Preserved Topic: What about skin?

How do you make believable, real-looking, plain old skin?
I tried some stuff, but the results were hilarious? Anyone knows how?

crip

lets see an example of your skin and maybe we can make suggestions

If Human Shield still haunts these halls, he had a decent human skin siggie. Not sure if he ever wrote up a tut on his methods but you may want to search the archives perhaps.

Well, as I have said in a fw other posts here, I am quite new here, and to PS too, only 2 months or so, and I do other stuff during the day
But, as I have just read the "I need a good quality sig..." thread I think I\ll play around for half an hour, post something here and then go to sleep , I mean I don't want people to think I want someone else to do myjob...And it's not a job actully, I was just looking at my hnad today and I started wondering how I could make a texture that resembled skin...Ok, back to tweaking

The most important thing to realize with something like a photorealistic image of a person, or a texture that resembles skin closely, is that it's not a "photoshop" thing. What I mean is, don't think about "how do I do this in Photoshop?". Think instead, what about this object makes it look the way it does.

1) Form.

2)Lighting

3) Color

4) Texture.

Ok, so how important to the overall feel is each one of these things?
How do they interact to form the whole?

Whether you're working with paint on a canvas or pixels on a screen, the same concepts apply.

The bulk of the work will have to be done by hand, and you should get familiar with your paint brush tool and all it's options (the help files can be quite.....uh, helpful....on that front). You'll want to get used to playing with different brush opacities and blending modes, as well as making your own brushes out of useful textures and the like.

And so on...

Yes, that is what I tried to do, get the colour right (actually, what color IS skin after all? I used 3 layers with 3 different colors that taken separately looked like the right one for me, and blended them in some way), the lightning (which was arbitrary and only present because I used lightning effects with a channel) and the texture ( i did some noise on a mask, emboss it and then used channel in ligtning effects so I can get that punctured lined look ). Oh, and did some veins on one of the layers ))
What I'm having problems with is those little holes in the skin that hairs come out of, and the hair it's self too.
Unfortunatelly, because someone in the campus here did something as stupid as hacking some server and not covering his tracks we do not have the right to do any ftp, ssh or other form of transport, we only have http for a while...So, I can't show what I have done...Only if someone here wants to put it, I'll email the piece to him...

Ok, i guess I'll sleep now...

good night

crip



[This message has been edited by crip (edited 05-11-2002).]

theres actually texture and sometimes hair. yah... duh... But I mean, Just airbrushing with the right colors will not work... I would get a few pics of skin and study them... if I was you.

. . .

quote:

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Only if someone here wants to put it, I'll email the piece to him...

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I'll serve it up for ya (as long as the file size is reasonable) since I'm kind of interested in where this thread may lead. Send it and I'll send you a url when it's up.

edit: sleep is good




[This message has been edited by cyoung (edited 05-11-2002).]

edit: that keeps happening to me lately

[This message has been edited by cyoung (edited 05-12-2002).]

Well, here they are, thanks to cyoung.
And it's late at night again

[1]
[2]
[3]


Sorry for the double posting... Damn UBB code
idea: users should be able to delete their own posts (good for users like me

[This message has been edited by crip (edited 05-12-2002).]

[This message has been edited by crip (edited 05-12-2002).]

[This message has been edited by crip (edited 05-14-2002).]

[This message has been edited by crip (edited 05-20-2002).]

Deleted your double post.

Only moderators are allowed to delete posts, due to an event in the history of the Asylum... at least one person was deleting posts and sometimes entire topics, confusing people and making people angry since their replies were lost. So now only mad scientists are allowed to delete. It's ok to edit your post and delete its contents though =)

That's darn fine work from where I sit. Better than I would probably come up with. The only thing that really occurs to me is maybe the veins need a little shading? Looking at the viens on my hand and wrist there are highlight and shadow areas, subtle as they may be.

It looks good but I'm not entirely sure about the hair and vains.

