Softening skin

[GiacomoD]

Portrait photos are not my preferred; I do basically outdoor and landscape photography.
But last Christmas, after a pantagruelic lunch and a lot of wine, I took some indoor shots to my family, without flash (I don’t like it) and with very high ISO settings. Also I tried a couple of B&W shots. Then, at the end of the day, I realized that the camera was set to JPEG only mode…

Lesson learnt: if you plan to take shots early in the afternoon, keep the wine aside at lunch

Anyway, I tried to play with one of them in PP to soften the skin of my niece using the Wavelet Decomposer plug-in in GIMP. Not very user-friendly, but quite effective, I believe.

Here the original JPEG and the result of PP for your C&C.

Original shot


Edit #1

[pnodrog]

Obviously it has improved the skin variations but is not software I have ever used so can not comment a great deal. I have "photoshopped" portraits a few times and use a mix of tools in a mainly manual method that with practice becomes relatively quick.

[GiacomoD]

L.Paul,
I can ensure you that also in GIMP is almost totally manual! This plug-in decompose the image in a series of layers of increasing degrees of details, then you have to work layer by layer with opacity, blur and brush on selected areas... the good thing is that you have full control on the size of the details that you want remove or keep, but it requires a lot of work.

I'd better keep myself on landscape photography but I liked to play with it!

Cheers

[Donald]

I can ensure you that also in GIMP is almost totally manual!

You have done very well with this exercise. It is, as you describe, a task that requires a lot of work. But it is satisfying when a good result, such as this, is achieved.

[GiacomoD]

Thank you Donald.
you are right: what is frustrating is when, after 2-3 hours of work, you realize that it's not even worth to save the file!


Looking at others portrait images that I find here, I honestly think that this one remains a "well below-average" one, but I posted it mainly to get some feedbacks on the skin softening technique. Perhaps it would have been better to post it into the
Image Post-Processing & Printing forum.

Cheers