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Rangefinder Magazine
August 2003

Solving the Acne Riddle by Richard Pahl

We had an article in the Rangefinder slush pile about the Photoshop cure for Acne. The only problem was that we wrote the article with Photoshop 6.0 in mind. When Adobe introduced Photoshop 7.0 with the new healer tool, it completely obsoleted that discussion. So here we go with a new cure/fix done in Photoshop 7.01

Figure 1

Figure 1 is of our assistant/intern, Bobbi, who has typical teenage skin. At a distance or enlarged to less than a 5x7, blemishes on her skin aren’t that noticeable. Looking at an extreme close-up of her face, Fig. 2, reveals numerous blemishes. We have included a piece of dust or debris that was apparently on the array during the shoot. This will present a particular problem that we’ll deal with later. Don’t forget that a teen’s body may be involved with acne too. (Fig. 3)

The usual method to rid images of these blemishes used to be to clone them out, or to dodge them or perform any number of fixes. Photoshop 7 has given us a great new tool that works very well. From what I can tell, the healer uses the texture of the source spot and then utilizes the edge pixel information of the recipient area to properly color the area being repaired. Figure 4 shows four potential donor areas. My donor location of choice is usually the forehead, unless it is involved with blemishes. The upper cheek area is my second choice. An area on her arm or shoulder may work out. Finally, any smooth surface on the image (or any open image) will work.

Figure 2

Bobbi’s forehead had enough texture difficulties that I elected to use her right cheek as the donor area. In many places on her face were areas of unerupted irregular areas, which gave her skin a rough appearance.

Smoothing these areas is a simple task for the old doctor tool (see inset). As with the stamp/clone tool, you may choose to have the donor site move with the curser for each fix. I prefer to leave the source where it is for all the fixes, whenever possible.

Baddabing, baddaboom, a click here and a nip there and her face is as clear as a bell. Rough areas are smooth, blemishes are gone and if she had any wrinkling going on, we could have fixed that too.

Skin sample for inset

That pesky piece of dust coming out of her left cheek also had to go. We option-clicked on the gray background and hit the offending dust with the tool, drawing it towards her skin. What’s going on here? The skin color seems to have smeared backward! (Fig. 5)

This drove me nuts for a while until I realized that the healer/doctor was no magician. He works perfectly, within certain parameters. But hit him with a radical color change and many things happen, several of which are bad.

There is an easy work-around here. Isolate the area to be repaired from the color change with the lasso tool (Fig. 6). Now go ahead and fix the area. The other color will not cross the dotted line. To continue into her skin, simply use Ctrl/Cmd/Shift-I to inverse the selection.

Now our girl’s face is pristine. (Fig. 7) We have worked a total of 10 minutes, stopping to make a couple of dozen screen saves along the way.

Figure 4	Figure 5	Figure 6

But why the dull, boring gray background (Fig. 8)?

Glad you asked that question. We have discovered that (for us) a light gray is the best chroma-key background. We have, in stock, literally thousands of backgrounds and scenics that we can put our clients in. Our high school seniors love it.

Figure 7	Figure 8	Figure 9

We normally remove the background color with Select>Color Select, but since we discovered the gray, we’ve gone even simpler. We use the Magic Eraser and eliminate the color that way. And if we find that the erasure has gone into the figure, we use the lasso tool to isolate one from the other.

Figure 10

No matter how well we have selected, there’s going to be a gray edge around the picture object. We have found the following does quite well to get rid of this. 1) Go to select>select layer. This will give you the marching ants around the pixeled area. 2) Go to Selection>Modify Selection> Smooth> 3 to 6 pixels. 3) Go to Select>Select Modify>Contract> 2 Pixels. 4) Go to select>Feather> .3 to .5 pixels (note that is .3 to .5 Pixels, not 3 to 5 pixels). 5) Go Cntrl>Cmd-I to inverse the selection. Hit the delete or clear button. If you want to save this selection as an alpha channel, now is the time.

In the case of Fig. 9, we added in a background that was originally a piece of stand-alone artwork, created in Bryce. We blurred it a bit, because Bryce renditions are tack-sharp and it wouldn’t do to have the background sharper than the foreground.

	Final

Using the Hue/Saturation (Cntrl>Cmd-U) control, we “colorized” the background and rotated the color to a soft tan color. Then we sampled the color of her skin and made a solid overlay of that color to tie everything together.

Finally, we used the newly cleaned image to produce the painter image we call Butterfly Kisses. You can see how important the acne patrol was. (Note tongue firmly implanted in cheek.)

Richard Pahl has achieved the highest accolade, Accolade of Lifetime Excellence, in record time, largely by his adept use of Photoshop and digital photography. Author of numerous articles, he occasionally holds Photoshop seminars at his studio in Okeechobee FL and has recently begun working with ProCreate’s Painter. The newest of 40 national PRCA (Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association) Photographers, he and his wife, Kathy, are branching out and will be doing a lot of Equine and Rodeo Photography.