Softening Posterized Skin in Painting

[Xander36210402r7ns]

Hi everybody,

I have a situation where I've upscaled a generated image of a woman. The image looks great, but giving it art nouveau qualities, it has a painted texture to the format. The upscaling has made the skin rather...splotchy and discolored almost like grey clay or dirt or something. 

I tried gaussian blur and reverse hi-pass, even smudging but nothing is really doing the job as it's not really skin, it's contextually paint in terms of pixels. I haven't run into this all year, and others in the same series aren't as bad, but this is a real travesty. I've put a lot of work coloring and fixing artifacts on a number of these. This one has me stumped though. So I was wondering if anybody had a method for fixing this sort of thing.

If anybody has any recommendations I'd be greatful. Thanks for reading.

[Trevor.Dennis]

Strangely, the last post I answered is going to have a similar response.  How did you upsize the original?  If you could post the original image before it was upsized, then we might be able to suggest a better workflow.

[Xander36210402r7ns]

Hi Trevor, I upsized it using Topaz Gigapixel (5x). I've used it for several and the results so far has been rather astonishing. What's a little daunting is that for larger prints (20 inches etc) I'm going to need to bump it up another 2x. I'm rather new at this (lol).

Here's the original image and the one with color. I pretty much layered levels/curves then pushed RGB saturation and then brought down yellow/red to calm skin tone, and color balanced with some blue mids. That seemed to be a good formula. They look pretty normal in comparison, and don't look near as posterized. I figure that must be a challenge for upscaling. I checked all my other images with animals and photos of people--look great, but painted skin tone seems to have trouble at least in this instance.

[Xander36210402r7ns]

[Stephen_A_Marsh]

Either before or after upsizing, the usual suspects in filters are median/smart blur and surface blur. You can use edge masks to help retain the sharpness of the edges over the natural edge detection used in the last two methods. Perhaps look into the Camera Raw Filter (negative values for clarity or texture, or the detail/noise reduction). You may also look into frequency separation to isolate the areas for retouching. Otherwise, one of the neural filters might be worth trying with appropriate masking.

[Xander36210402r7ns]

Hi Stephen, awesome thanks so much for the suggestions! I'll try those out for sure.