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Digital Grin > DODGING AND BURNING The healing brush's value is the ease with which lots of gross imperfections can be brought under control without a loss of skin texture. But if you want to take that next step to flawless skin, you will need to dodge and burn—again, and again and again. With the healing brush i will try to cover as many bases as possible before moving on. Dodging and burning is never finished. Sometimes the problems that it has to address don't become obvious until other steps have been completed. A typical work flow might look something this: Healing Brush Contrast move Dodge/burn Color move Dodge/burn HIRALOAM Dodge/burn Healing Brush Dodge/burn Smoothing Dodge/burn Add glow Dodge/burn Sharpen Dodge/Burn Have lunch Dodge/burn You get the idea. A quick search of any number of Photoshop forums will turn up a variety of approaches to this task. I'll be honest, I haven't tried most of them; I found the version I like and it's never let me down. If you wish to embellish or modify this technique, by all means, do so. None, by the way, involve actually using the Dodge/Burn tools on the image pixels themselves. Don't even think about that. They all involve placing dark and light tones in a layer or layers above the image with the intention of countering unwanted variations in the lights and darks. Usually, this layer will be in Hard Light, Overlay or Soft Light mode. All three modes interact with the underlying pixels to create lighten or darken effects. In all three modes, 50% gray has no effect at all. Hard Light and Overlay will screen tones lighter than 50% against the underlying pixels, and multiply tones that are darker. With Overlay, the effect diminishes as the underlying pixels approach white and black, concentrating the effect in the quarter tones and three-quarter tones. A layer filled with white in Overlay Mode will bleach out most of the image, but the shadow detail will be retained. Hard Light mode affects the highlight and shadow detail as well and as a result, produces a much stronger effect. To be honest, I'm not sure what Soft Light does. It's similar to Overlay in that highlights and shadows are retained, but the effect is, well, softer. The best way to see the difference is to place a layer above any image you choose, fill it alternately with white and black in each of the three modes.
Digital Grin > By Crawford Hart. This is a topic that often falls outside of the concerns of professional photographers; rather than capturing reality and presenting an honest depiction of what one finds there, this endeavor is concerned with... well, lying. At its simplest, it's an effort to help the subject look their best; at its most extreme, we are creating fantasy pure and simple, with results that are never found in the real world. Ever. No one looks like this, not even Tyra Banks. (She comes pretty close, though). Perfectly smooth skin is a tricky retouching challenge. It's a series of complex gradients moving not only from lights to darks and from one hue to another but in multiple directions as well. It doesn't take much for the eye to fasten on imperfections and the effort to remove them often creates more problems. Until Photoshop 7, the tool of choice for skin work was the cloning tool (No purer manifestation of evil has ever been found.) It was, and remains, woefully inadequate to the task. The combined challenge of maintaining the smoothness of the gradients without losing believable skin texture made many retouchers reconsider their applications to McDonalds. With PS7 the Healing Brush made it's appearance and music and light once more filled the land of retouching. There are three ways to approach skin retouching. The most common is to think like a plastic surgeon: you graft skin from a healthy area onto the problem spots and hope you can minimize the scars. But imperfections can also take the form of unwanted variations in dark and light areas. Rather than replacing an unwanted area, we dodge or burn the areas, lightening or darkening just enough to bring them into balance. Sometimes the problem is one of mismatched color, and we must find a way to exploit color correction techniques. These three approaches constitute 90% of the time you will spend on a serious retouching job. None of them requires arcane techniques; they do require finesse, and, most of all, patience. There is no quick fix for skin, not if the desire is to make it look both flawless and real and to hide your own tracks. None of the whiz-bang effects that LAB produces will be found here. Most of the job entails endless repetition of the same simple moves, with results so slight you'll often wonder if you're accomplishing anything. Until you turn your retouching layer on and off. You get your whiz-bang effect at the end of the job when you compare before and after version. One technique that has been around forever, and which lives to this day, is to create some form of smoothing layer on top of the offending skin and try to blend it into the original without making it look fake. Whether one paints tones in with an air brush, or tries some blurring moves, this approach is roundly scorned by most magazine editors and, when done too obviously, will not only get the job bounced, it will earn those responsible a place on the "Do Not Use" list. Still, the reason it remains a current technique is that, done right, it works. It is to be hoped that we will do it right. In this section I will address the three approaches to skin work already mentioned. In Part 2, I will deconstruct a couple of jobs, discuss contrast moves, smoothing, sharpening, how to make skin glow, and other fantasies.
