Skin retouching without the 'mush'

Many Photoshop skin retouch procedures leave the skin devoid of pores and fine detail. Others overlay a fake texture which is passable at small print sizes but falls to pieces when viewed close-up. Either of these looks are fine for a glossy cosmetics ad but they're a no-no for lifestyle photography. This entry will explain a process that evens up skin tone perfectly whilst 'keeping it real'. It will only deal with skin - Facial reshaping, tooth/eye whitening, etc. may be covered on another entry. I'm assuming you're familiar with Photoshop fundamentals such as masks and blending modes.

Here's the straight raw conversion that will be retouched for this example...

The Process...

1. Dup the Background layer and then create a transparent layer over the Dup. Use the Healing Brush and/or Patch Tool to quickly remove any major blemishes - Pimples, scars, etc.As a rule of thumb just deal with the ones painfully obvious on a 25% view.
2. If there are any patchy skin colour issues such as redishness from a rash-like condition create a transparent layer, set it to Color blending mode, and with a soft edged Brush or Clone Tool set to Color mode paint over the off-colour area sampling from the true skin colour.
3. When major blemishes and/or colour patches are removed, merge with the Background dup.
4. Now comes the magic! Dup your retouched layer twice. Rename the first one 'Smooth' and the second 'Detail'. Click off 'Detail's visibility and select 'Smooth'.
5. Using the Select > Color Range function make an accurate selection of the skin tones. Use the +/- eyedroppers and the fuzziness slider to make sure that the areas adjacent to the skin tone (hair, clothes, etc.) are not part of the selection. When done save the selection as a new channel. Call it 'Skin'. Now you can Deselect (Ctrl-D). Still on the 'Smooth' layer open the dialogue for Lens Blur.
6. At the top of the dialogue ensure your preview is on. Load the 'Skin' channel as your Depth Map Source. Blur Focal Distance should be 0. Select Octagon as your Iris shape. Blade Curvature 100, Rotation 0, Brightness 0, Threshold 0, Noise Amount 1. The judgement call part is the Radius. You need to set the Radius to a level that blurs out all of the undesirable skin detail - Unevenness, blotchiness, etc. - Without going too far an ruining the contours of the face. The amount will depend on the skin of your subject, the resolution of the image file, and the amount of the frame filled by the subject. For the example image above (2912x4368 pixels) it was set to 32.
7. Now it's on to the top layer, Detail. Make it visible, select it, set the blending mode to Linear Light. Now preview a high Pass filter at 100% and adjust the radius. You will find a setting that reveals pores, fine lines, etc., but still hides blotchiness and other larger flaws. On this example image a radius of 2-3 would be about right. When you've found the radius you're happy with run the filter.
8. At this stage you may want to try adjusting opacity's of the 'Smooth' and 'Detail' layers on a 100% view to taste. When you're happy merge these two layer with the Dup background layer.
9. Now make a black (hide all) mask on this layer. Use a stylus to paint the skin areas back to visible. No need to be too slavish about this as the mask you made from the selection should have dealt with much of the undesirable overlap already.
10. When you're happy with your masks reveal of beautifully perfect skin, Flatten: It's a job well done!

The result...

Taking it Further...
For commercial work I'm after a tip-top retouch. I create 3 or 4 'Detail' layers running a large, medium and small radius High Pass filter on them and setting each one to a different opacity. The before & after 50% views below used a 35 radius High Pass at 8% opacity, a 14 radius at 18% and a 2 radius High Pass at 75%. Using multiple layers of High Pass you can produce a very realistic 'perfect' skin...

Before...

After...

Fixing Fringing: Chromatic aberration & blooming

What it is & why it happens...

Chromatic aberration is an optical effect found in almost all wide angle and cheap telephoto lenses, both primes and zooms. It's caused when the different wavelengths of white light originating from the same point hit the sensor (or film plane) at two different points. It always appears as two different colours as a result.

