Retouching skin to retain texture
In the world of beauty retouching, there are many methods retouchers use to get flawless skin. The aim of great retouching is to make the subject of the image look like he or she hasn’t been retouched at all. Most importantly, this refers to keeping the skin texture intact. Because images can vary vastly it’s helpful to have a number of techniques under your belt so you can pick and choose whichever one will suit the image best. Below is just one method of many methods you can use, and see if it works for you.
1. Open your image and create a new layer. Set this blank layer to a blending mode of screen.
2. Zoom into closely the image so you can clearly view the pores in detail. In the new Screen layer you just created, grab your brush tool and reduce it’s size to match the size of the pores. Make sure it is a soft edge brush and the airbrush is not selected. Reduce the opacity to about 20%. Now start painting in the dark areas of the pores using colours that are sampled from the surrounding pixels (alt + click to get your colour picker on the fly). Sample the surrounding areas often so you don’t get any weird colour-shift in your Screen layer. Here’s what your skin should look like now.
3. The darker areas of your skin should look lighter and therefore the pores will look reduced. If you notice the screen layer is too harsh reduce the opacity of the layer. In this example I reduced the Screen layer to 50%.
4. You will see now that there are some harsh highlights on the skin – you should remove anything that calls the eye too much, so lets reduce those highlights. Create new blank layer and set it the blending mode to darken. With a pore-sized, soft, round brush at 30% opacity, start painting over the highlights. Once you’re done, reduce the opacity of the layer if the darkening is too strong. You don’t want to flatten out the skin, it’s supposed to have texture – we just want to reduce the contrast of the pores so they appear more subtle. Here’s the final result.
Roll over the blow image to get a better preview of the before and after results.
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Great post Karen!