I think your best 'skin' was the first you posted. The rest don't look overly like skin. The problem, in my opinion, with your hair is the length and the amount. Maybe I'm just abnormal, which might be true either way, but the parts of my body where I have as much hair as in your sample it's kind of long and curly. You might want to work on your hair a bit. Also, the vains. While the vains clearly have a blue tint, it's still more of the skin tone then blue. Does that make sense? What Im saying is it generally, at least on my body, looks like raised skin. Almost as if theres a blue tube underneath your texture. Shading should be a must for that.

Hope that helps.

-Jestah

can't you just pull your pants down
and sit on the scanner?

I would agree that the 1st is the most convincing. I would skip the veins for now though, they seem to distract more than anything.

The problem with the hair is that there are no pores for the hair to be growing from...

the base of each hair needs to have a little 'divot' in the skin to be realistic. actaully making the divot is a simple process...light on one side, shadow on the other. THe tough part will be placing them at all the hairs.

Thanks for the replies... And cyoung, thanks, this beeing my first achivement after starting with PS. (I won't let it go to my head though .
yes, I know the hairs looks like shaved-a-week-ago pubic hair, but it was put there just to see how that skin would look with hair, I will work on that, if you look carefully, the second is the same skin, only with the hair layer hiden. The third is the only one that is really different. I just forgot to say that, it was late
And yes, I know, as I said above, the punctured look is something i know i have to do, but have no clue how. I gues I could create the pores somehow but then I would have to put every hair in it's pore (Any ideas on this?)
And I agree that the veins should be a bit bluer, and not so green and that they should be raised skin. I actually did the veins in a different document, they were embossed, I flattened the image and put the resulting layer between 2 of the layers of the skin texture, but i guess i lost that emboss by making the layer too transparent so that they should look underneeth the skin. i'll work on that too and I will show what I've got.
What I need is, if anyone tried this before, skin I mean, is that they post a bit of that skin so I can get some ideas.
Thanks anyone for the feedback... I already feel welcomed here

Only one question... To Jestah ...
What 'first skin you posted" do you mean? I don't remember posting anything else than those 3. If I did and it's better tell me where is it so I can see it

Oh, and another thing...Since this is my first real texture, aside from those gold, wwod, metal, plastic tutorial textures out there, I don't think I can actually recreate that exact effect. The reason is that I might have applied some filter at one point or the other and forgot about that. The layers are there, I can see what the settings are. But what can I do so that 3 months from now I can do it again. Ok, practice and record actions maybe... But still...



[This message has been edited by crip (edited 05-12-2002).]

well... If your trying diff things... I would try more thinner smaller veins... and um.... peach fuzz hair... yeahh.... lookin good

. . .

on making the pores:

1) use a paint brush, slightly larger than the thickness of the base of the hair. not too hard, not too soft.

2) place a dot at the base of each hair with the paintbrush (on a seperate layer).

3) select the transparency of the layer with the dots (ctrl+click the layer). Then make the layer invisible - it won't be needed other than for it's shape).

4) nudge the selection up and right 1px.

5) alt+shift+click on the layer again. this will select the portion of the selections which no longer overlaps the layer, giving you a 1px selection around the top-right of the dots. Nudge the selection back into place.

6) create a new layer (while the selection is still active). Fill it with black (or a dark color of your choice).

7) repeat this process, but nudge down and left, and fill the selection on a new layer with white.

8) blur the highlight/shadow layers slightly to soften the edge, and play with opacities/blending modes until it looks right.





[This message has been edited by DL-44 (edited 05-20-2002).]

Thanks, Dl, haven't tried it yet, I will tonight, now it's beer time
But that sounds like the solution. I will try it and will post the rezults.
I haven't found the time to work on that hair so it will still be that shaven hair
The links to the skin pics were broken but i will repair them now...

crip



[This message has been edited by crip (edited 05-20-2002).]