Blooming cannot occur with film capture. It is caused by the micro lenses on a digital camera sensor and is compounded by individual photodiodes being overloaded with charge (blowing out to 255,255,255 white) next to low charge areas (dark tones). It's always a single colour, usually purple, sometimes blue'ish or red'ish. With digital captures it's not uncommon to have both chromatic aberration and blooming/fringing on the same image.
From here on in I'll refer to the lens issue as 'CA' and the digital sensor issue as 'blooming'.

Fixing CA

Above is an interiors image opened in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). The red circle shows the area below under the 'Lens' tab. If you don't use ACR then in Photoshop go to: Filter > Distort > Lens Correction. This is a 200% view...

This is 'classic' CA. My 24mm lens always displays this red-green CA towards the horizontal edges and corners of the frame. With ACR I just select all of the raw files that were taken with the 24mm in Adobe Bridge and paste an ACR setting of -24 on the 'Fix Red/Cyan Fringe' slider to them all. Again opened in ACR this is the result...

You can save settings and then apply them for your problem lenses/focal lengths, or use the copy & paste method (after correcting one image), or use the synchronize button within ACR. Whichever method you choose you can correct hundreds of images for CA in one fell swoop by selecting all of the raw thumbs in Bridge/ACR and then making a couple of mouse clicks. Neat eh!

Sometimes the problem is a little trickier to solve. My 17mm lens is a case in point. This is because it exhibits CA on more than two wavelengths of light and the CA effect shifts a little at different focusing points (between close focus and mid-infinity focus). Here's an image taken with the 17mm opened in ACR...

At 200% green-magenta CA is clearly visible...

This is corrected with a -17 on the 'Fix Red/Cyan Fringe' slider, and a +18 on the 'Fix Blue/Yellow Fringe' slider...

Fixing Blooming
Below is another 200% section of the above image with the Chromatic Aberration sliders still at -17/+18...

If we try to use the sliders to correct this problem we'll cause other problems elsewhere. The sliders are for CA only - they always manipulate two colours. This problem is blooming and it needs a different technique to fix it. Here it is at 200% in PS...

There's no raw conversions fix for this issue but it is easy to deal with in PS. Unfortunately it's a manual job. There are non-manual PS fixes but they corrupt the whole image unless you resort to manual control to limit their effect.

We're going to use the clone and/or brush tool to paint away the blooming. Create a transparent layer above the image layer (click the circled icon) and set this new layer to 'Color' mode...

Now set your clone tool or brush tool to color mode. This is the clone tool set up for working on the image...

Ensure that the 'Sample All Layers' box is ticked if you're using the clone tool. Sometimes it's best to use 'Aligned' cloning and sometimes it's not. It just depends on the amount of space you have to sample from in relation to the blooming.

If you're using the Brush tool (again a decision based on sampling area) ensure that you've sampled the foreground colour with the eyedropper tool from an area unaffected by blooming.

Now just paint/dab away. With either the clone tool or a brush you're simply overlaying the colour component of the sampled area/colour. The underlying luminosity (light, shadow & texture) is not affected. This is the job in progress with the clone tool (diameter 9px, hardness 70%)...

For the longer diagonal strip (not blooming, I just didn't like the colour!) I used the brush as the sampling area for cloning was very narrow. The whole thing took less than 30 seconds...

PS - In the 'Fixing CA' section the slider adjustments match the lens focal lengths. This is pure coincidence. Those sliders have nothing to do with focal lengths.

Dramatic retouch

Films Sin City and 300, and the work of stills photographers such as Andrzej Dragan and Jim Fiscus have recently helped popularize a dramatic, dark, muted colour palette style of produced photography. Obviously lighting and post production are the keys to these looks. I'm not going to speculate about how other photographers produce their images other than to state that contrary to many peoples suggestions I do not think LucisArt filters are used at all. Each photographer develops their own unique techniques and then applies them differently to each image to best suit subject and brief.
My processes are no different in this respect. They're not used too often but on occasion they're the right way to go. I'll take you through one image's production step-by-step...

