Post processing help

What needs to be done with this picture to make it better? I am some what new to a headshot like this. No idea what to do with the skin?

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/jwtphoto/660460​9047/

maybe a touch of rim light from above and camera left to illuminate the hand, hair and shoulder and keep them from blending with the background. Can do it with a strobe or a reflector from the key light.

otherwise, exposure, focus, etc. looks good to me.

kirk

What do you want to do with it -- it looks great to me, but I'm not a "skin re-toucher"!

tonylong wrote in post #13623652
What do you want to do with it -- it looks great to me, but I'm not a "skin re-toucher"!

I was thinking something with the skin.

What software do you have? There are a lot of skin-retouching apps out there, many designed to be used in Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop Elements...

But there are plenty of folks here who are great with this stuff and they can chime in!

tonylong wrote in post #13627643
What software do you have? There are a lot of skin-retouching apps out there, many designed to be used in Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop Elements...

But there are plenty of folks here who are great with this stuff and they can chime in!

Lightroom 3 and photoshop cs5

If I were doing basic skin-retouching on this, I'd use Lightroom's Adjustment Brush. First I'd lighten up her face and neck a little with the brush set to Brightness=25, then I'd use negative clarity to smooth the skin a little. The trick is to use it just enough to smooth it without losing too much detail. As you've got Image Editing OK, here's a quick edit I did with the brush settings of Clarity: -100, Size=5, Feather=50, Flow=100, Density=50

If you wanted it even more smooth, you can press New for a new brush and go over it again.

garryknight wrote in post #13629361
If I were doing basic skin-retouching on this, I'd use Lightroom's Adjustment Brush. First I'd lighten up her face and neck a little with the brush set to Brightness=25, then I'd use negative clarity to smooth the skin a little. The trick is to use it just enough to smooth it without losing too much detail. As you've got Image Editing OK, here's a quick edit I did with the brush settings of Clarity: -100, Size=5, Feather=50, Flow=100, Density=50

If you wanted it even more smooth, you can press New for a new brush and go over it again.

Thanks, that is what I was looking for. I just found the adjustment brush yesterday. I don't do these types of shots often.

If you wanted to do the job in Photoshop, the best way I know of that seems to give the most control over the process is as follows:

1. duplicate the layer
2. apply a High Pass filter with a radius of about 10
3. invert the layer with Ctrl+I (Cmd+i on the Mac)
4. set the blend mode to Overlay
5. add a layer mask set to Conceal All
6. with a soft white brush, brush over the bits you want to smooth

The various ways you can control the effect are a) the High Pass filter radius; b) the opacity of the brush used on the layer mask; c) the opacity of the filtered layer.

Edit: I just remembered - If you look in Lightroom's Adjustment Brush drop-down menu (to the right of where it says 'Effect', you'll see a Soften Skin preset with Clarity=0 and Sharpness=25.

Nice edit Garry!

Here is another way that is pretty quick (used CS3):

Make a rough selection around the girls face, hair, and arm/arms.
Copy your selection to a new layer.
Go to "filter>blur>surface blur" and use some mild settings. I used 19 radious and 20 threshold on this. You can go heavy if you want because you can use layer opacity, mask, and a soft brush on the mask to hide the effect. Here I used layer opacity of 54% and brushed away the effect on her eybrows, lips, and lightly on her neck.
Notice how it softens the hair a little as well taking away that sometimes overly sharp/stringy hair look.

I probably should of did some work around the left eye (her right) where there is a light and dark splotchy area but didn't of coarse!

-Douglas- wrote in post #13630366
Nice edit Garry!

Same back to you, Douglas! I like the way you preserved the character in her face rather than making her look like a plastic model.

My version...

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Nice one ED, now what did you do? Other than the softening, it looks like you might of reduced some yellow?

Other than some softening i removed some of the red in the face by desaturating it and using the slider for red in selective color (i didn't do anything with yellow). I brightened her pupils just a tad and added a bit of saturation and sharpened them a bit, i cloned the area between her right eye and her nose to smooth it, it seemed a bit harsh. That's about it, I used Imageonic for the smoothing and photoshop for the rest...

Thanks for the info Edsport!