Efficient Skin Smoothing

Hi There,

I seem to be taking more people pictures lately, as opposed to my usual nature and landscapes. I've been doing a little research about smoothing skin and was wondering what you all feel is the best combination of efficiency and quality.

I saw a very interesting video of a tutorial where the guy claimed he was stealing the technique from Kelby--it involved running a Gaussian dialogue, finding a radius, and then actually cancelling out but remembering the number. High Pass, invert, Surface Blur, etc.--I'm sure you guys are familiar with the technique. Anyone use this technique and have any opinions on it? It seemed much more manageable than another one I saw where blur is applied, then masked, then noise is created, then blurred again and masked again. The first approach seemed much more streamlined.

Also, with Surface Blur, what exactly is the threshold doing? The reason I ask is that I was playing around with it the other day and had it down to 2; no matter how high I cranked up the radius there was no blur happening until I jacked up the threshold as well. Can someone explain these settings to me, and maybe give a starting point range to work off of for the two parameters (for a full native image in the 3000-4000 pixel range)?

Thanks,
Randy

Portraiture is not an area that I "work" in, so I don't have the expertise, but while you are waiting for experts to chime in, look at the bottom of the page at the "Similar Threads" section. Your title had keywords that triggered a forum "mini-search" that brought up some useful threads!

Randy,
There is a free photoshop action develope by chip springer called skinfix which I think uses roughly the same process you are talking about. You might want to try it and see. Its available for free download, just do a google search.

RandMan wrote in post #14984957
I saw a very interesting video of a tutorial where the guy claimed he was stealing the technique from Kelby--it involved running a Gaussian dialogue, finding a radius, and then actually cancelling out but remembering the number.

Sounds like this:
http://retouchpro.com/​tutorials/?m=show&id=2​13

More:
https://photography-on-the.net …p?p=14077144#po​st14077144
https://photography-on-the.net …?t=1191223&high​light=skin
https://photography-on-the.net …ghlight=skin#po​st14808464

Get portraiture... It's an amazing plug-in... highly customizable

Another recommendation for the Portraiture plugin if your going to be using blur based skin smoothing; it's about as efficient as it gets.

surface blur works quite well but you have to use it very mildly otherwise the model comes out looking like a fake barbie doll.

the threshold option determines how much detail is being left on the defined edges. the higher the number the more it blur's the defined edges.

atleast that is what i have come to understand.

René Damkot wrote in post #14986933
Sounds like this:
http://retouchpro.com/​tutorials/?m=show&id=2​13

More:
https://photography-on-the.net …p?p=14077144#po​st14077144
https://photography-on-the.net …?t=1191223&high​light=skin
https://photography-on-the.net …ghlight=skin#po​st14808464

Tried that, long winded and doesn't work on all photos. I know it says that this is the case, but its like too much fine tuning per photo

doidinho wrote in post #14987508
Another recommendation for the Portraiture plugin if your going to be using blur based skin smoothing; it's about as efficient as it gets.

Can easily do an efficient job without the need for expensive plugins

I've done a little skin smoothing, but not a lot. It's time consuming but effective.

However, unless I spent all day every day doing it (and would then be better and quicker at it), I would not bother with any specialist plug-ins.

i agree that skin smoothing does take some time to get used to and doesn't require special plug-ins to get a good feel.

this one of mine, the skin smoothing was done in about 15 minutes seperating the smoothing of the face from the body. following my technique posted earlier.

start off with adding the surface blur to how you want it.
add a black layer mask so that you can add what you want painting with white.
turn flow of paintbrush down to about 15% (adjust as you want)
paint over the skin area
touch up any area's that you may have blurred over
reduce opacity of the entire layer to bring back some of the natural features (adjust accordingly)

do the same for the face but keep the brush flow around 18%, then you can go back and touch up the eyes or any other features you don't want blurred.

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RichSoansPhotos wrote in post #14989169
Can easily do an efficient job without the need for expensive plugins

Not sure if this was a comment or a question; I will assume a question?

It depends on your definition of efficient I guess. The plugin does the masking and there are sliders that let you target different textures, so it's way quicker than doing any of the blur, band pass, degrunge methods. The plugin also has the advantage of letting you varry the radius, threshold, and amount before committing. It all comes down to what your time is worth.

I very rarely use any of the destructive skin smoothing methods myself, but rather use cloning and dodge and burn. It takes more time , but it's worth it for me. If I'm just doing a quick edit I may, every so often, run portraiture on a duplicate layer and then reduce the opacity to 40% or so.

Check out this short video:
http://www.christyschu​ler.com/retouching.htm​l