Yes, more fun things you can do with Wavelet Scales.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a bit (or just read through any of my previous postprocessing tutorials), then you should be familiar with Wavelet Decompose. I use them all the time for skin retouching as well as other things. I find that being able to think of your images in terms of detail scales opens up a new way of approaching problems (and some interesting solutions).
A short discussion on the GIMP Users G+ community led the member +Marty Keil to suggest a tutorial on using wavelets for other things (particularly sharpening). Since I tend to use wavelet scales often in my processing (including sharpening), I figured I would sit down and enumerate some ways to use them, like:
Showing posts with label skin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label skin. Show all posts
Getting Around in GIMP - Blue Channel Check Layer (Retouching)
In my previous post for the Open Source Portrait (Postprocessing), I had mentioned during the skin retouching in GIMP section that there was a method that I had used in the past for helping to make skin imperfections visible for healing.
It is a similar method described by Calvin Hollywood (again), that he calls "Check Layers". He explains what they are and how he uses them in the video below:
If you don't want to watch the video, the basic idea came about from my experience when converting images to B&W. That is, the Blue channel of a color image is not flattering at all for skin (unless you have flawless skin). Conversely, the Red channel usually has very pretty skin tones (and hence it's common to overlay a Red channel on your image and set it to Overlay blend mode to enhance this).
What Calvin Hollywood shows in his video is using a Photoshop adjustment layer to turn the image into grayscale, and to turn down the contribution from the Red channel, while increasing the Blue channel. This results in a more contrasty image that favors the blue channels, and will make skin imperfections much more visible.
The problem is that we don't have adjustment layers in GIMP...
The rest of my GIMP tutorials can be found here:
Getting Around in GIMP
Getting Around in GIMP
It is a similar method described by Calvin Hollywood (again), that he calls "Check Layers". He explains what they are and how he uses them in the video below:
If you don't want to watch the video, the basic idea came about from my experience when converting images to B&W. That is, the Blue channel of a color image is not flattering at all for skin (unless you have flawless skin). Conversely, the Red channel usually has very pretty skin tones (and hence it's common to overlay a Red channel on your image and set it to Overlay blend mode to enhance this).
What Calvin Hollywood shows in his video is using a Photoshop adjustment layer to turn the image into grayscale, and to turn down the contribution from the Red channel, while increasing the Blue channel. This results in a more contrasty image that favors the blue channels, and will make skin imperfections much more visible.
The problem is that we don't have adjustment layers in GIMP...
Getting Around in GIMP - Skin Retouching (Wavelet Decompose)
I have looked around quite a bit for a good method in GIMP to smooth skin for portrait work. I did find a few tutorials, but they all were mainly concerned with using Gaussian blur with a layer mask to "smooth" the skin. The results were almost always less than satisfactory.
The rest of my GIMP tutorials are all listed here: Getting Around in GIMP
For more examples of this technique at work, have a look at:
my recent shoot with Mairi!
Want to see Wavelet scales as part of a complete portrait retouching workflow? Check here:
The Open Source Portrait (Postprocessing)
For more examples of this technique at work, have a look at:
my recent shoot with Mairi!
Want to see Wavelet scales as part of a complete portrait retouching workflow? Check here:
The Open Source Portrait (Postprocessing)
Then I found the Wavelet Decompose plugin, and the search was mostly over for me.
I thought it might be helpful to walk through the theory as I approach it for skin retouching/smoothing, and how Wavelet Decompose fits into my workflow.
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