Wavelet Decompose (Again)

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:

• Skin Smoothing & Retouching
• Sharpening and Local Contrast Enhancement
• Removing Stains/Colors/Tones

Getting Around in GIMP - Skin Retouching (Wavelet Decompose)

Image courtesy of (and copyright) Kelly Ealy (mouse over for original).

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)

Then I found the Wavelet Decompose plugin, and the search was mostly over for me.

Hoodie by Erik Olsson (mouse over for original)

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.