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When did it suddenly become cool to hate everything? It's a growing problem, especially in the entertainment world, and no one benefits from an increasingly hard to please, pessimistic audience.
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My friend Melvin did a video tutorial on these techniques, found here. He's a dramatic guy.
 Note: Touch this for a closer look. Ok. I did a similar tutorial recently but I realized for a few reasons that it could have been a lot better. So I found a picture with skin that was much rougher in complexion, did the process again, this time with full screenshots, and a lot of little details for the people who haven't used Photoshop all that much. It's really quite long, so I will put • marks by all the integral steps if you wanna skip over all the yabber jabber.  I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended. Note: Screenshots will have to be fullsized in your browser window after you click to them otherwise they will look horrid. Here we go! This is my buddy Jon. He goes to photography school with me. His face is very textured. Let's give him some Neutrogena. The key to a retouch is subtlety and retouching is often very much overdone. You want the viewer to think it's real, and in the worse case you want the viewer to subconsciously know it's not real but not be consciously thinking of it. If the viewer thinks, wow thats fake, then you've gone to far and the effect is lost. A difficulty in retouching is not getting the skin so smooth that it looks fake, but still removing pores, blemishes etc. • This is the original. It is too soft, as most digital images are, so I sharpened it up a bit using the Unsharp Mask in Filters>Sharpen, after I duplicated it by grabbing the layer and dragging it to this button marked in red. Important: I always duplicate my layer if I am going to do a permanent change to it, in case I screw up and need to go back. There are also times like we will see soon when you'll need to duplicate the layer because you'll be using only a portion of it, or using it with a different blending mode. We need to get rid of the really noticeable bits, and a great tool for that in Photoshop is the Dust and Scratches tool. Duplicate this layer again and name it Dust and Scratches by double clicking directly on the current layer name. *IMPORTANT* This might seem obvious but don't enter the same numbers as I did in these filters. Go for the same look, but the amount you shift the sliders depends on the size of the image, the quality of the image, and just how bad the shit you're going to be retouching actually is. I simply included the process windows so you could more understand what settings I chose, but it is important to copy the look, not the exact numbers. • Now go to Filters>Noise>Dust and Scratches. Using a small radius (which determines how large of a blemish the filter looks for, the higher the larger) and a very small threshold (which determines how much detail will be left alone, higher means more detail) apply the filter. Now most of his exciting little bits and bumps have magically disappeared just like that! Saves us a lot of work. • However, we don't want the adjustment on the whole image, so what we are going to do is use a layer mask to show only the parts of this layer that we need. First we are going to completely hide it. Making sure the layer is selected, hold the Alt or Option key and click the button shown here. This will apply a mask that will completely hide the layer. You can see it next to the thumbnail of the layer as a black box. Black is hidden, white is revealed, gray is partially revealed. Now, the way you hide and reveal in a layer mask is by using your paintbrush tool. Click on the black thumbnail so it is selected, then switch to your paintbrush tool. Painting with white will reveal the layer. Right click (or whatever the hell you mac users do) in the image to bring up the brush menu, use a midsized brush, with the hardness at zero. Set the flow of your brush to about 15% and start painting in repeated constant strokes on just the areas where there is bad skin you want to get good.  You should now be here.Note: I quit making screenshots for the tools and buttons because it was a fucking pain in the ass and I friggin hope you know Photoshop at least enough to know what I'm talking about. • Before we move on, take the time with your Clone and Healing Brush/Patch tool, and go and nail those tiny marks that the filter didn't get, plus any other imperfections that you see which weren't where the filter was applied. • Okay so now the image doesn't look half bad, but the skin is still too blotchy to satisfy me. So we're gonna smooth it even more. Duplicate your layer again and go to Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur and perform this filter, getting the details as soft as you can without getting to the point where they start to degrade. Use your masking tools to clean up any edges. Now the skin is nice and soft so we have a smooth base to work on. But it's way too soft, and this is where many retouchers run off the road and their images look like absolute shit. Like I said, keep it believable, and the way we are going to do that is to add some texture back into the skin. Do not duplicate your layer before this next filter. We want to lay it down right on top of the blur. • Go to Filters>Texture>Grain, and perform this filter at high Intensity, medium Contrast, and set to Enlarged Grain. It will look horrible. Go for it.  See? It looks just wretched!  