Skin Smoothing: the foundation method

In the last post, I used the patch tool to get rid of large blemishes. Let's take the same (stock) photo of a typical problem-skin teenager at the point where we left off:

The patch tool alone has made a big improvement, but there are still a lot of smaller blemishes that would take too long to eliminate that way, and the overall tone is too blotchy and uneven. "Skin smoothing" will help even it out. The most common method involves adding a blurred overlay made from the skin tone—the digital equivalent of foundation. Some people try to sell Photoshop actions with fancy names that do what I'm going to show you, but I'm calling it the "foundation" method because the result has the pros and cons of base/foundation/pancake makeup. Like a heavy layer of make-up, it hides flaws well, but it also risks making a person look unnatural. Way too many photographers who use this method lose all sense of restraint. Suddenly, they are children playing with their mom's makeup, and their clients, regardless of age or gender, end up looking like vaudeville performers. To avoid overuse, keep in mind that you are not really fixing their skin, you are just covering it up with a layer of makeup.

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):


3. Set the layer blend mode of your blurred layer to "darken":

4. Now repeat the blur procedure on your other duplicate layer (above the one you just did). Blur it to smithereens once again (I did 26 pixels again), but this time set the blend mode to "lighten."
Your darkened and lightened blend modes will look creepy and unflattering like this...

and this...
but in the next step, you will merge the two layers and end up with a plain old blur.

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:

masking out the effect is the magical part, but it's also a real pain. If you don't know how to mask, look at the thorough explanation in steps 5 and 6 of my clone out distracting backgrounds tutorial.

When masking, use the backslash key to show/hide a red overlay of what you are masking out:
I toggle between the normal view and this view constantly when masking so I can see if I'm missing a spot.

Lips are fairly straightforward, and even hair is not too bad, but the eyes need more attention.

The lines are clear on the inside of the eye, but the eyelashes and lids (not to mention the eyebrows) can't looked like they're caked in foundation. So you need to mask out each eyelash, one at a time—just kidding. Who's going to do that? The best way to deal with the problem is by changing the opacity of your brush (and use a very soft brush) and gradually take away the effect—more agressively around eyeliner and the parts of the lashes closest to the eye, more lightly where the eyelashes open out to the lids.
Bring texture back to the lids and the bottom of the eyes with low-opacity brush strokes.

When everything is masked that needs to be masked, you can view your makeup layer at 100% opacity and see how horrible it looks:


Then, you can lower the opacity. 68% still looks way too fake:

I have seen far too many skin retouch jobs that look like the image above. My advice is lower the opacity until you think it looks good, and then lower it a little more. Most people don't have flawless skin, and in the case of someone with problem skin, like this girl, you don't want to make her look like some frightening air-brushed glamor portrait. It's OK to let some imperfections show through.

At 36% opacity, she looks human again:


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:
It looks about the same as the "foundation" layer I got from the lengthy steps 1-5 above. And you could probably get the same look by using gaussian blur filter. I just used "surface blur" above for fun because I hardly ever use it. In fact, I'm pretty sure Kelby does a short version like this with a gaussian blur.

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:


And here's the end result with the short way (surface blur version):

They are not exactly the same, but they are both acceptable.

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.

Skin Retouch Step 1: The Patch Tool, your new best friend

On the first day of retouch posts yours truly gives you...

the Patch Tool! My favorite weapon in the skin retouch arsenal. This post will give you my completely biased view about why Photoshop's patch tool should be your new best friend for retouching skin.

But first, some clarification on a few points:

1. A pro retoucher would most likely be horrified by every post I do this month. Why? Well, it's like when I was in grad school and the philosophy professors were horrified that the French lit professors included not just Descartes, but even Plato and Aristotle in their syllabi. First, objected the philosophy profs, those lit professors should stick to literature and second, how can you possibly cover Aristotle in a week? This comparison comes to mind because I was doing grad work in literature while my wife was working in the graduate program of the philosophy department. I heard those complaints all the time, so I decided to take a grad class in philosophy and see what all the fuss was about. For an entire semester, we plodded through Descartes' Meditations. The smartest student in the class liked to stroke his imaginary beard and gaze out the window while exposing the logical flaws of the cogito. By week three, we were still on the first meditation and I knew that this would be the last philosophy course of my life. My point? The real pro retouchers will dodge and burn, burn and dodge until their eyes are ready to bleed. It's really impressive, but it's not my world.
   
2. Random digressions are par for course with me. Sorry. Let's get back to business.
   
3. This post is just the first step, the elimination of blemishes. I mean, even if you want a very natural and unretouched look, I doubt you want to memorialize a zit.
4. Out of consideration for my clients, I'm using a stock photo of a girl with typical teenage skin problems. So here she is:
   

She looks pleasant. Nice smile, but I bet she'd like some help with the skin. Most people would run to the clone stamp tool, but my guess is that most of them haven't given the patch tool a fair shot. I use the clone stamp tool all the time for getting rid of distracting backgrounds, but even in my tutorial on that topic, I make use of the patch tool.

