http://reviews.davidleetong.com/?p=1569

Level – Advanced

We’ve looked at quickie skin retouching in the past in this article, now let’s take it a bit further and spend more time doing careful skin retouching without the plasticky, no-pores, Barbie skin look that’s plaguing so many portraits out there.
This isn’t an “original” technique but an accumulation of different techniques I’ve learned over the past couple of years from Photoshop masters to retouch skin with much more attention to detail and realism, while still producing a good looking print and a file that still looks good at larger magnifications on screen.

This workflow works for me in a sense that it balances the need for speed and quality at the same time. No large amount of global blurring, haphazard masking, over-sharpening and so forth. Just plain logic-based processing.

It’ll be a looong post (over 30 images), so let’s get started with a photo of a local model I’ve worked with recently, Jen. This is the original captured image.



The image below shows the full crop of the skin, notice the faint scars and blemishes present at this magnification (it’s normally not that visible in real-life or web-sized images).

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