"Skin Smoothing"

[paul]

I take alot of criticism for skin smoothing. its something, i believe, you love or hate ....

tell me if this is a good or bad image .... please???

[coffee]

Who criticizes you :)? By skin smoothing are you talking about correcting skin texture for problems, or smoothing skin just to smooth it? This is a technique that's used by profession photographers all the time. Can't imaging anyone being so against it. I do think a person can get carried away with it to the point where skin turns into plastic. But hey, to each his own right?

As far as your image, it looks like a nice shot, but the skin is hard to tell because the image is very dark.

[jaydi]

what is skin smoothing and how do I do it. I have photoshop cs3.:(

[ladyups]

Here's a video that explains one way of doing it. I've never done this so it was new to me too. All I can say is don't make it look like a mannequin. All you want to do is smooth out the roughness and erase the blemishes.

http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to/video/how-to-smooth-skin-in-photoshop-cs3-262374/

[coffee]

There are lots of ways to accomplish this in PS. One of the best I found is noise ninja. NN is a noise reduction plug-in, that is intended to get rid of noise, but also works well to smooth out the skin.

[jerryph]

Imagenomic Portraiture v.2.0 is incredible. Portrait Professional MAX is another one, but with that one, you are pretty much a click away from going overboard all the time, it is severely finicky.

I don't really suggest using a noise reduction software becuase what it is doing is not softening the skin, but removing detail from the entire picture. Done carefully, though, it does make the skin look a little better, if you can accept the loss of detail in the rest of the picture. :)


As mentioned, there are also at least 20 ways to do it in PS CS2, CS3 or CS4. Use layers, masking and gaussian blurs, and the healing tool works very well.

[coffee]

I don't really suggest using a noise reduction software becuase what it is doing is not softening the skin, but removing detail from the entire picture.


NR does soften everything, but in NN and most I would think, you can brush away selected areas so that what you don't want softened doesn't have to be. Softening in any form is going to take detail away. That's the beauty of using NN for me. It's very similar to using PS and masking what you want brought back.