How to eliminate veins

[nebulaoperator]

Hello everyone,

I need advice on how to eliminate blue veins I have been trying to but not very successful. If only there were couple of them I would do graft or stamp tool and healing brush. I noticed that by this method texture is slightly changing when zooming in.I want to preserve texture as much as possible(for now) I tried using hue&sat , selective colour, curves, channels but still can't isolate vein colour. I would really love to learn best available trick or solution to this problematic area of retouching. Appreciate your help. Thank you

[daygraphics]

Do you have an example of the image that you are struggling with? Or can one access it somewhere?

[mistermonday]

It really depends on the image - particularly what the skin looks like. It would be best to post a sample.
Regards, Murray

[nebulaoperator]

Here is the link:
http://s1119.photobucket.com/albums/...nt=Samp-le.jpg

[mistermonday]

On this image the veins are not very prominent and the contrast against the skin is low so I agree that Hue/Sat, Selective Color , etc are not the way to go. However if you use a grayscale vizualization layer, you will see that the luminosity of those veins is very close to that of the skin. Therefore with very little effort, you can add a dodge curve above the BG and dodge the veins until the luminosity matches the surrounding skin. Once the luminosity is matched, you can add a blank layer set to Color blend mode and paint over the veins with adjacent skin color and it will blend in perfectly.
Regards, Murray

[brodiebutler]

EDIT: I just saw the picture. This technique will still work but its a manual way with cloning and healing.


I remove veins a lot and I find it easy enough to do using Frequency Seperation.
I wont go into it, but look it up. plenty of info online. You can basically target the colour/shades and the texture individually. I will often use the clone stamp tool on a low opacity to blend the skin tones and kill any coloration from the veins. Then on the texture layer, i will use the healing brush to fix up any harder edges of the veins.

[mistermonday]

As Brodie points out, frequency separation is another good way to do it but depending on the image and your proficiency with the various techniques, you may find one method to be quicker than the other.
Regards, Murray

[nebulaoperator]

brodiebutler

I just tested how IHP works and have to say with soft grey layer being used for d&b and the FS technique applied works really well.
First I d&b very lightly and when all the retouching is done apply FS. This way in my opinion it looks better then FS applied on it's own. And no stamp or healing brush tool was used. Texture well preserved.
Thank you Murray too.
And

[nebulaoperator]

Just adding related sample.