski]

Hello,

Have You got any good technique for removing blemishes and some dark skin spots or wrinkles without softening in overall. I think the best way is doing in manually with some dodging and burning techniques plus clone stamp and healing brush but if You want to make it perfect it's really time consuming and not possible for a quick and basic retouching job for small money. Thats way I'm looking for some quicker more automated trick.

Unfortunately all techniques I know involve softening or blurring the skin. Recently I've tried this DE-GRUNDE trick. It's quick and quite nice but I don't like this soft glowing ethereal type skin which is a result of de-grunging.

Have You got any suggestions?

[Photodivauk]

Try reading Katrin Eismann's book on retouching.
Photoshop Restoration & Retouching
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=p...Eismann&pgis=1
A mine of information

[HuBBa]

Well, its a little bit of having the cake and eating it. If you want perfect great result, it will take time. If you want quick & dirty, it will not be perfect.

If there were a technique that let you click a few buttons and 30 secs later you have perfect flawless skin retouch, then a lot of retouchers would be out of a job =)

My suggestion is clone-stamp (at 100%, less and it starts to blur to much) and healingbrush and just practise getting a very fast workflow using that and most important, know when to stop. Go for the big whoppers first and then move down to the finer detail. It's all in how much time you want to (or can) spend on each image. If it's in the "30 seconds tops" range then im afraid you will not be able to do it with anything else than blurring techniques or plugins like Portraiture / portrait professional (which are just glorified blur-skin scripts anyway).

It wont look like the latest vogue beauty shoot, but if the client isn't paying for it why do it.

[Hendrik]

a combination of Healing brush, cloning and degrunge is the most quickest method with good results. Don't apply degrunge equally on the skin. Using the technique with high values (tripple the numbers), I call High-value Degrunge can make the skin even more equal, without destroying the texture.

Another method is the old fashioned (but still good) skin blurring/softening.

Most important is what your clients love, not what you love or think is the best method.

[TommyO]

The quickest method for those "small money" jobs may be the filter called Reduce Noise, which seems to be forgotten by many.

It's integral to Photoshop. Move the Color Noise and Jpeg Artifacts sliders to 0. Adjust the others to taste. The Preserve Details and Sharpen sliders provide two additional steps in one. You can follow-up with the Spot Healing brush on any larger blemishes and be done in less than a minute.

[Daviskw]

HERE is a great one.

Scroll down to Cspringers Skin Repair and download the action.

This uses an altered version of degrunge using the vivid mode but you can apply and control the effect much easier then the original...and using the vivid mode does a much better job on some pictures...although you can still change the mode to any you would like.

It includes the skin smoothing. routine, removing larger blemishes, adding texture...all in the same action.

Butch

[Mr Tickle]

Hi
I'm new to the forum so 'hello'!

Anyway, I've just tried this technique and it looks pretty good.

Originally Posted by R_Leszczynski

Hello,

Have You got any good technique for removing blemishes and some dark skin spots or wrinkles without softening in overall. I think the best way is doing in manually with some dodging and burning techniques plus clone stamp and healing brush but if You want to make it perfect it's really time consuming and not possible for a quick and basic retouching job for small money. Thats way I'm looking for some quicker more automated trick.

Unfortunately all techniques I know involve softening or blurring the skin. Recently I've tried this DE-GRUNDE trick. It's quick and quite nice but I don't like this soft glowing ethereal type skin which is a result of de-grunging.

Have You got any suggestions?

[mfischer]

NeatImage.
Turn low freq all the way up, enable very low freq, paint in to taste.