Show us your skin smoothing

[Alter_ego]

This girl was pretty enough to not need skin smoothing but it does seem to have enhanced the eyes. My only criticism is that the hair has lost its natural look, but the background is so much better.

[PhotoMom]

Thanks,

I'm still working on my Photoshop skills. Need to learn how to do better masking to mask out images like this one with lots of wispy hair. Anyone have any tips for this?

[Alter_ego]

Have a look here. The Russell Brown Show
Scroll down the page until you find the 'Advanced background extraction' tutorial. It has just what you're looking for.

[PhotoMom]

Thanks, ALLCART,

I'm checking it out asap!!!

Thank you so much! I can't believe all the tutorials on that site! I'll be at the computer forever!

Photomom

[Mr. Pickles]

Pretty good job of meeting the challenge.

[dc2]

Thanks for adding to this .
Peano I don't recall seeing this method used before ,for the skin tones but it seems very good .
Again thanks for sharing guys.

[dc2]

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

[KellyL]

I offer Ashley. One of the best touch up artists I have seen is Vikki Hansen. Vikki Hansen's Photo Galleries at pbase.com. I emailed her and she directed me to a great article she wrote for PBase magazine on touching up skin. You can find it here: http://k41.pbase.com/pbase_magazine_vol2_jul2005.pdf. Scroll through until you find her article. In her article, she has you paint on a new layer to help even out skin tones. This is where I digress from her tutorial. Instead of using paint, I strongly blur a layer of the image to create what I call a "paint layer". As I was thinking about the paint layer, I thought, what is the sense in constantly changing the paint color when one could use the actual image in a blurred layer and have the colors right at hand. I then mask the top layer to reveal all, and using a 25% opacity, 75% flow brush, begin smoothing out the color. When satisfied, I merge those two layers, keeping it separate from a layer that took care of the blemishes. By setting the opacity of the newly merged layer, I can bring back some texture to the skin.

That probably sounds like a bunch of gobbledygook.

[tuscanpearl]

Here's a before and after using Neat Image. Also selected eyes and enhanced the blue as well as enhanced color in lips. Work done in PS CS.

Sorry the upload is so large...It's my first forum post

[HuBBaTheMan]

Well, im completely new to these forums so this will be my first post =) And i absolutely love before/afters

So here is one i did with a model who wanted a very soft portrait. To bad i couldnt get her to smile in the original photos.




My fav way of smoothing is to make a surface blur (cs2 and above) layer, and with a layermask paint in only the smoothings. On top of this i then put a layer with high-pass (or several depending on how much of the skin texture i want to retain) which is then put into Soft light blend mode. The opacity is then adjusted on both layers to fine tune.

Comments are very welcome btw. And as you may see, the skin smooth is not the only thing done here

[trentchau]

I guess I'll use my current one

Original



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[Carol Chan]

I'm surprised no one has brought up Imagenomic's Portraiture plug-in for photoshop, which does a marvelous job all its own without your intervention. You just select the type of smoothing you want--and the amount--and press a button. This is one of the top five photoshop plugins I've ever used.

Here's a smaple before and after.

[dc2]

And I cannot believe tis thread is still going strong . Guess it shows theres a hundreds of ways of doing this and thats not a bad thing as we all have our faves .
Again thanks to all that have added to this.

[justinc]

just a quick simple try.

[cspringer]

This is a Skin Repair action vs. trying to delete character, pores, etc.
Download CSpringer's Skin Repair Action at ActionCentral.
Start the action, grab a white brush and paint problem areas. Make sure opacity for brush and layers is 100%. It will be blurry but the next step will fix it. Continue action and adjust texture with the Gaussian blur layer. There are other layers for Healing and adding texture.

[Lee4145]

Thank you Chip!

[MattGilley@tamu.edu]

Very nice smoothing techniques, here is an example of mine below.