Keeping natural texture by wjklewis

KEEPING THE NATURAL TEXTURE IN THE SKIN

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After

I start by taking the clone stamp tool and set the mode to normal, opacity to 100%, flow to 50% and check the box to Aligned. I set the opacity to 100% and keep the brush hardness to about 50%. On my first pass I take out any major imperfections on the skin making sure as I am cloning to sample skin similar in color and value. On my second pass I change the clone stamp tool opacity to 50% and work the problematic sections that are more due to shadows, skin value, etc. Don’t over do it because we will come back to the fine-tuning later in step 5.

Go to your layer pallet and make three new copy layers by hitting Command J (For the Mac) three times. On the second layer, which is called Layer one, rename it Median 30. On Layer One Copy 1, rename it High Pass 5. On Layer One Copy 2, rename it Mask. Now go to the second layer called Median and go to Filter/Noise/Median and set the radius to 30. (You can experiment with adding a

larger or smaller radius later if you want but I have found 30 to work beautifully) Go to the bottom of the layer pallet and add a adjustment layer-Levels.

Now go to the layer called High Pass 5 and go to Filter/Other/High Pass and set the radius to 5.0. With this layer highlighted set your blending mode to Overlay. The blending mode pull down is at the top of your layers pallet. Now go to the top layer called Mask and create a mask by going to the bottom of the layer pallet and click on the third icon from the left.

Now we are ready to begin the skin smoothing process. You should be on the top layer call Mask. Click and activate the mask by clicking on the white box just left of the layer title or right of the image thumbnail. Go to your tools pallet and select the Brush tool and set the mode to normal, opacity to 100%, flow to 50% and set the brush hardness to a soft setting of 0-25%. Now set your foreground color to black and begin painting over the skin making sure you don’t cross over the eyes, lips, eyebrows and hair. You will see a softening process as you paint over the skin, but this is not the final look so don’t be too alarmed. To see where you have painted and what areas you have missed; uncheck the small eye icon next to the first two layers call Background and Median. The areas you have painted will be in gray. You can toggle back and forth until you are sure your have all the skin painted in. If you have painted an area and want to subtract it switch your foreground color to white.

There are two options you can do at this point. The simplest is to first make sure all the layer eye-icons are activated and then go and adjust the opacity percentage on both the Median layer and the High Pass layer until you get the blending levels of the skin to look the most natural. The High Pass layer is what gives the skin its texture and the Median gives the softness. Feel free to go back and forth until you get it right.

Another option is go to the layer called Median and set the blending mode to Soft Light and the Opacity to the 85% range. This blends the Median layer with the original image. However, doing this will increase your saturation, so go to the Background layer and

create a adjustment Hue/Saturation layer and set the saturation to the –45 range. This is a judgment call but try and get the color balance to match the original image. Now go to the your High Pass layer and adjust the opacity until the skin texture looks natural. I normally start by moving the slider to 0% and work my way back to 100% until I get my desired results.

You can now go to the Levels adjustment layer just above the layer call Median and double click on histogram icon and open up the levels dialog. Just below the histogram go and slide the middle adjustment (just above the box that has the number 100) to the left ever so slightly and this will smooth out the highlight uniformly on the skin. You may what to skip this step you your are going to apply the Amy Dresser highlight technique in Step 6.

Remember one of the wonderful things about this technique is that you can now go back to each layer and adjust the opacity and the adjustment layers indefinitely until you get the correct blend you want. Sometimes it may take a few fine tune adjustments to get it right. However, to move on to Step 5 you will need to flatten these layers so make sure you are satisfied before moving on.

At this point flatten the layers and go back and repeat Step 1 but magnify the images to about 200% and work out any imperfections.

From here I make a copy layer (so I have a backup image) and take the dodge tool and set the range to Midtones and the exposure to 3-5 % and work over any areas that need tonal blending. I do the same with burn tool. This is a critical step, as you can see the difference between the image in step four.

Step Five: Close-up of final image after dodging and burning. You can see that the skin looks nature still holding the texture.

This is an Amy Dresser technique that I have slightly modified. This gives a “wet look’ or sheen to the highlights of the skin that can add a punch to the overall feel.

Make sure you have flatten your layers so you have one layer. Set your foreground image to white and go to Select/Color Range. A dialog box will come up and make sure Select is set to Sampled Colors and the Selection is checked and Selection Preview should be set to None. Now take the first of the three eye droppers and click on the area of skin that you want to add the highlights or the “wet look”. Now change the fuzziness slider so that a good range of highlights show up on the face. You can always redo this step if you don’t get it right the first time. Click OK and you will see the selection that has been made.

Now create a new empty layer by going to Layer/New/Layer or by holding down Shift/Command/N. Fill this layer with white by going to Edit/Fill/Use/White. After this make sure to deactivate the selection by hitting Command D. Now create a mask on this layer and fill it with black by going to Edit/Fill/Use/Black. Go to your tools pallet and select the Brush tool and set the mode to normal, opacity to 30%, flow to 50% and set the brush hardness to a soft setting of 0-25%. Now start painting in over the skin and the highlighted areas will begin to show through. Since your opacity is set to 30% the more you paint over and area the greater the highlights will show through. You can always cut back on the amount of white by changing your brush to black.

Once you have painted in the highlighted areas and are satisfied click the icon just to the left of the mask and change the blending mode to Overlay. Now you can adjust the percentage to around the 35% range. If needed you can add a small about of Gaussian Blur to smooth out the highlights a bit more. But again don’t loose the texture in the skin. You can push this effect even more than I have in this example by setting your opacity to 50% - 100% range.

Image before Step Six Image with selective highlight “wet look” applied. Step Six: Layers pallet should look like this.

Step Four: Image should look like this. Step Four: Layers pallet should look like this.

Step One: Image after using the clone stamp tool at 100% & 50%.

Step Three: Layers pallet should look like this.

Step Two: Layers pallet should look like this.

Step Three: Image should look like this.

At last I have worked up a retouching technique for skin that works wonders. I have reviewed tons of techniques over the past few years but many of them leave the skin looking like a blurred mess or end up looking like plastic. The goal is to take out the flaws but still retain the skin texture. Keep in mind that this tutorial just deals with the skin portion of the retouching process and not the eyes, hair etc. At the very end of this lesson I bring out the eyes a bit on the final image just to finish it off. At first this technique may seem a bit complicated, but one things I do to speed up the process is build an action button for step two that I can repeat for future images.