Retouch Magic - Photo Manipulation and Retouching / Discuss

Eric Paul Owens says:

I am going to try and start putting together a tutorial a week for the forum here. A fair amount of these will probably be me regurgitating something I find online as I learn from it and do it myself. This first one deals with cleaning up skin but still having it look natural. Most of the earlier tutorials I found used blurs pretty heavy handidly and you were left with unatural looking pour-less skin. This project is largely copied out of these two tutorials found on youtube: (I Have since re-linked them to Tutorial Bucket's Site)
Smooth, glowing skin with a facial scrub
Smooth skin foundation makeup

I cropped the original down for this tutorial so that hopefully you can see a little more of what I am doing as I go along.


First, I duplicate the background layer. I do this first all the time so that I have the original pixels available to me if I need them later.

In the Channels tab we select the Red channel. Hit ctrl-A to select all then ctrl-c to copy.

Make a new layer and then paste the red channel into it. Making the blending mode "luminosity" kinda dulls the color, but clears up the skin. To bring back the color other places we are going to apply a luminosity mask.


Go Back to your channels tab and ctrl-left click on the thumbnail next to RGB. This will make a luminosity selection


Switching to your Layers tab click the quickmask button (circled in pink) This will bring back the color by creating a luminosity mask. You can also adjust what areas of the picture this layer effects by adusting the levels of the mask. by pulling the black slider to the right you will bring back some sharpness in your dark areas.


Now the fun stuff, I create a merged layer by clicking ctrl-a and ctrl-shift-c (or edit->copy merged) and the ctrl-v to paste it. I open the gaussian blur filter and find a level that smooths the skin, BUT I DO NOT CLICK OK. Instead I note the number (In this case 12) and click cancel.


Now we actually run a High Pass Fliter (Filters->Other->High Pass) at the number we found from the blur. You can see how this is bringing out all the flaws in the skin.


Invert this layer(edit->adjustments->invert) We then go back to the gaussian blur layer and blur by 1/3 of our original number. (in this case 4)


Now set it to overlay, because this images is zoomed in I am leaving the layer alone, but in a lot of cases you may want to mask this layer to just cover the skin.


That is the bulk of the tutorial. I did not like how the lighting looked on this all cropped so I make a merged layer just as before (ctrl-A, ctrl-Shift-C, ctrl-v) and play with the levels.


Idon't like what the levels did to the colors of my left eye, so I make hue-saturation adjustment layer


I mask that just to cover my left pupil


and that is that.
Originally posted at 11:54AM, 6 August 2007 PDT (permalink)
Eric Paul Owens edited this topic 70 months ago.