Preserved Topic: making people pale (Page 1 of 1)

hey all ...

Check out this picture, if you please:



I'm playing with this image, see. I want to make this guy's skin PALE ... as in winter complexion. As in nearly white skin and dark hair.

I thought I could do this fairly easily, but see above for what I was able to do with a single Colour Replace command. (making the mask was the hard part, of course). I tried making hue/sat and colour balance adjustment layers, but those looked even worse.

As you can see, it now looks like it's just washed out.

Does anyone know how to change skin tones in PS?


thanks for any help


Anam

ICQ 7514404
AIM Anamacha

like this???

sheesh! thats one ugly dude, aint he ever heard of a razor? LOL

This is just a guess, made away from Photoshop, but you might try brushing over his face with the Color Dodge tool and a large brush size.

The one you got is not that bad, considering the quality of the original; may just be the computer I'm on, but your original looks kinda blotchy. A lot of the noise I see on the original, I also see on the paler version. It's just more noticable on the pale guy.

Curves works wonders.

Witherin

WOW! I didn't expect this many responses ... especially so soon

I like what you guys have done, especially the last two pictures.

Dracusis, how did you create that effect? You're not a Buffy or Angel fan, are you? I'd love to know how you did that, so I can try applying it to other things.

I didn't even think of using the Dodge tool. Thanks for the tip.

Oh, and about Curves ... I fixed the picture I got with a Curves adjustment layer ... I just never thought to use it to get the effect I wanted ... again, thanks for the ip


Anam.

ICQ 7514404
AIM Anamacha

How'd I do dat? Ummm.... well...

First I hit it with the spounge tool, desaturate. Working over the face and hair a little bit.

Then I masked out da fella with a rather dogey quick mask (I missed some bits of da hair). Then copied out the background, pasted to a new layer. Blured it (locked transp.) and set it to multiply or overlay or something.

Upped the contrast of the main layer and played with the curves a tad. Repeat, tad...

Then wacked in some lighting effects to make it a bit more dynamic. Just a single spotlight but both colors were set to slightly different pale yellow-orange colors to even out the skin tone a bit. After that I noticed the background was looking out of place so I ran the same lighting fx over that layer as well which seemed to work quite well.

Then I was playing with a duplicate (or two, or three, can't remember now, sorry.) of the main layer, bluring a bit and frigin with the blend modes yet again, trying to get a subtle soft focus look, like in those shonky day-time soaps but with a bit of byte to it. Remember when playing with duplicates and blendmodes the transperancy slider is you best friend. Then back to the main layer with the doge and burn tools for another little workover. Keep the pressure down when using these things, about 5 - 10 %.

After I had it roughly how I wanted it I went in and attacked the base (main) layer with the smudge tool to clean up some of those nasty Jpeg compression errors on da face. Then I went back over some of the facial features yet again wif da sharpen tool to well, sharpen dem up a bit. I didn't need to smudge fix any of the other layers as they all had at least a small blur applied to them.

And that's about it. I think I was done in around 5 minuites... Didn't bother fussing too much, just hacked and layered away untill I was happy with it.

Me a buffy fan? Arrr... does being a Willow fan count? Damn she's cute



[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 05-07-2002).]

For now, though, have a look at the final outcome of what happened between my wife and I. She did the original compositing and the hair work (the darkening of the goatee and the white temple), and I did all the touch up and detail work.

She did that in PAINTSHOP PRO ... can you believe that? I was using PS6, natch

Regarding the hair work: In PSP, she has a nifty option for her airbrush called DENSITY. It seems to affect how many dots are put down during any given fraction of time the mouse button is held down. Is there an equivalent of that in PS6? Or do you have to create a new brush for every different dot density you want to use?

Oh ... to get around the skin colour problem, we punted and shifted the picture to a grayscale mode (obviously). We both felt this matched the character's personality better -- yes, this was all for a role-playing game I do.

hey, what can I say? Any excuse to do something useful and learn things in Photoshop ... right?


