Help Needed Please!

[Kirsty]

How do you smooth out the skin of a model/sitter without making them look plastic or fake and without loosing of the colour or the quality of ur photo?

This is the photo, just want to even out the skin a bit but not too much, can anyone help please?

[Stemmy]

This is my take on it.

first off a better crop. girl on left looks too stooped - looks like she has a hunchback. So crop tighter to get rid of thet.

Then colour balance. I added contrast and desaturated a tiny bit.

Then sharpened and finally a touch of noise removal to soften the skin.

I would take longer and clone the shadows etc but you get the idea.

Oo yes made the background a bit more high key as well - looked a bit grey in the original.

Hope this helps

[Kirsty]

She does doesnt she i hadnt noticed that before!
I wasnt finished with the background but i didnt want to go too high as to make it look unrealistic and fake.
Thanks for the hints!

[Earl53]

Hi Kristy,

I use Photoshop 7 and there's a tool called Healing brush also there's one in the same box called Patch Tool. Either one of those might help you.

I messed with it a little. First I corrected the hump look by using the liquefy tool and push the hump out. Then I corrected the levels. Then I used the healing brush very sparingly. It didn?t need much. I then took out some of the red with Hue/Saturation. Lastly I change the Brightness to ?5 and contrast to +10. This is what I came up with.

[Mgarcia]

Go to whereisben.com (in case you dont know who Ben Willmore is, He is the BOMB!) he has lots of things that will help you . I personaly use Digital Gem by Kodak to clean up my Portraits.

Good luck

Mike

[Earl53]

In case you're wondering what liquefy tool does I did some playing around with it. See if you notice any difference.

[Ade]

Had a quick go at it and i mean quick as i'm meant to be getting ready for work....

Basically just adjusted the levels, blurred the skin and masked out the remaining.

[StuG]

Hi Kirsty the easiest method I've found to soften skin is this one on a link that Barry posted some time ago.

http://www.paulsportraits.com/skin/skin.htm