perfect pores in portraits

[aesthetic]

I've seen numerous forums listing ways to create a perfectly natural retouched face, but how do YOU do it?

The effect I'd like to achieve is attached link.
I've used to same method for years and I'm looking to better myself.



http://i212.photobucket.com/albums/c...oreexample.jpg


A woman I'm shooting this weekend has a bit of an acne issue and wants her skin refined and unnatural (ok, if she says so!), so how would I achieve this without it looking terribly fake?!
Would I have to have a separate "pore" jpg and overlay?

[santajuana]

to remove acne try healing and cloning on a new empty layer and be sure you have selected current and below layers, and for pores use dodge & burn in a new 50% gray softlight layer.
i can tell you that girl on the image on top right has great skin, i've seen her images without retouch so that's not a good image to compare. i'm attaching two images to show you that with healing and cloning you can remove some of the major problems on skin.

[Alfred]

For doing it the real easy and quick way and if you like more of a unnatural look. I would use the clone tool for most of the bigger blemishes, then I run NoiseNinja on a dup of the original and then mask everything I don't like to be smooth. Perhaps unsaturate the skin tones a little bit and apply some noise to it.

[Verywierd]

It depends on how bad the skin is and how much detail you have in the picture. It also depends on how much time you want to spend and the expectations of the client. When she says "unnatural", she could mean flawless and not plastic doll smooth.

Usually there are still some patches of reasonably clear skin that can be fixed up with a little clone and heal and you can use that as the basis for restoring the pore pattern.

Plug-in skin cleaners or noise removers usually cannot deal with really huge acne scars unless you want the "android" look, and you will notice that most tutorials use examples with fairly good skin to start with.

There is no one techinque really. Use whatever works, but work slowly and zoom in and out a lot when dealing with the worst scars.

On the other hand, quick and easy, clone out the worst, blur the hell out of the skin and find another picture to use as a pore pattern (or use a noise layer) as you suggested.