I ♥ Faces Fix-it Friday

I loved this week! I love really having to FIX a problem photo, rather than just playing around at improving an already good one. This week's little boy has a skin condition on his face, so I set to work to clear that up!

Here's the original:


And my fix:

It's still not perfect, but it's a start.

First, I cropped the image. I decided to keep it in colour because I didn't want to waste those beautiful blue eyes on black & white! Then I went around with the spot healing brush. Anywhere there was flaking white skin or little red bumps, I took them out. Once that was done, I was still left with a lot of red texture around his mouth and cheek, so I made a copy of the layer, then applied gaussian blur to the bottom one. I made the top one a layer mask, and then just painted over the bits where I wanted the gaussian blur to show through.

So now I was left with a smoother face, but still very red. I made another layer copy (I flattened the last two first) and adjusted the red balance on it till the red areas looked normal. This left the rest of the picture very blue, but that's okay, because I just made that top layer into a layer mask again and painted off the blue I didn't want. Flatten again.

I used the clone brush at 20% opacity to paint over areas on his face that still looked uneven. This is a long process! Then I sharpened his eyes and applied a warm layer. The End.