Impossible skin

[RetWannabe]

Hi,

This has probably been asked or discussed on this forum before. What do you do? You have an impossible image, really bad skin, almost no spot to source for healing or cloning. 1. How many of you have have a supply of facial textures that you've saved from previous retouches and are you able to use them successfully over the 'impossible image'. Just generally is saving facial textures a common practice? How do you go about it. As a beginner I would like to know.

Thanks

[Flashtones]

Re: Impossible skin

Can you post a portion of the image?

[RetWannabe]

Re: Impossible skin

I don't have a sample image as yet; I am just anticipating this happening at some point. I have seen some images that retouches have done amazing things to even when it seemed there was not a spot on the skin that was unaffected either by acne or a ton of wrinkles. I would have just thrown my hands in the air and said this one is not doable. So besides gaussian blur and all that bad stuff how to fix such a problem. Save a load of skin textures to source from? I guess that is my question. And how many actually practice this?

[Der_W]

Re: Impossible skin

In most cases there'll be a tiny amount of good skin that you can work with (although it's pretty likely that you'll end up with repeating patterns).
Dodge & burn might also work, depending on how damaged the skin is.

When worse comes to worse you probably can get decent results with frequency separation and replacing the high frequency data completely (technique can be found here: http://www.modelmayhem.com/po.php?th...=1#post9585669).

[RetWannabe]

Re: Impossible skin

Thanks very much for that link. I have to try that, and soon. I need more hi-res RAW images to practice on. The link you gave me I think I will sign up, see if they have any spare going.

[ray12]

Re: Impossible skin

I have been photographing and saving skin pore textures for years and have a collection of photographically accurate skin pore sheets that I use for transfer work when I want to add in some accurate skin pore fixes.

We cast for specific models with good original skin quality that can transfer well, we use special lenses, hi-res cameras, and use special studio techniques to get the best details. We then make up seamlessly tiled sheets of texture that we can then apply to another model when its desired. There are 7 different kinds of skin pore textures in a face and if you are a real detailed retoucher you would want to use actual forehead textures on the forehead, or large cheek pores on the cheeks. There are some times when it is just fine considering the job...to just use general skin pores and transfer them.

The pore textures we use are photographically accurate so they blend in realistically and they are specially designed not to repeat the patterns or to change the color of the underlying skin. You can make the pores any size, any angle, any ethnicity, and just paint them on, or paint them off, till the desired position and strength is achieved.

We use them to cover up all our facial smoothing and blending efforts, to perfectly cover up cloned and fixed up areas on the face and body, and to repair shine or blown out highlights on the face. They print out nicely up to 16x20" because we started out with hi res originals. They go on in seconds and dont take 6 hours to do like a dodge and burn might. Because you have artistic control of the positioning, strength, and the different types of skin pores...they are good for production retouching where you need a good balance of quantity, speed and accurate looks.

There are retouchers out there that have wrestled with your same issue almost every day...so dont feel bad. As you guessed, there are several kinds of techniques that can be employed as mentioned above...and it seems that each retoucher has their own favorite tools and techniques. It definitely takes time and practice.

Cheers

[RetWannabe]

Re: Impossible skin

Many thanks Ray for the detailed explanation. At least I am/was on the right track or my thinking was. There are just some cases where I am sure no amount of dodging and burning; days of it, would create (for me anyways), a satisfactory result. And at this early stagein the learning and practicing process I need to know all the tools not just the ones that come with PS, I would need to have in order to cope with every kind of situation.

Thanks again!