Digital Grin > In Part 2, we'll see these techniques in the context of an actual job, taking this lady from here . . .
Digital Grin > to here.
Digital Grin > And with this image, we will confront head-on an issue raised in a dGrin thread: "How far should we go?" In this case, the answer is "At least back to 1986", because we'll peel about twenty years away from his face. Discuss these techniques on Dgrin in this thread.
Digital Grin > One last thing to keep in mind, both with the Healing Brush, and with the two techniques that follow: Start close up, at 100%. Then move back out to 50%. Avoid odd scaling values. 66.7% and 33% aren't horrible, but 71.83% would be a disaster. At 100%, there is a one-to-one ratio between screen pixels and image pixels. 50% and 25% yields results that compress the pixel information evenly, much the same as happens when you print at actual size. Odd scalings create interference artifacts from uneven interpolation of image pixels to screen pixels. At even scalings, you will see artifacts that weren't apparent at 100%, and you can trust that they are actually there. So you will want to make several passes, zooming out each time and dealing with the new problems that show up. You won't get it perfect with the healing brush, but as you can see here, sudden transitions with their obvious edges are easy to remove. And now the imperfections that remain can be dealt with much more effectively by the next technique.
Digital Grin > Here's an unsightly wrinkle that we're simply going to take out (A). Keep in mind, the healing brush is quite forgiving. You don't need to worry about lining up your sample with your target, you don't need to be particularly precise. (B) shows a typical stroke that I might make, and the result (C). And after four or five similar strokes we arrive at (D). The question could be raised, "Why use the healing brush for a shadow like this? Why not a dodge/burn layer?" As I will demonstrate, I make extensive use of dodge/burn layers to lighten and darken selective areas. However, unlike the healing brush, dodging and burning requires infinite patience and subtlety. And precision. Large imperfections like this wrinkle are among the first things that I'll attack, and I do it with the healing brush because it's fast. I can be sloppy. I basically scribble over the target area; maybe I'll draw circles, maybe half-moons. It doesn't matter. The healing brush responds to all of it and after a relatively short time, the gross imperfections suddenly become much less noticeable. And much more conducive to the refined shifts that dodging and burning provide.
Digital Grin > Note the similar target area in (D), but with a significantly smaller brush. The result this time (E) is much more in keeping with expectations. So— Rule 1: always keep the size of your brush in proportion to the artifacts that are being dealt with. Even if the overall area that you cover with a single move is much larger, the tendency to pull in unwanted pixels will be determined by the brush size. (On the other hand, if there is a sharp transition that you want to smooth out, replicating the "mistake" of image (A) can become a valued procedure. A few passes on either side of the transition line, pulling the regions into each other, can make for smooth transitions.) Rule 2: Don't use the healing brush to make drastic shifts in color or value (i.e. removing a dark shadow, or a necklace.) It will make a soupy mess of the job. Prep the area first by using the Dodge/burn techniques or the color moves discussed next, to bring the target into rough balance with the surrounding area. You could even use the clone tool.
Digital Grin > THE HEALING BRUSH Adobe has described the Healing Brush as "The Cloning Tool on steroids." Somewhat true. While you can often treat it like a cloning tool, one that doesn't require precision and offers superior results, it comes with its own set of quirks, and capabilities that go beyond cloning. For any skin work, it will be one of your primary tools. First, let's note the most peculiar quirk of the Healing brush. In theory, it retains the color and lightness of the target area, while replicating the relationship between lights and darks from the sampled area, translating the sampled texture into the target range of value and tone. It also performs a kind of magical blending between target and sample, and at the edge of the strokes, without muting detail. While this blending pretty much eliminates the "clone worms" so prevalent with the cloning tool, it can be both blessing and bane. In these images, we see what can go wrong with the healing brush. The pattern of fine hairs needs to be smoothed out. It would seem to be a perfect job for the healing brush, given it's blending capabilities. (A) We sample from a nearby region with texture but no hair (B). But the result (C) demonstrates the blending capability of the healing brush, precisely where we don't want it. Part of the problem is that we've made our target area too close to a much darker region, but the main problem is the brush size. The ability to suck in surrounding pixels is a direct function of the size of the brush.
DODGING AND BURNING
The healing brush's value is the ease with which lots of gross imperfections can be brought under control without a loss of skin texture. But if you want to take that next step to flawless skin, you will need to dodge and burn—again, and again and again.

