Chemical Peel – Smoothing Skin without Losing Texture
Posted: May 20th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: beauty, pores, retouching, skin, skin smoothing, skintones, tone | 11 Comments »One of the most common retouching steps is skin smoothing, yet it’s a technique that people (myself included) often struggle with: straddling the line between “not enough” and “plasticky.”
How do you take a few years off without looking fake? Struggling to achieve “age appropriate” flawlessness? The goal is to make the subject look his/her best — but still recognizable (and in the case of noncommercial retouching, we may not want the subject to know h/she’s been retouched at all … you’re just THAT good behind the camera).
Here’s my technique — I call it the Chemical Peel, but it works equally well on men/women, young/old. We’re going to smooth the skin, even the skintone, and then add in a layer of texture. As usual, I’ve created an action so you can fly through it, but here’s the walk-through:
ORIGINAL:
1) Make sure you are working on your background layer or a flattened version of your current image. Name this layer “Skin Foundation.”
2) Duplicate your layer and name it “Skin Smoothing.”
3) Go to Filter>Blur>Surface Blur, and adjust your settings until you’ve totally smoothed out the skin.
4) Hold down ALT+Click the layer mask icon to add an inverted layer mask.
5) Working on the mask, paint over your skin only with a soft white brush.
SURFACE BLUR (Radius: 30px, Threshold:30) at 100%:
6) Drop your opacity down until the smoothness looks a little more reasonable. I find that, for a 12MP image, dropping the opacity down to 50% is a good jumping off point.
7) Create a new (empty) layer and name it “Even Color.”
Select the eyedropper tool, and choose a representative skin color from the subject’s face.
9) Press ALT+Backspace (Option+Delete) to fill the “Even Color” layer with your selected color (100% opacity).
10) Change the blend mode of the layer to “Color.”
11) Right click on the layer, and select “Create Clipping Mask.”
12) Drop the opacity of the “Even Color” down until the color looks natural; the goal here is just to even the skintone. Try setting the opacity to 25% or so.
EVEN COLOR (Layer Opacity: 25%)
13) Go to Layer>New>Layer>Name:Restore Pores; Mode:Hard Light; (check) Fill with Hard Light neutral color
14) Go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise>Percent:15%; Uniform Distribution; Monochromatic
15) Go to Filter>Gaussian Blur>Radius: 1px
16) Go to Filter>Stylize>Emboss>Angle:125-135; Height:1-2; Amount:100
17) Press CTRL+J, CTRL+J to duplicate this layer twice.
18) Merge the three “Restore Pores layers” (select all of them, then right click and choose “Merge Layers”)
19) Right click on the merged layer, and select “Create Clipping Mask.”
20) Reduce your layer opacity until the texture looks natural. I find that 50-75% works well on a high-res (12MP) file if I’ve chosen an emboss radius of 1-2. If I’m working with a lower res file — or with a picture of a child or baby whose pores are almost invisible, I’d drop that amount down a lot more.
21) Adjust your layer mask if necessary (you may see spots you missed or overlapped inadvertently), and tweak the opacity of layers as follows:
- RESTORE PORES: increase opacity for additional texture; reduce for pics of children or very low-res images
- EVEN COLOR: reduce opacity if the skin tone looks “flat”
- SKIN SMOOTHING: increase/reduce overall effect
FINAL (Restore Pores: 75% opacity ; Even Color: 25% opacity ; Skin Smoothing: 50% opacity)
A comparison of original, “standard” (blur-based) smoothing, and the Chemical Peel (with pores “restored”):
And, finally, the before and after:
Now that you understand how it all works, make it easy on yourself:
pixelation Chemical Peel action
Something awry? Have a better way? Let me know in the comments!
