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Author Topic: C1 skin smoothing.  (Read 3463 times)

Hywel

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C1 skin smoothing.
« on: April 19, 2016, 06:32:17 am »

Hi All,

 I am moving over to C1 following the discontinuation of Aperture. There's a few Aperture features that I'm trying to figure out how to replicate sensibly within C1 and my Google-fu isn't up to figuring out the answers. I wonder if anyone can help?

I've figured out the heal/repair/clone equivalents, and local adjustments generally (which work very well in C1).

What I've not figured out is the equivalent of skin smoothing. In my Aperture workflow I used Imagenomic Portraiture plugin to apply a basic, subtle overall skin smoothing to a batch of images. I then went through with the repair and skin smoothing brushes in Aperture to fine tune image by image.

I can't quite get my head around how to do something like that in C1. Can anyone help?

Would it work to make a new layer, make a colour-based selection to grab skin tones, then use negative clarity and detail to do an overall skin smooth? If one does that, can one lift and stamp to all images in the set (assuming a fairly broad colour selection for skin, and similar lighting and colours for all images in a set)? Can you do a colour-based selection that way?

Is there then a local way to intensify the effect in a simple manner? (Like by setting the selection opacity of the original effect to 40% and using a brush to intensify it to higher percentages where needed)?

I need to process thousands of images per month in an efficient way and I'm doing my level best to avoid Photoshop and Lightroom because I hate the UI sooo much...

If I had one request for C1 next version it would be skin softening sliders as an overall effect. Ideally working like portraiture with a small, medium and large detail preservation sliders and an overall amount slider, plus fine tuning for skin tone selection where needed- but for me a generous "it's somewhere in the range of human skin tones" default would do the trick most of the time. Then a simple way of applying it as a local effect on top of the existing global skin smoothing.

I'm not speaking here about skin colour alterations (grading) which everything I found on the web seemed to think constituted skin smoothing or retouching.

I'm talking about the digital equivalent of diffusion in front of the lens, a subtle blur on the skin tones to counteract the unfortunate tendency of non-AA-filter high detail cameras like the A7Rii to turn every skin pore into a crater and every minor wrinkle or blemish into a mountain, especially in directional light.

Does anyone do this routinely in C1 and if so are you willing to share your recipe? I can't get my head around it.

Cheers, Hywel



« Last Edit: April 19, 2016, 07:03:18 am by Hywel »
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Doug Peterson

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Re: C1 skin smoothing.
« Reply #1 on: April 19, 2016, 04:24:20 pm »

Options include:
- negative clarity (usually applied locally)
- negative structure (usually applied locally)
- skin tone luminance uniformity (usually applied locally)

Using color editor to create a mask based on skin tone is a good way to get an initial mask.

These are covered in depth during our Capture one masters program. Some overview-level information can be found on Phase One YouTube page or in the user manual.

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