Achieving the "Miami Kaos" look.

[shortt304]

Here are some links to what I am talking about.

http://www.infinitegraf.com/kaos/portraits/14.jpg

http://www.infinitegraf.com/kaos/portraits/7.jpg

I am brand new to this site. Just bumping around I am impressed with the talent amassed here.

So my question. I suspect there is some vectoring and what not included in this look but I would love for someone to break it down for me or even give some links so I could start using this effect with some of my photos. Thanks.

[pavel123]

As far as appearance of the faces go, looks like some sort of blur (surface blur, smart blur of remove noise) most likely with initial airbrushing and manual highlits...
Saw a therad in retouch forum "how to ahieve plastic skin look", could be useful

Pavel

P.S. The thread is here

[Kraellin]

cool look. definitely some kind of de-noise or blur, like a median filter or something along those lines. some posterization maybe? maybe some dodge and burn in there also. would love to see the original as a comparison.

[shortt304]

Thanks fellas. I believe this is a shot from the same shoot

http://www.beepworld.de/memberdateie...lala/jay-z.jpg

[Kraellin]

yup. looks like the same or very similar picture as your 2nd link up above. he's reversed the image, smoothed/blurred/de-noised with whatever he's using and then done some highlight and darkening with maybe dodge and burn, added a new background and some special handling on the jewelry, probably a cut and paste from another image with some extra highlighting there. overall, a very nice effect.

[shortt304]

So is it the de-noise'ing which reduces the number of colors?

[Kraellin]

no, it shldnt be. the de-noise, or whatever he's using to smooth, wouldnt reduce the colors. i hadnt even thought about reducing the colors. but, the dodge and burn could easily reduce the number of colors.

try it. take the one image that is un-touched and run a bit of dodge and burn on the face. i think you'll see what i mean.

[Kraellin]

ok, he may have also used a hue/sat adjustment layer to move the reds closer to brown and the yellows closer to reds to get a more uniform coloration on the face.

i'm playing around with this a bit. the posterization will even things up somewhat, but it gives big transitions also. so, where he may have used some of this at one point, it's probably not what he used to get the even tones.

the 'edge preserving smooth' filter in psp seems to work well on this image to de-noise it quite nicely.

[goose443]

Cut Out will reduce the number of colors. In fact you can specify how many you would like. Cutout on Color blend mode will do this without changing your image.

[shortt304]

Thanks guys keep em coming...It fun just messing around with it.

[pavel123]

Originally Posted by goose443

Cut Out will reduce the number of colors. In fact you can specify how many you would like. Cutout on Color blend mode will do this without changing your image.

A posterize layer would do the same trick. An advantage of Posterize transformation is that it does not produce sharp borders. (although this may not be an issue as the image will be blurred afterwards)

[pavel123]

The second image was bugging me for some time, tried to remember there I could see the look. I think the skin looks as if it was processed using Luci's art.

Pavel

[shortt304]

Luci's art? What is that.

[pavel123]

Originally Posted by shortt304

Luci's art? What is that.

I think I got the spelling wrong. It's Lucis Art, a plug in that was quite popular lately (with a good reason, I must say).

You can see an example here

post 10

I seen a picture on dpreview some time ago, wedding I believe, re-touched using this plug-in. Very similar look. Unfortunately I do not remember teh post, you might find it if you search dpreview using Lucis as a keyword.

Regards.

Pavel