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So here's how it works in brief: You make a duplicate layer, blur it (in various ways and levels of difficulty depending on who's teaching you), add a layer mask so you can paint out the blur in areas where you wouldn't put foundation, and then reduce the opacity of your "foundation" layer to achieve a balance between coverage and realism.
I used to follow a recipe that Scott Kelby calls "advanced skin softening." It goes something like this (and I'm going through it quickly and without all the material Kelby uses in his 12-step version, because I'm going to throw it all out in a minute anyway):
1. duplicate your background layer twice.
2. on one of the duplicate layers, add a heavy gaussian blur (I did 26 pixels here because it is not a big image, but 40 or higher can be pretty common):
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3. Set the layer blend mode of your blurred layer to "darken":
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Your darkened and lightened blend modes will look creepy and unflattering like this...
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5. In the layers palette, click the eye to hide your background layer. Then, create a new empty layer on top of your two light/dark blurred layers. With your new blank layer selected, hold the option (alt) key while selecting "merge visible" from the layer palette's pull-down menu, and you will end up with a blend of your light/dark layers (which you no longer need and can now discard). All this gets you a skin colored "foundation" layer covering your photo. At this point, you will make the background layer visible.
6. So, your top layer is like heavy makeup—so heavy, in fact, that you may have to lower the opacity of the top layer to even see what you are going to be doing next, namely, masking out the effect anywhere that doesn't need foundation. The lips, for example:
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When masking, use the backslash key to show/hide a red overlay of what you are masking out:
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Lips are fairly straightforward, and even hair is not too bad, but the eyes need more attention.
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When everything is masked that needs to be masked, you can view your makeup layer at 100% opacity and see how horrible it looks:
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Then, you can lower the opacity. 68% still looks way too fake:
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At 36% opacity, she looks human again:
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And now for the part where I throw out steps 1 through 5. In my opinion, all of that complicated darken/lighten/merge/blur stuff is overkill when you consider that you just end up with a blurry blob. But it's a quality blurry blob, some would argue. Maybe, but as an experiment, I decided to compare the results from the above process with this more simple process:
1. Duplicate layer and add a "surface blur" filter to it. The numbers don't matter, just the look. I put the sliders at 77 and 77 to get the following blur:
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2. There's no escaping the need to mask. Do the things I explain in step 6 and beyond to end up with a final result.
Here's the end result with the long way:
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And here's the end result with the short way (surface blur version):
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If you want to try a longer version, my advice would be to buy Kelby's book (currently there's a CS4 one that is probably excellent like all of his work—the version I have dates back to Photoshop 7)—and turn the long method into an action to speed up the process.
1 comments:
Ew, I hate those photos where people have done WAY too much skin softening. The people just look so fake. I think yours looks very natural.
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