With the healing brush i will try to cover as many bases as possible before moving on. Dodging and burning is never finished. Sometimes the problems that it has to address don't become obvious until other steps have been completed. A typical work flow might look something this:

Healing Brush
Contrast move
Dodge/burn
Color move
Dodge/burn
HIRALOAM
Dodge/burn
Healing Brush
Dodge/burn
Smoothing
Dodge/burn
Add glow
Dodge/burn
Sharpen
Dodge/Burn
Have lunch
Dodge/burn

You get the idea.

A quick search of any number of Photoshop forums will turn up a variety of approaches to this task. I'll be honest, I haven't tried most of them; I found the version I like and it's never let me down. If you wish to embellish or modify this technique, by all means, do so.

None, by the way, involve actually using the Dodge/Burn tools on the image pixels themselves. Don't even think about that. They all involve placing dark and light tones in a layer or layers above the image with the intention of countering unwanted variations in the lights and darks. Usually, this layer will be in Hard Light, Overlay or Soft Light mode. All three modes interact with the underlying pixels to create lighten or darken effects.

In all three modes, 50% gray has no effect at all. Hard Light and Overlay will screen tones lighter than 50% against the underlying pixels, and multiply tones that are darker. With Overlay, the effect diminishes as the underlying pixels approach white and black, concentrating the effect in the quarter tones and three-quarter tones. A layer filled with white in Overlay Mode will bleach out most of the image, but the shadow detail will be retained. Hard Light mode affects the highlight and shadow detail as well and as a result, produces a much stronger effect. To be honest, I'm not sure what Soft Light does. It's similar to Overlay in that highlights and shadows are retained, but the effect is, well, softer. The best way to see the difference is to place a layer above any image you choose, fill it alternately with white and black in each of the three modes.
Digital Grin > DODGING AND BURNING The healing brush's value is the ease with which lots of gross imperfections can be brought under control without a loss of skin texture. But if you want to take that next step to flawless skin, you will need to dodge and burn—again, and again and again. With the healing brush i will try to cover as many bases as possible before moving on. Dodging and burning is never finished. Sometimes the problems that it has to address don't become obvious until other steps have been completed. A typical work flow might look something this: Healing Brush Contrast move Dodge/burn Color move Dodge/burn HIRALOAM Dodge/burn Healing Brush Dodge/burn Smoothing Dodge/burn Add glow Dodge/burn Sharpen Dodge/Burn Have lunch Dodge/burn You get the idea. A quick search of any number of Photoshop forums will turn up a variety of approaches to this task. I'll be honest, I haven't tried most of them; I found the version I like and it's never let me down. If you wish to embellish or modify this technique, by all means, do so. None, by the way, involve actually using the Dodge/Burn tools on the image pixels themselves. Don't even think about that. They all involve placing dark and light tones in a layer or layers above the image with the intention of countering unwanted variations in the lights and darks. Usually, this layer will be in Hard Light, Overlay or Soft Light mode. All three modes interact with the underlying pixels to create lighten or darken effects. In all three modes, 50% gray has no effect at all. Hard Light and Overlay will screen tones lighter than 50% against the underlying pixels, and multiply tones that are darker. With Overlay, the effect diminishes as the underlying pixels approach white and black, concentrating the effect in the quarter tones and three-quarter tones. A layer filled with white in Overlay Mode will bleach out most of the image, but the shadow detail will be retained. Hard Light mode affects the highlight and shadow detail as well and as a result, produces a much stronger effect. To be honest, I'm not sure what Soft Light does. It's similar to Overlay in that highlights and shadows are retained, but the effect is, well, softer. The best way to see the difference is to place a layer above any image you choose, fill it alternately with white and black in each of the three modes.
DODGING AND BURNING
The healing brush's value is the ease with which lots of gross imperfections can be brought under control without a loss of skin texture. But if you want to take that next step to flawless skin, you will need to dodge and burn—again, and again and again.

With the healing brush i will try to cover as many bases as possible before moving on. Dodging and burning is never finished. Sometimes the problems that it has to address don't become obvious until other steps have been completed. A typical work flow might look something this:

Healing Brush
Contrast move
Dodge/burn
Color move
Dodge/burn
HIRALOAM
Dodge/burn
Healing Brush
Dodge/burn
Smoothing
Dodge/burn
Add glow
Dodge/burn
Sharpen
Dodge/Burn
Have lunch
Dodge/burn

You get the idea.

A quick search of any number of Photoshop forums will turn up a variety of approaches to this task. I'll be honest, I haven't tried most of them; I found the version I like and it's never let me down. If you wish to embellish or modify this technique, by all means, do so.

None, by the way, involve actually using the Dodge/Burn tools on the image pixels themselves. Don't even think about that. They all involve placing dark and light tones in a layer or layers above the image with the intention of countering unwanted variations in the lights and darks. Usually, this layer will be in Hard Light, Overlay or Soft Light mode. All three modes interact with the underlying pixels to create lighten or darken effects.

In all three modes, 50% gray has no effect at all. Hard Light and Overlay will screen tones lighter than 50% against the underlying pixels, and multiply tones that are darker. With Overlay, the effect diminishes as the underlying pixels approach white and black, concentrating the effect in the quarter tones and three-quarter tones. A layer filled with white in Overlay Mode will bleach out most of the image, but the shadow detail will be retained. Hard Light mode affects the highlight and shadow detail as well and as a result, produces a much stronger effect. To be honest, I'm not sure what Soft Light does. It's similar to Overlay in that highlights and shadows are retained, but the effect is, well, softer. The best way to see the difference is to place a layer above any image you choose, fill it alternately with white and black in each of the three modes.
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