Too smooth by half

Too smooth by half

This isn’t really a rant about either skin softening or old Etonians, though there may be a sideswipe at both along the way. It might have something to do with the state of the pavement outside, and it may also derive from something my wife (unkindly) reminded me that I said (unkindly) around 1978, and which I will never reveal to anyone.



Let’s start with skin smoothing… And the senseless application – Kirstie Black (top) has a beautiful complexion, as can be seen from the detail extractor version I did with Nik Efex (second down). There are small scars on her elbow, a couple of shadows in her armpit, but there’s nothing else that needs correction. Both Imagenomic (which does lovely things for art nudes, I find, in the right light) and another software package make less of the image than a straight edit.



So the first thing is to ask yourself whether you need to do any smoothing (unless you are, truly, addicted to rendering all skin without pores and Barbie-perfect and unreal…) Minimalism really works well. A little gentle work with the clone tool, the spot healing brush tool and the (possibly less well-known) healing brush tool will usually deal with all the problems of a poor complexion.



It’s worth mentioning that the healing brush tool requires you to take a sample (just like the clone tool), but then applies the texture from that area to anywhere that you apply it – it doesn’t map the image in the same way as the clone tool. It’s therefore excellent for – say – reducing the shine of a slightly-greasy nose or cheek, or gently removing shadows below a model’s eyes.

Similarly, the trick with the clone tool is to turn down the opacity, and clone from different places around an imperfection by resetting the sampling area. This gives a gentler look, and tends to help avoid the problem of patterns and textures obviously repeating, which is often a giveaway for editing.



I’m still learning to use Imagenomic properly, and understand the finesse of its controls. As with the image of Twiggi50 below, it doesn’t remove or conceal texture so much as it gives a different look, which I’m still struggling to describe, even to myself. However, whatever it does looks very good indeed, and I’m looking forward to exploring and using it further.



As is usual with this sort of plugin, it does a decent job of selecting skin areas for itself, and you can refine its selection if you want or need to. But you can also switch it off, so that the effect is applied to the whole image: the company suggest this can look good with hair, but there’s no reason to limit its use to portraits, as the snow scene demonstrates – you may be hard-pressed to say what is not quite right, but it’s pretty lovely to my eye, enhancing the feel of the picture, and the road surface that proved too smooth by half for a hapless Mercedes driver the other day.

But whether he was a smug, polished and entitled scholar from Lower Slough School, history doesn’t relate.




And, by way of a test, I need to write a bit about the site T&Cs, and see what placing a LINK in the middle of a sentence does, so HERE's a second link back to my daily post.