Common problems people have with cloning skin include obvious edges and differences in lighting between source and destination. With the patch tool, it's easy to avoid both of those problems because 1. you lasso your own shapes (rather than stamp a circle, for example) and 2. some algorithmic magic beyond my comprehension helps you clone out a blemish without destroying your lighting.

Let's look at a section of the girl's face:
As a first step in skin retouching, I just want to get rid of the large blemishes. My own philosophy is that temporary things, like zits, get retouched and more permanent "flaws" (like scars, which I think we should embrace) only get retouched if the person asks for it.

Using the patch tool on skin is very easy. Select it (j), draw a line around the area you want to fix—and make it sloppy. Sloppy is fine. Sloppy is good because an irregular line tends to blend well. Here's a super quick selection of a zit (lovely, isn't it?):

Once it's selected (and sorry, but you'll have to imagine this step—no screen grab), click inside your selection and drag to a place that doesn't have the blemish but that has a good texture for the area you want to repair. As you drag, you will see a sort of cloned view inside the your selection, but remember, your end result will not be a direct clone. Look for texture that lines up well. Don't worry about how dark or light it looks. When you let go, your patch selection does its magic:
I didn't mention settings because the default setting of the patch menu should already be "source," which is what you want.

From here on out, it's just a matter of rounding up all those blemishes. Sometimes I lasso a few at a time, sometimes I take an area in smaller parts. It's just trial and error. Make an error and you can just go back a couple steps in the history panel and try again. You can clean up a whole face in a relatively short time.

Here's the "before" section:
and after only a minute of quick and sloppy patchwork:

I haven't eliminated every little problem, just the most obvious. But what you see here is the result of no more than a minute of lasso a problem area/click/drag to good area/release/ repeat.

Try it, you'll never feel like using the clone stamp for skin cleanup again.

Finally, a word of warning: Since the patch tool blends with the surrounding pixels as it heals, you need to avoid getting too close to sudden changes. For example, if I were to make a selection of skin too near her lip, I might end up with a kind of muddy rose blur. Three possible solutions to that sort of problem:
1. pay closer attention to the relationship between the selection and the area you drag to. For example, the zit near the corner of the top lip can be selected and dragged to the side in a way that lines up the same lip/skin transition and your results will look good (just pay attention to how things line up as you drag).
2. if need be, you can use a selection tool (such as the lasso tool) to define an area large enough to include both the problem skin near the lip and the good skin while excluding the lip itself, then use the patch tool within your selection. The blended result won't use any pixels that aren't in your selection, hence, no muddy blur. This is something I might find myself doing around a brunette's hairline to avoid smudgy looking blends.
3. the formerly maligned clone stamp can come to the rescue.

December Monthly Special: Skin Retouch

Back from Paris with a souvenir from the plane ride home: a stomach flu that has made the rounds through our whole family. Nothing conveys the spirit of giving like a virus. Getting sick is kind of a holiday tradition for us. Other people open advent calendars to find sweet surprises, we start each day with a new symptom. On the first day of Christmas, my daughter gave to me, a fever of one hundred and three. On the...wait, where was I? Oh yes! The December Monthly Special!

I know that the month is half over, so I'm going to get very specific and work on an end-of-the-year goal: tackling the dreaded question of skin retouching. How to retouch skin is the number one question posted in forums devoted to photo retouching. OK. I just made that up, but still...it sounds true, doesn't it? I mean, what else would it be? How to add a fake tattoo? (Clients ask for this all the time, don't they? I don't know, Marc. That portrait of my baby is beautiful, but it seems like something is missing. Perhaps some angel wings, a full sleeve, and her name in Kanji just above the diaper? What do you think? No? Too much? A butterfly on the ankle then?)

When I first began my "starters" section, my intent was to build up steps that could then become a recipe. The first recipe was meant to be the portrait retouch workflow. Most of the elements are already there—color correction, whitening teeth, brightening eyes, and so on—but skin retouching is the dreaded beast that I have saved for last. I had a mega-post in mind: the ultimate skin retouch tutorial that goes over many possible methods and evaluates each one, but a more realistic goal might be to break it down into multiple posts.

Wait! Did I say "realistic" and "goal"? And in the same sentence? That won't do. I prefer challenges. I haven't done more than 10 posts in a month since May, and I just noticed that it's December 13, which just happens to be twelve days until Christmas, so I am going to do Take-Out Photo's version of an advent calendar: 12 posts in 12 days. Not every post will be about skin retouching, but many will. I won't bother with the shared linkies this month, but they will be back in January.

Who knows what surprises you will find? One thing I do promise: no viruses.

December monthly special is coming. I promise.

Sorry I've temporarily stopped posting. Tomorrow I leave Paris and go back to America. But I plan to devote what's left of December to retouch recipes. I'll explain it in the next post, but for now let's try an experiment. If someone out there has a photo they want retouched, email it to me and we can use it as an example. I may only choose one, possibly more depending on what we might all learn from the retouching workflow. Put "Take-Out Retouch" in your subject header and I'll see what's waiting for me when I get home.