Softening this highlight.

[jessicaporter1]

Im having some issue with the harshness of the light and the depth of her pours in this image. I'm doing my regular dodge and burn to shallow up the pours but the highlight itself is a real contrasting area on the face.

Any tips on getting rid of this? Much appreciated!

- Jessica

[0lBaldy]

Simplistic approach... sample a color close to shine.. paint on a new layer... change mode.. adjust opacity.. blur if needed

[jessicaporter1]

Originally Posted by 0lBaldy

Simplistic approach... sample a color close to shine.. paint on a new layer... change mode.. adjust opacity.. blur if needed

=) thank you

[tom60634]

The problem that I ran into with the above techniques was that the flesh under the veil remained shiny. To individually brush out each square would take hours and the quality would be probably be questionable.

I set the foreground color patch to the desired fleshtone.
I then created a solid fill adjustment layer,double clicked the layer to the right of the color Fill Layer1 Mask which brought up the layer style panel. I kept the Blend mode to normal while I adjusted the Blend If lever till the highlighted area was covered with the adjustment color. I quickly switched to black as the foreground color and with a soft brush at a low opacity brushed into the lips and nostril area. The excessive shine was tamed but it did dull the veil.

To bring back the veil I repeated the above steps except that I used black as a foreground color. As I write this I believe that if I used a 50% gray instead of black, I probably could have avoided the brush work to save the lips and nostril area.

It turned out to be a quick and easy solution that kept the original texture pretty much as found,

[Wolfman]

I used the brush at 10% opacity and sampled skin color and painted over shine, but left some shine..... it took about 1.5 minutes.... I could have spent more time on veil area, but just wanted to show solution.

[K.C.]

Keeping some of the hotspot/highlights helps to shape the face.

[Cron]

Frequency separation + blur and brush on the low frequency layer

[K.C.]

Many different methods to achieve similar results. It's all about preference and style.