How to remove facial blemishes without destroying details?

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Posted By
Roberto
Oct 1, 2009
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1630
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2
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Most facial blemishes that I want to retouch out are pimples, acnes, and rough skin.

For pimples and acnes (red spots), I clone from a neighboring healthy area with "lighten" mode. Rough skin is a little more tedious: it contains many darker and brighter spots. I also clone them out (sometimes using "darken" mode as well).

However in close up facial shot, even normal healthy adult face has fine hair and folicles. If I clone out the blemishes, the fine details are also destroyed, making that area looks different from the un-retouched area.

What is the solution? I see that in fashion magazines, many women’s faces are retouched to the point where no fine hair or folicles are visible. It looks unreal but perhaps that is acceptable. For me, I want the photo to look natural after I retouched it.

Is there a better technique, or special plug-in to help?
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K
Kabuki
Oct 1, 2009
"james" wrote in message
Most facial blemishes that I want to retouch out are pimples, acnes, and rough skin.

For pimples and acnes (red spots), I clone from a neighboring healthy area with "lighten" mode. Rough skin is a little more tedious: it contains many darker and brighter spots. I also clone them out (sometimes using "darken" mode as well).

However in close up facial shot, even normal healthy adult face has fine hair and folicles. If I clone out the blemishes, the fine details are also destroyed, making that area looks different from the un-retouched area.
What is the solution? I see that in fashion magazines, many women’s faces are retouched to the point where no fine hair or folicles are visible. It looks unreal but perhaps that is acceptable. For me, I want the photo to look natural after I retouched it.

Is there a better technique, or special plug-in to help?

what version of PS?
have you tried the HEALING TOOL?
it preserves the textures, there are two choices

I never used lighten or darken for cloning repairs
I use a soft edged brush and low opacity
for really pimply or wrinkly faces sometimes you can use an over all method like Gaussian or surface blur the skin, mask the eyes, lips nose edges, all you don’t want softened, adjust the opacity of that layer but I agree the result of that technique is somewhat fake-y like a soft focus filter

there is a free action you can download -also a bit heavy handed look (Tony’s soft 2 blur)
I find the plug-ins look over done too

no sub for just removing blemish by blemish, the old fashioned way

the fashion ads take a lot of license, all the texture is gone, glow added, the colors of the entire skin and hair change drastically, I agree not acceptable for a realistic portrait
AB
Alan Browne
Oct 1, 2009
james wrote:
Most facial blemishes that I want to retouch out are pimples, acnes, and rough skin.

For pimples and acnes (red spots), I clone from a neighboring healthy area with "lighten" mode. Rough skin is a little more tedious: it contains many darker and brighter spots. I also clone them out (sometimes using "darken" mode as well).

However in close up facial shot, even normal healthy adult face has fine hair and folicles. If I clone out the blemishes, the fine details are also destroyed, making that area looks different from the un-retouched area.

What is the solution? I see that in fashion magazines, many women’s faces are retouched to the point where no fine hair or folicles are visible. It looks unreal but perhaps that is acceptable. For me, I want the photo to look natural after I retouched it.

Is there a better technique, or special plug-in to help?

I use the "healing brush" in PS (Elements or CS3). It mixes local colour/texture with sample colour/texture in effect blending the two. So it is similar to the clone in operation without making a dead exact copy.

Depending on what it is, I sometime clone a healthy patch over and then use the healing brush to mix and match.

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