Anam



ICQ 7514404
AIM Anamacha

I think your straight jacket's a bit tight?

I just realized Im too late but heres my try:



edit: bad url



[This message has been edited by Hew (edited 05-07-2002).]

Hew: You're never too late I tried going to your icklepix.com site (nice name, btw) and nothing would load ... it SAID it was loading, and then nothing came up in the middle bit. Same behaviour for home, gallery, links, etc etc. I'm using IE 5.1 on a mac.

Actually, what I've seen most of thus far is a general desaturation of the chap's face. This is where I started -- with desaturation and colour balance.

This is not exactly what I want. What I want is to affect the SKIN TONES of the picture -- I don't wnat to desaturate the picture or otherwise wash it out.

Does anyone know how to do this?


Anam

ICQ 7514404
AIM Anamacha

oh, and Dracusis: Thanks for the info; what did you mean about the 'straight jacket' being too tight?


Anam

ICQ 7514404
AIM Anamacha

hahaa Anam...
I beleieve that was a poke at your sanity buddy. hehee All in fun though i'm sure.

For anyone still checking out viable techniques to answering Anam's question here... here's a whole 'nother batch of answers from another board: http://www.photoshopgurus.info/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=384

Anam... figured since you're sharing this subject with other boards, i'd also share some answers to it with other boards as well. hehe

no worries, Guest ... it's no secret that I posted the same damn question to this board as I did to That Other Board ... hee

Anyway, share the info Far and Wide.

There's some useful information in the other thread that he quoted, to be sure.

Anam

ICQ 7514404
AIM Anamacha

Fun and interesting challange. I had a very brief go at it, and have some thoughts. First off, my Pantone colors don't have an entry for "zombie', so I went for "fair skinned" instead of "pallor". Still, you aren't going to turn a Spaniard into a Swede - there are too many clues. Best I could do was a shift towards fair.



Very brief (stealing time from work now) synopsis:
First duplicate the original. You'll see why presently. Convert the duplicate to LAB and blur A and B channels (this is for image quality only, not color so feel free to omit this step. It basically smooths the chunky jpeg artifacts).

Convert to CMYK. Yep. Curves alone aren't going to get us where we need to go. Examine the channels. M is reasonable, C and Y stink. Info from M needs to beef the other two up. Using the Apply Image command, I put 60% M into C (normal blending) and Y (lighten blending). This is pretty heavy handed, but I was in a rush. Now the color is better and an overall curve can lighten him.

Convert back to RGB and bring this back to the original as a layer. Using a layer mask, eliminate all of the new layer but the face. Tweak the opacity a bit to make it "fit better.

I doubt this is the effect you wanted from this image, but it was a good retouching exercise! If you want to know more about channel blending, I warmly recommend any of the editions of "Professional Photoshop" by Dan Margulis. He covers this powerful technique is exceptional depth.

I've got a problem similar to this...I have a photo of the boyfriend of a friend of my sister *whew* . And...purprisingly for him, it's a really good photo, except for hte fact that he is EXTREMLEY red in the face...could I use a technique simlar to this to alter the colour of his face to a more normal shade (for him)?



Koan 63:
Those who Believe
Can
Those who Try
Do
Those who Love
Live

Post it. Let's see what we can do.

Thanks, all of you, for help with my issue.

As far as your problem, Skarjj -- if it's just a matter of removing one colour -- ie., red -- from his face, then it SHOULD be a fairly simple matter to reduce that with a Color Balance or Curves adjustment layer. As Steve said, post it; let's see what we can do.


Anam

ICQ 7514404
AIM Anamacha

Um, I thought that was what you wanted, I did it with my wacom , not just filters anyway.

About my site .. um please try again once more

I posted this is site reviews:
http://www.ozoneasylum.com/Forum6/HTML/000931.html