Oily/Shiny skin

[culicchia]

What is the best way, in your opinion, to get rid of the flash-induced shine, or oily look to someone's face without it getting muddled or too yellow/brown? I'm using CS2...

[Rob_w]

dunno if this helps, but when i got rid of someones shiny skin, I used the spot heal tool, and used it to darken the area. doesnt get rid of it, but makes it duller, and less shiny

[Lesa]

Another possibility is to duplicate the layer and apply a guassian blur. Create a layer mask on this "blurry" layer and immediately fill it with black. This will hide the blurry effect completely.

While the layer mask is still selected, use a fairly large, soft-edge brush, and paint with white those areas of the skin you wish to soften (remember when dealing with layer masks, black hides and white reveals). When finished, you can decrease the opacity of the blurry layer to lessen the effect.

This technique works wonders for softening skin, and for hiding blemishes and hot spots.

[michaellittell]

Lesa's instructions above work great for softening blemishes & age spots, but doesn't really fix the problem of flash-induced "shine" on the skin.

May I suggest this however, which recently worked great for me:

1. follow Lesa's instructions above... then,

2. duplicate the original layer and place it above the layer she had you create.

3. using the clone stamp tool with a soft edged brush, sample 'good skin' just outside of the shiny area, about 1 brush-width away depending on the size of your brush. (Sampling at about the same horizontal point where I intend to start brushing usually works best for me, but I assume it depends on the shadows and lighting on the skin you're working with.)

4. once you've sampled the close 'good skin', work the edge of the shiny area with the clone stamped brush. This will make your shiny area about 1 brush-width smaller.

5. since you sampled very close to the bad skin, you'll have to resample to work the edges again after about 1 brush-width... therefore, repeat steps 3 & 4 as much as needed to systematically shrink the shiny area, from edges to center, until the shine is gone... change the size of your brush as needed.

6. touching up with the smudge tool will help get rid of any accidental repeating skin imperfections you may have cloned.

7. finally, pull the opacity down some to soften the effect, which should blend it nicely with Lesa's blur layer underneath.

and that should do it!...
hope this trick works for you as well as it worked for me.

michael : http://michaellittell.com

[NEMESIS]

Hello,

One of the best and easiest ways to fix "hot spots" on the photograph is: Take Healing Brush Tool (J) and in Options bar for Mode choose DARKEN and check the option "SAMPLE ALL LAYERS". Open the new layer, set your healing brush tool hardness to 0% (is soft brush) and size of the brush (use brush size slightly bigger than hot spot) and with OPTION+click(MAC) or ALT+click (PC) choose skin tone you like and paint on areas with Healing Brush tool. For "painting" i mean click on areas where you want to cover the hot spots. What is great about this technique is that you have that cloned pixels on separate layer and you can apply slight Gaussian Blur filter, lower the opacity of layer to achieve great end result.

Sound simple but this technique is used by professional photographers and end result is astonishing.

See ya

[juano]

Matt Kloskowski gave an excellent demo of this in episode #60 of Photoshop TV

[michaellittell]

thanks Nem... I hadn't had much luck with the healing brush before, which is why I used the clone stamp tool... but I'm sure its 'cause I wasn't using it correctly. I'm gonna give your method a try too next time I have to deal w/Skin Hot Spots.

peace... michael.

[NEMESIS]

Hi Michael,

You should try this technique, is great. And why i prefer in some cases to work with Healing Brush tool is because when you pick clone source and apply it that cloned pixels blend nicely with surrounding colors and texture. On the other hand you have Clone Stamp tool and when you pick clone source and apply it that same clone pixels are same from the location you picked them and do not blend at all. So i can say that Healing Brush tool have more dynamic features while you are cloning. I am not saying that you shouldn't use anymore Clone Stamp tool but i am suggesting you where in some cases you might need the that nice blending, textures applied to your cloned pixels. At the end every tool in Photoshop is great (except in some case the "tragic wand" tool ) and how to use them wisely depending on a task and the overall end result.

See ya