It's okay. • Go into Edit>Fade Grain. (You can only do this directly after you preform the filter, so if you do anything else, you'll have to go back and do it again.) Set the blend mode to Luminosity, which will remove the colour from the grain, and lower the opacity to something that's still fairly noticeable as grain but not crazy. See here. Now you can rename this layer to Grain. Remember this point? • I want to see some of this realistic texture through the grain, to nudge the image into the subtle-not-blaringly-edited field. First I am going to set the blend mode to Darken, which will darken some of the soft shadows just a touch. Then I am just going to lower the opacity of the layer so a bit of the underlying layer shows through, like this. We're basically done now. • I'm going to use a Selective Colour adjustment layer to brighten up just the reds a bit, and a Colour Balance adjustment layer to take a bit of the ruddiness out of the skin tone, shown here, and that's it for me. **Note: When fading the Grain, keep in mind your subject. Jon has a babyface, so I kept the effect quite subtle, but if your subject is more stern and manly looking, they might not appreciate having soft skin like a girl. Fade the grain until it is a little more noticable than you normally would to give a more prominent effect. As always, use discretion, and make your final calls when you lower the opacity of the layer in that next step. You can even lower the opacity of the first layer we smoothed with D&S, also, to let a tiny bit of the original blemishes through. Okay, this took me a lot longer to make than I thought it would, so I hope you folks appreciate it, and I hope it is just what you needed to squash your skin retouching frustrations. So long!  Microsoft Word 2000 Word Count 3 pages 1,218 words 141 lines 39 paragraphs  -- Tutorial and Images © 2009 Lane Chevrier [Never Glass Imaging] All rights reserved. Images or written material may not be used or reproduced in anyway without expressed written permission of myself. Comments
 It is a better result, but he has that soft featureless skin look that comes from too much blur. This has the effect of removing pores and the cross-hatch texture that is normal to skin. I am not trying to criticize here, I have the same problems in some of my images.
-- I.M. SirReal Fine Art and Erotic Nude Photography Website: [link] Flickr: [link] RedBubble: [link] This is not the case.
It is the whole reason I added the grain. I'm not sure if you read the tutorial or just guessed at what I did, but I know all too well of this problem. The grain I added simulates pores and texture. It doesn't simulate large pores, and it doesn't simulate a greasy face, but that is why we are retouching - there is a granted surreality to changing the texture of someone's face to suit an ideal. We want it as close to real as possible, but if we wanted it exactly real we'd leave the grease and large pores and facial blemishes on there. Regardless, if you look at places on the original picture where he has no blemishes, on his cheekbone for example, you'll see that his skin's texture is very very close to the result I achieved. Thank you for your comment. -- emerging from oblivion a scream of light a shiver of sound just a whisper and a buckle in the windowpane of time  This came out really well. Only thing I could suggest is maybe using the healing brush (this one not to much) and the patch tool (This one works wonders!) You can get a nice natural look to things.
I really like how it came out though! -- This world is my canvas and I plan on using every bit of it. yeah, but you can't really write tutorials for using those, you just... use them. lol.
 -- emerging from oblivion a scream of light a shiver of sound just a whisper and a buckle in the windowpane of time also, if there is no where nice to patch from you're screwed, and unless you use a nice area, regardless of how smooth it turns out you will end up with a bunch of blotchy areas of uneven tonality, depending on your source *and* your destination.
and spot healing brush is only as good as what surrounds it, and the healing brush needs several good reference points to work well -- emerging from oblivion a scream of light a shiver of sound just a whisper and a buckle in the windowpane of time That is very true. Sometimes if the original subject has no nice areas whatsoever, I find another stock photo that has skin pretty close to theirs. It makes things kind of easier.
It really all depends on the artist. One way will work crazy easy for me and then with tutorials I'm all like "Arghhhh, can't do this!! *give up*" -- This world is my canvas and I plan on using every bit of it. i hate using stock photos. i am a photographer, so i refuse to use the photography of someone else. That's like saying 'i made spaghetti' when your roommate gave you the sauce in a jar.
-- emerging from oblivion a scream of light a shiver of sound just a whisper and a buckle in the windowpane of time My point is that it doesn't look like convincing skin, it's too soft and the texture of the skin is lost. The purpose of skin retouching is to remove imperfections while retaining the realistic look of normal skin, not to create a 'surreal' version of skin. As I said, it is an improvement, you managed to make the imperfections disappear, but at the expense of creating unrealistic skin texture.
-- I.M. SirReal Fine Art and Erotic Nude Photography Website: [link] Flickr: [link] RedBubble: [link] I accept your opinion.
-- emerging from oblivion a scream of light a shiver of sound just a whisper and a buckle in the windowpane of time |
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