BuzzPro & Portraits

[Michael Robinso]

I'm using BuzzPro to make portraits from photographs. Photos with a facial glare or light reflecting off a face usually creates washedout (pure white) areas on the portrait. How can I eliminate these washedout areas? Before or after applying a simplifier filter, when ,how,where......
Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Mike R

[jch71566]

Michael,

Without an example (Before & After), I'm not sure what I can do to help. The things I would try would be to decrease contrast on the original, or to add some noise to the over-exposed area on the original.

Best of Luck,
Jeff

[Patricia]

I've had some good results by using the healing brush on the glare before applying the buzz filter. Works best with small areas.

Patricia

[DannyRaphael]

Hi Michael:

Welcome and thanks for posting your question. Patricia is right... the healing brush or any technique, really, to replace the extreme highlights with some sort of color help a lot. Adding a little noise along with some color could work, too. [good call, jeff]

Here's another method that might work, depending on the image characteristics. First, create a new layer. Then with an appropriate size brush (usually soft edged) with airbrush setting on, flow ~ 40%, opacity ~ 40%, hold down ALT key (mac: option) which turns the brush into an eyedropper. Use it to sample nearby colors, populating the foreground color swatch.

Then do a little airbrushing to cover up the washed out areas, sampling colors as you go. Since you're doing this work on a separate layer, it's easy to erase or use a layer mask to 'undo' any areas where you may have gotten too much paint or the wrong color.

When you're happy with the results, create a layer about the rest, then, while holding down ALT, choose Layer > Merge Visible. This will merge the two layers into the new one, while keeping the individual layers in tact. Good plan in case you don't like the Buzz result and/or want to fine tune the fixup after you see what Buzz does to it.

When you get done, why don't you post one of your portraits? I'm sure many (myself included) would like to see the results.

Hope this helps. Keep the good questions coming.

~Danny~

[gina]

I use diffuse glow

Hi Michael,

I'm sure all the other ways are very good and I just drop my 2 cents here. It's not something I found out myself. I read it somewhere and jotted it down and used it a few times since. Very nice for flash highlights too!

Here you go :

First with the eyedropper tool you pick a color from the skin near the light patch for your foreground and a darker skin tone for background color.
On a dupe of your pic or layer run :
filter/distort/diffuse glow.

First bring your graininess back to zero, then the next slider you see represents the amount of background color you bring in.
The last slider represents the foreground color. Any bright spot on you picture will be filled with the bg color to a more or lesser degree. In playing with those 2 sliders you can fill up the lightest parts and not filling in too much from the rest (unless) you want to of course!).
Play with it a bit and see if it works for you


gina

[Michael Robinso]

Thanks

Thank you Jeff, Patricia, Danny, and Gina. I'll try them all.
Jeff, I don't know how to post an example ,yet. How is it done?

Thank you all,
Mike R.

[jch71566]

Thank you Jeff, Patricia, Danny, and Gina. I'll try them all.
Jeff, I don't know how to post an example ,yet. How is it done?

Thank you all,
Mike R.

Mike,

When you post a message, if you scroll down a bit there is a box titled "Additional Options". Inside of that, there is another box marked "Attach Files" with a button labled "Manage Attachments".

You can click on that button and upload files that will be shown with your post.

Best of luck,
Jeff