Portrait blemishes and low pass

[tomczak]

I'm still trying to mimic this technique

viewtopic.php?t=894#p4271

Blending in low pass looked better I think, as one could regulate how much high frequency details like skin pores to preserve

I've been experimenting with the detail tool, and I wonder if some kind of suppressing/emphasising low/med/high frequency bands in-situ option would have desirable outcomes?

Or maybe as Pierre suggested allowing AS blur tab to threshold low roughness like the sharpen tab does?

viewtopic.php?t=4056

[tomczak]

Clearly this is an effect you would only want to apply selectively to faces for example.

I think yes - the Detail Tool is probably the best place for it. For the latest Valentine's projects it ended up being some 800 images, all with a face in them. And it wasn't artificially beautifying - more like protecting from being unduly emphasised by increased contrast and sharpening (and bad light).

I used the Advanced Brightness Curve with Mask's Paint instead of the Detail Tools because it was faster to do a credible job by suppressing the high/mid frequency details this way, and I didn't mind smearing high frequency details much because the down-sampling has probably already done it.

Another idea: maybe restoring high/low pass blending could do the trick?

[tomczak]

Nothing new, but my attempt of simulating what a band pass (for face blemishes for instance) could look like. The settings could be refined and the red channel is blown in the sample image, but it's all in the spatial domain. The guided/bilateral blurring with its blur threshold is even more flexible than the original low-pass blending as the major edges can be protected in one go.

p.s. Also not sure if the Hard Light is the best blending method at the and of this process. Soft Light or Linear Light may work too.

[tomczak]

I was experimenting with the Detail tool again, and one reoccurring issue was this: if the source area is smaller than my target (i.e. I want to transplant details from relatively small available source area over and over again over a larger target area), how do I 'decouple' the brushes? Can be done by repeatedly re-centering the source with shift-clicking on it and doing just small target areas at the time, while watching the source brush not to cross the source area boundaries. The idea above on low/mid/high pass filtering at the target as an alternative to cloning high pass from the source still sounds enticing, I think (though I know little about what may be be involved).