Grainy Face

[carolp]

Hi Everyone!  I need help with this photo.  I'm not finished with it by any means, but her face is giving me a frustrating problem.  When the photo is blown up to 300% you can really see the light places for what they are.  It looks as if some shiny substance is on the photo itself and it glows when I put it in grayscale and use auto contrast.  I took the auto contrast off until I am finished, but when I made the repairs the left side of her face is now grainy.  I tried cloning it, but it made it too blotchy, I tried matching the paint, but it made her look artificial, the blur tool only blured the dots.  Is there a method that anyone knows that I can use to make her as soft looking and natural as the right side of her face?  I am using PhotoShop CS2.  Thanks in advance to everyone!

[Charlene5]

This is one of my favorite techniques for blotchy.  I did two separate hue/saturation adjustments using the magnetic lasso tool, one for the light side and one for the too dark side.  I defocus my eyes (honest, it's easy, I can't read the top letter on the eye chart without glasses) and just look at tone to do the selections.  They don't have to be perfect.  Above that I put a blank layer.  Drag out a paintbrush with the hardness set very light - 10% is where I start with light colors - and the opacity set to about 12%.  Turn on the airbrush option.  Select the paintbrush and hold down the Alt key.  That turns it into a color picker.  I looked at the baby's face and clicked on what I thought was a good mid tone in the skin.  Start airbrushing.  After you've gone over it well do a gausian blur - I used 10% or so.  Keep repeating the painting and blurring until the tone starts to even out.  Erase carefully (with a soft brush) everything doesn't need paint all over it - the eyes, the mouth, the edges - and do one more small (2% or so) gausian blur to mix in the clean erased edges.  Try adjusting the opacity of your airbrush layer down and see if you can get away with less than 100%.  The less the opacity, the less chance you have of that painted look.  I often add in noise or film grain as the last step because airbrushing smooths it out so much.  It needs more work and some refining but it's a start.

[Hannie]

Hi Carol!

Welcome to the forum, it's great to have you lurking around here! (was it rude of me to say that? :-[)
Just a very quick note before I go to bed (it is way past midnight here).  I saw that MJ has written a very interesting tut, will look at it better tomorrow!
There is one thing that came to mind when you asked about the grainy skin.  CS2 has the Spot Healing Brush, if you set the "type" to "Create Texture" it can work really well on fixing skin problems.

Goodnight everyone!   

Hannie

[Mhayes]

Hi Carol, welcome to the forum, we are glad to have you. You have done a nice job so far and MJ's excellent tutorial should help out a lot. I'm guessing that the shiny areas you see on the baby are either where the photo is stuck to glass or perhaps the plastic in a photo album.

Margie

[schen]

To avoid the painted look, I use healing brush extensively.  The baby's right arm has nice skin texture to be used as sample source for healing. 

Healing brush will copy the texture of the sampled area to the target area.  Texture means the relative values of each pixel to its neighbors.  So the shading transition through the sampled area should resemble the the shading transition of the desired target area.

Healing brush will also adjust the target area to blend in with the surrounding areas.  The brush size should cover the entire blemish.  Often, this is difficult to do.  So I use clone stamp to get the image closed to what I want then apply the healing brush.  Or I use dodge/burn tools to adjust the luminosity before using healing brush.