ZipedX
Power User
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Skin retouching with frequency separation
ALB68
Dear Departed Guru and PSG Staff Member
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Thus my question..Is it possible? Sounds like it's a dead end then.
Tom Mann
Guru
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Hi everyone. I'm back again.
Thank you all very much for your comments. This turned out to be a great exercise for me in that, as far as I recall, I don't think I have ever tried correcting the barrel distortion of the face that is inevitably caused by photographing someone very close to the camera (as is almost inevitable with arms-length cell phone "selfies"), and unfortunately, I wound up "correcting" distortions that didn't exist.
Larry hit it on the head when he said that my "after" version doesn't even look like the same person. I think what derailed me was that I've known someone for years who looks very much like the subject, except with much less prominent cheekbones, and I wound up subconsciously turning the subject of this photo into my friend at a young age. All the time I was working on it, I was thinking to myself, "Wow, this is really going well -- it really looks like her". Well, yes, it looks like my friend, but as I worked on it was slowly getting further and further from the subject in the photo. It wasn't till several hours had passed and I looked at it again through your eyes that I realized what I had done.
I think that if I had photographed the subject myself, I would have seen her in person, had a concrete reference to work from, and would have not gone so far in reshaping her face. but I fooled myself into thinking the photo needed more "correction" than it really did.
With respect to Chris' comment. I think it's a bit of a matter of choice as to how far one goes with this, but I think the root cause is that it's the overly uniform pore structure (even if they are all her own and not fake texture), and reduction of too many small shadows and highlights that take away the "life" from a photo. OTOH, one does see lots of retouching to this level just looking at the large advertising posters hanging up in local shopping mall. It's not "smoothing", per se, but a sort of mass-produced uniformization.
Again, thank you all for your insightful comments.
Tom
Thank you all very much for your comments. This turned out to be a great exercise for me in that, as far as I recall, I don't think I have ever tried correcting the barrel distortion of the face that is inevitably caused by photographing someone very close to the camera (as is almost inevitable with arms-length cell phone "selfies"), and unfortunately, I wound up "correcting" distortions that didn't exist.
Larry hit it on the head when he said that my "after" version doesn't even look like the same person. I think what derailed me was that I've known someone for years who looks very much like the subject, except with much less prominent cheekbones, and I wound up subconsciously turning the subject of this photo into my friend at a young age. All the time I was working on it, I was thinking to myself, "Wow, this is really going well -- it really looks like her". Well, yes, it looks like my friend, but as I worked on it was slowly getting further and further from the subject in the photo. It wasn't till several hours had passed and I looked at it again through your eyes that I realized what I had done.
I think that if I had photographed the subject myself, I would have seen her in person, had a concrete reference to work from, and would have not gone so far in reshaping her face. but I fooled myself into thinking the photo needed more "correction" than it really did.
With respect to Chris' comment. I think it's a bit of a matter of choice as to how far one goes with this, but I think the root cause is that it's the overly uniform pore structure (even if they are all her own and not fake texture), and reduction of too many small shadows and highlights that take away the "life" from a photo. OTOH, one does see lots of retouching to this level just looking at the large advertising posters hanging up in local shopping mall. It's not "smoothing", per se, but a sort of mass-produced uniformization.
Again, thank you all for your insightful comments.
Tom