Lighting
A lighting arrangement that results in strong highlight and shadow lays down the right foundation for the post production process. Lighting that clearly delineates the subject from the environment is also a target. There are techniques similar to those outlined below that work with flat lighting. This results in a different, watercolour-like look.
In the case of my image below the background was lit with two tall white V boards placed at each end of the screen.
The model was heavily rim lit with two reflector dishes at 2 stops over placed at 45 degrees behind, left & right, and at 35 degrees above eye level.
Just to the right of the camera position and a little behind it was one light fitted with a 80cm circular dish diffused with tracing paper. This was elevated 25 degrees above eye line and was 1/3 under. It's at a distance that makes it a fair bit smaller than usual light source for female portraiture...

Raw Conversion
Using ACR the image was correctly WB'd from a grey card reading. Then it was adjusted from defaults. I'm not quoting exact settings because they're different for every shoot. Aim for an accurately coloured, low contrast file that holds all important tones...

Photoshop core process
Once the subject was extracted from the Chromakey background the edges were tidied up using a mask. The layer was duplicated. A Channel Mix layer was placed above this. The red channel was reduced (usually by 50-100) and the blue increased by the same amount. In this case each was shifted by 90. Sometimes the red channel reduction is replaced by some increase in green as well as blue. This results in a subtler look and slightly a cleaner skin tone. The channel mix was set to monochrome and then the layer set to Luminosity. Often this is then set to less than 100% opacity. In this case it was left at 100%. The Channel Mixer layer was then merged with the duplicated subject layer.
Keeping an eye on the histogram an S-curve with both input points close to centre (127) was then applied. Only a slight shift from input to output at each point is required, just 2-3 is usually enough. For example a typical adjustment would be an input 123, output 121 for the bottom curve and input 133, output 135 for the top. Both ends of the curve were held tight with two additional points to minimise shadow & highlight clipping (eg. 25,25 & 230,230).
Next was a full skin retouch. Use which ever technique(s) you prefer. I'll detail my usual method on another post. For female subjects especially, a full paint over is essential as the blue channel boost used to set Luminosity reveals a lot of latent noise.
After the retouch I decided drop in a new background made with the Vignette setting in the Lens Correction filter. I also cropped the image a little to tighten up framing. Here's how things looked at this stage...

Photoshop finishing touches
It was important to unify tones in this image so several transparent layers were made over the image layer. Each one was set to colour mode, and each then 'painted' with a brush in colour mode to change the colour of the jewellery, makeup, areas of skin and hair. Of course you could do this on one layer but if you put each colour on its own layer then adjusting it is simpler. I usually use the Hue/Saturation menu for any tweaks. Once all the colour changes were finalised the colour layers were then merged to the subject layer.
Next was a touch of detail recovery. Notice on the image above how the hair and knicker line/trousers are blocked-up. The original raw conversion (the base layer) was duplicated and placed as a layer over the image and set to Luminosity mode. Using a mask painting these dark areas have their detail restored from this layer.
The visible layers were merged. The subject layer was then duplicted, desaturated, and then this B&W layer was duplicated. One of these B&W layers was set to Multiply mode, the other to Screen. Each was 'Hide All' masked and then a soft and careful paint was used to subjectively enhance highlight (Screen layer) and shadow (Multiply layer) areas. A light hand with a pressure sensitive stylus makes this job much simpler than a low opacity paint with a mouse. Once this was done and the masks were applied, the B&W layers merged, this merged layer set to Luminosity mode, and its opacity set to 33%. The opacity is another image-by-image variable, typically I use 20-40%. This was then merged with the subject layer. It's pretty much job done at this point. All I usually do at this stage is a final small retouch for skin and fine detail (on a transparent layer) as was the case with this image. I also shifted the overall Hue towards red by 9 and reduced the overall Saturation by 25 on this one.

Here's the finished image...