attn: flora Jeani.. and all help me to remove plastic look

[Saikat]

Remember MY FIRST POST

I have just finish the work. Its a part of my multimedia project and I have to submit it within 25 th may.

I failed to remove the plastic look properly, and I am not satisfied with the Skin( man) I made. It should look more natural.

Jeani.. Flora.. .. can you help me to fix this.

[jeaniesa]

I can't promise that this is "fixed" in your eyes, but it's the best I know how to do. In general, what I noticed right off was that the man's lips were the same color as his skin and looked very unnatural. Even though men don't wear lipstick, their lips are still a reddish/ruddy color. Also, most skin tones are not a single color, so I tried to add a little more (subtle) variation in the skin tones. In addition, shadows tend not to have much color, so in the shadow area under the man's chin and down in the bottom left in the shadow area of the shirt, I desaturated slightly.

Specifically (if you want to try to copy anything that I did):

1. Copied the background layer and used the sponge tool at about 10% with a soft brush to desaturate the shadows (as mentioned above).

2. Created a new layer and set the blending mode to color. Chose a reddish-pink color for my foreground color and painted over the man's lips. Then added a Hue/Saturation layer grouped with the color layer and adjusted until I liked the color.

3. Created another layer and set the blending mode to color. Chose a (very) slightly more pink color than I had used for the lips. Then, using a fairly large and very soft brush at a low opacity, I ran the brush down the nose, over the cheeks and across the forehead of both the man and the woman. I also added just a touch to the neck of the man. Then, I lowered the opacity of the layer until the color was hardly visible when looking at the picture, but noticeable when I turned the layer on and off (for a before/after view). This added a bit more tonal variations to the faces, but it is meant to be a subtle effect - not like applying makeup.

4. To bring a bit more depth to the faces and get rid of the "plastic" look, I went into the channels palette and selected/copied the green channel. Then, back in the layers palette, I created a new layer, pasted the green channel into that layer and changed the blending mode to luminosity and the opacity to 28%. This affected the entire image and I only wanted to affect the faces/necks, so created a layer mask and filled it with black, then painted with a soft brush with white just over the faces.

5. To add a little texture (and further get rid of the plastic look), I ran the Film Grain filter (Filters>Artistic>Film Grain) on the luminosity layer with settings of Grain=3; Highlight=0; Intensity=0. Then faded the filter to 75%.

6. The shirt was a little too saturated for my liking, so I reduced the saturation of the shirt (using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and layer mask) by -10.

7. The image was still looking a little "harsh" to me, so I tried reducing the contrast with a Curves adjustment layer with two points to the curve:
First: Input 129; Output 126
Second: Input 61; Output 76
I liked the result of this because it lightened the harsh shadows on the faces/necks and brought out the hair texture. It did make the clothing look a little flat though, so I used the layer mask to bring back some of the contrast there.

Hopefully you like something in what I did and can use it.

Jeanie

[Flora]

...Like Jeanie, who did a wonderful job, I'm not sure this is the result you're looking for....

I was also tempted to tone down the colours, but noticing you've constantly kept them very vibrant, I decided to leave everything as it was except for their heads ...

What I did is the following:

1) Used Selective Colors on their skin to fade the yellow a bit and get a more natural look.

2) Created Overlay, Color and Multiply Layers and used a soft white, black or coloured brush to add shadows, lights and depth to their faces aiming to a increased 3D effect on their otherwise rather flat one-tone colour.

3) Used the Curves to decrease the complete blackness of their hair and brought back some highlights in it for a more natural look.

4) Added some noise (Uniform, Monochromatic) to correct the unnatural smoothness of their skin.

I hope that, mixing bits and pieces of what both Jeanie and I did you might achieve the results you need ....

[Saikat]

thanks for your help...

I am working on it ....

you two really help me to finish my project and i hope , i can get maximum marks.

[Opal]

I thought that I would have a try at this one in PSP 8...quite liked the results of the skin colours etc. First I applied the one step photo fix script....then the Automatic Contrast Enhancement...lastly 'Clarify'...that's it.

Opal

[Saikat]

Opal thanks for help , but I dont have PSP8, and one thing it looks like oil paint (may be due to jpg compression).

I achiev exacly this result by using KPT plugin and some curve correction.

again thanks for help..