retouching technique comparison
In portrait and glamour photography, skin retouching is as important as anything we do. I have shot exactly ONE model with perfect skin and she was 6 years old! I’m not a big fan of the super-smooth look. While it’s certainly trendy, to my eye it can often look over-processed and a little plastic-y. So except for highly-stylized images (like vintage pinups), I try to retouch wrinkles, blemishes and other imperfections while preserving realistic skin textures. That’s hard, and so I’m always looking for new ways to improve my technique. I’ve been using a process I adapted from the Lee Varis book “Skin” for a while. I recently stumbled across a new technique shared by pro photographer Joel Grimes and wanted to give it a try.
I decided to compare techniques on a somewhat challenging retouching job. This is a detail from an image where I used directional lighting to emphasize the model's sensual pose and lingerie. Unfortunately, this kind of lighting accentuates any imperfections in the model’s skin and needed careful retouching.
Both techniques start out the same way, smoothing out major imperfections with a clone stamp. I always begin with a small brush at high opacity and gradually increase the brush size while decreasing opacity. [2011 update: i now use a combination of the clone and patch tools. and, with CS5, the spot healing brush seems to be turning out acceptable results on small blemishes, stray hairs, etc] In the middle image, I then used a fairly generous surface blur on a masked duplicate layer and adjusted opacity til I got a nice balance of smoothing and texture. In the third image, I tried the Grimes’ technique. Instead of the surface blur I used a median filter layer for smoothing, a high pass layer for texture, and a masking layer to isolate the adjustments. Again, tweaking opacity of the various layers til I got a combination i liked. [2011 update: I now typically start with 60% opacity for the high pass layer and 30% on the median layer and adjust from there]
Both techniques yielded good results. Here, I slightly prefer the surface blur treatment which I think is a little more subtle and fits the image better (feel free to disagree). The Grimes method produces some interesting specular highlights – sort of a subtle glittery effect. This was my first experiment with the Grimes technique and I plan to use it more. I think I'm gonna love the look with higher key glamour lighting, especially on lighter skin tones, and look forward to giving it another test drive.
Here you can see this detail larger
And here’s the full, finished image (filtered moderate because flickr has me a little neurotic about such things).
retouching technique comparison
In portrait and glamour photography, skin retouching is as important as anything we do. I have shot exactly ONE model with perfect skin and she was 6 years old! I’m not a big fan of the super-smooth look. While it’s certainly trendy, to my eye it can often look over-processed and a little plastic-y. So except for highly-stylized images (like vintage pinups), I try to retouch wrinkles, blemishes and other imperfections while preserving realistic skin textures. That’s hard, and so I’m always looking for new ways to improve my technique. I’ve been using a process I adapted from the Lee Varis book “Skin” for a while. I recently stumbled across a new technique shared by pro photographer Joel Grimes and wanted to give it a try.
I decided to compare techniques on a somewhat challenging retouching job. This is a detail from an image where I used directional lighting to emphasize the model's sensual pose and lingerie. Unfortunately, this kind of lighting accentuates any imperfections in the model’s skin and needed careful retouching.
Both techniques start out the same way, smoothing out major imperfections with a clone stamp. I always begin with a small brush at high opacity and gradually increase the brush size while decreasing opacity. [2011 update: i now use a combination of the clone and patch tools. and, with CS5, the spot healing brush seems to be turning out acceptable results on small blemishes, stray hairs, etc] In the middle image, I then used a fairly generous surface blur on a masked duplicate layer and adjusted opacity til I got a nice balance of smoothing and texture. In the third image, I tried the Grimes’ technique. Instead of the surface blur I used a median filter layer for smoothing, a high pass layer for texture, and a masking layer to isolate the adjustments. Again, tweaking opacity of the various layers til I got a combination i liked. [2011 update: I now typically start with 60% opacity for the high pass layer and 30% on the median layer and adjust from there]
Both techniques yielded good results. Here, I slightly prefer the surface blur treatment which I think is a little more subtle and fits the image better (feel free to disagree). The Grimes method produces some interesting specular highlights – sort of a subtle glittery effect. This was my first experiment with the Grimes technique and I plan to use it more. I think I'm gonna love the look with higher key glamour lighting, especially on lighter skin tones, and look forward to giving it another test drive.
Here you can see this detail larger
And here’s the full, finished image (filtered moderate because flickr has me a little neurotic about such things).