And now, for something completely different ...
IMHO, while there are some major blemishes on this subject's face, I would put actual skin smoothing (ie, after blemish removal) far, far down on my list of things that need to be corrected in this snapshot. IMHO, the first and most important things that need to be helped along are:
1. Perspective (geometric) and lens (barrel) distortion arising from shooting from much too close, and with too wide a lens.
2. From the catchlights in her eyes, the lighting appears to come from a single, small, on-camera flash. This leads to shiny, specular reflections from any area on her skin that is even slightly oily, as well as it highlights every single blemish and clogged pore.
3. The green color cast, probably leakage from ambient fluorescent lights in the room.
No one who wants to make a nice, flattering portrait of a woman would ever photograph and light her this way unless there was a gun to their heads, they had absolutely no other choice (either because of lack of equipment or lack of knowledge), and there was zero chance they would ever have to face her wrath, LOL.
Improving #2 and #3 is fairly straightforward. However, because, I've never met this woman in person, I have no idea of the true shape of her face, so the retoucher has no choice except to guess. So, that's exactly what I did -- I guessed -- BIG TIME. I probably made her face too slender, or made its shape different from what it really is, but I wanted to see how easy it would be to get rid of some of the perspective and lens distortion that is almost synonymous with cell phone portraits (including selfies).
Obviously, some guess work is also needed w.r.t. her exact skin color, but, IMHO, almost anything would be an improvement over her current color.
Soooo... I brought the image into ACR, and used its lens controls to try to counteract the distortions. I next used the color balance and other color controls in ACR to give her skin a better, non-green skin tone. To reduce the harsh lighting, I pulled the clarity control down to about -20 and compensated for the loss of sharpness by increasing the actual sharpening controls in ACR. I also used ACR's tonal adjustments to tame the reflective oily areas. The preceding steps constitute probably about 70% of the changes you see in the attached image. The remainder was done in PS, e.g., the liquify tool to further adjust the shape of her face, lots of burning and dodging to help out the lighting, and finally, all the usual spotting tools (eg, clone, spot healing, patch) to work on the major skin blemishes and to even out the slight mottled nature of her skin. I did use a touch of the glamor glow tool to give a more traditional portrait look, and then I applied the final sharpening.
FWIW, I did not do anything other than glamor glow and the spotting tools to specifically "smooth" her skin. No frequency separations, no Gaussian blur on a separate layer, nothing like that. All the pores and texture that you see are either hers, or an artifact from the original file.
So, after I finished, I sat back and looked at it. I think I succeeded in removing many of the distortions in the original, and my guess is that the subject would probably think its flattering, but she would also probably feel that it takes off too many years to be believable. What do you think?
T
