facial blemishes

Hello,

Thanks to MCB and Baadil I think I've managed to save and post an image. If pigs start to fly and it actually worked here is my question. What can I do about the blemishes on this girl's skin? I have Photoshop Elements 2.

Thanks.

dioptic

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Does Elements 2 have a healing brush? I'm not familiar with that product. From Adobe's web site, it looks like that might be a new feature in Elements 3. If you have a healing brush, that will do the trick. If not... hmm... I can't help much with Elements. Sorry.

Good luck, though.

You may want to try a noise reduction filter such as Neat Image. That might improve the skin blemishes.

Thanks. The blemishes that are under her eye are not on the image I have nor on the girl. The zits on her forehead are the ones I am trying to remove/reduce.

dioptic

Not likely.

Here is a quick job I did....<3 mins (I'm at work), but you can at least get an idea.

Applied cooling photo filter.
Neat Image reduce noise.
used healing brush tool (not sure if you have that in elements)
Neat Image reduce noise
Unsharp Mask (245% , .02 radius)
Unsharp Mask (245% , .02 radius)

Is that what you were looking for?

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Elements 2 does not have the healing brush.

I have elements 2 and use a combination of the clone tool to hide the blemishes, then use a soft, feathered brush (click on the blur icon on the tool bar) to blend it away. You can easily adjust the size of the brush so you can work it into very tight spaces.

Just keep experimenting and you should get some really great results!

Actually Neat Image does a pretty good job of cleaning complexions in photographs. Do the analysis on the skin. Not as good as the manual process, but quite fast and easy.

It does nothing for the actual face! Except perhaps bring a smile to it?

Thanks for you input. Buginajar you did a good job.


Thanks.

dioptic

I'll take your word for it, I'm sure it depends on how much the blemish color differs from the skin color, the pixel resolution and other factors. Still seems like using a wrench when you need a hammer. There are tools better fit for the job.

If dioptic would upload a 100% crop of a smaller area with minimal compression, I'm sure some of the PS experts here could illustrate some techniques. The image originally posted is affected more by jpeg artifacts than blemishes.

I've found this to be the case. If you apply Neat Image to the near original you will get almost no change at all in the complexion. Apply it to the compressed jpg and it does do quite a job.

jimmyb_2 - yup, that's about what I got too. I thought it was pretty good for the minimal effort it required.

I've found that a combination of Neat Image and some photoshop is necessary. I steer clear of the healing brush because I'm not familiar with it. Upgrading from PS7 to CS, it was like teaching an old dog new tricks. I'm set in my ways with the clone stamp. I used a brush at sero hardness on this one at a flow of 35% and opacity of 35% on a duplicate layer. I change sources and sizes often to avoid patterns showing up and use the shadows and highlights of the face like a painter's palette to pick up the tones I need for a certain area. Overdo it a bit and then reduce the opacity of the edited layer to let the original through a bit. Then I ran it through Neat Image on the Digital Rebel ISO400 profile

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