Tutorial: Skin Retouching
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http://web.me.com/joelgrimes/Joel_Grimes_Photography/Skin_Smoothi...
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TUTORIAL: SKIN RETOUCHING
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KEEPING THE NATURAL TEXTURE IN THE SKIN
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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.
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.
Step One: Image after using the clone stamp tool at 100% & 50%.
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
22/08/2009 21:16
Tutorial: Skin Retouching
2 of 2
http://web.me.com/joelgrimes/Joel_Grimes_Photography/Skin_Smoothi...
22/08/2009 21:16