Facial hair removal

[graham73]

Hi

I would some advice on removing fine facial hair on black skin.
I need to keep skin detail so I dont want to blur it at all.


Graham

[Aiden]

You could try burning the white bits, but it looks like a tricky job, I've also tried everything else I can think of, but nothing else really works.
Good luck.

[Der_W]

For the best results I would suggest the clone stamp or healing brush on "Darken" mode.

But you could also select the hair, feather the selection and copy it to a new layer.
Then use the "Filter"-"Noise"-"Dust and Scratches", set the threshold to 0 and adjust the radius as high as the hairs disappear. Then increase the threshold just before the hair reapers.
Set the blending mode of the layer to darken and fine tune with dodge & burn.

[flexmanta]

This is exactly one of the cases where you want to separate frequencies.

[graham73]

Thanks guys

The healing brush on darken seems to work best it at least keep some texture, this was a very sharp shot taken on a hasselblad so would like to keep the texture.
Could you explain about different frequencies?

[flexmanta]

Quick one here. By having color and big bumps on one layer (which you want to preserve), and little 1,7 pixel hair on another layer (which you want to shave), you can retouch them separately.

The idea is to separate frequencies by the fact that an Xpx low pass plus an Xpx high pass set to linear light, equals to the original image, but in 2 independent layers. The ways that you can retouch the high frequency layer depends on what your end result needs to be, i would dodge and burn all the way if there was time, being very careful with the color (that WILL shift). But you can also heal in darken on the high freq layer with the tool set to sample just the current layer.

[falem]

I tried it.

[rovis]

One way to fix hair like that is to use a clone brush, but with the hardness set to 100% and opacity very low, 3-5%.

start "massaging" the area with a brush like that, changing the sampling point constantly.

slowly you start loosing the details but are still keeping the texture.

I attached a quick demo, just a few minutes of cloning.