High-end skin retouching?

Question

Suggestions for editing skin like this?

Trevor.Dennis · Accepted Answer

HiMaybe I'm wrong Trevor, but I feel the Op is trying to reproduce the skin texture + highlights. (his demo headshot)Maybe one of your precedent tutorial can help ?PierreOK Pierre. I'd forgotten that old thread.You can go crazy with curves going from normalTo a faux bronze look with a radical W shaped curveI like to use Camera RAW > fx > Grain  to give texture to skin. This is OTT to fit with the radical curves, but values around 12 to 20 work well.But I am a bit fan of the Hair & Skin Textures by Castrochew brush set. The skin texture brushes don't work well with low res images, but they are excellent with higher res. I used them with the digital portrait I have just finished. Sample the skin colour and then pick a slightly darker version of it, and apply to a new layer. Reduce opacity for best effect. BTW The portrait was done using just the standard brush set, and about four of the Castrochew brushes, plus some I made myself based on Bert Monroy's Lab at MAX.

Trevor.Dennis · Answer

It looks like they might have used oil or something similar to make her skin shine. To fix the blown out areas, I use a large fully soft brush set to 10 or 20% opacity, and continuously sample skin tone from around the problem area, and gradually build up tone on a new layer. Always finish by using high value Gaussian blur to merge with the surrounding areas, and mask or erase out any overspil onto things like the eyes and teeth.

I have a feeling that the photographer wanted the grainy look, as it so easy to avoid it with today's cameras, but if you wanted to smooth that out, use the Camera RAW filter, and apply negative clarity. That is quite good at not softening important areas, but not perfect, so if your image is very sharp, do this on a copy of the layer so you can mask out the eyes etc.

I also used a curves layer to win back some contrast

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