superfrasky

I am attempting softening the skin and that the sternum's bones not be noticeable . Somebody can telling me technique to follow. Thanks friends.

Welles

Are you using Photoshop CS? If so, I'd suggest trying to work with the Patch tool for a start. Check Destination and select an area of smooth skin. Drag that over the area you wish to affect. Experimentation is in order.

superfrasky

I dont know how to do it........ |

Stroker

A great deal of the trick is in luminosity.
Probably best to think in terms of high frequency and low frequency.

Once you nail the lum, shouldn't take much to fix hue and sat.
Or hue and sat first, then lum.

I'm on my way to the office.
In the meantime, start thinking about high/low frequencies as presented in this:
http://www.3dgate.com/techniques/200...0625hajba.html

Welles

Well, I gave the Patch tool a try and here's what I came up with. A little tweaking and its pretty good, I think. The patch tool is very simple. For setup I used destination. You can see the setup in my Process image.

First draw a selection around the area you wish to use. (That is the Start image.) Then you drag the selected area over the area you wish to affect and watch the magic occur. In the process picture you see the last placement of the patch selection.

Meanwhile I'm off to study Stroker's tutorial suggestion.

Stroker

No! Not Patch/Heal on RGB!
Bad, Welles. Bad. Go lie down.

Personal preference thing. I don't like how Patch/Heal works on RGB one bit. It does funky things when you use it on the 'whole'. I recommend using Patch/Heal on 'individual' things. You'll see what I mean in a few minutes.

What we will be doing is high/low frequency on the lum channel. So, the first thing to do is to extract luminosity.

Copy photo
Edit > Fill
Use: Black, White, or 50% Grey
Mode: Saturation

Once you do that, you will be left with Photoshop's flavor of luminosity.
Copy it so you have two copies.
The bottom copy will be the low frequencies and the top one will be the high frequencies.

Time to look at the attachment.
Believe me, real quick-n-sleazy.

Upper-left: Low Frequencies.
Did some Gaussian Blur and a little bit of painting to even things out where Gauss didn't even things out. Sometimes you can be sloppy and sometimes you have to be careful. Weird.

Upper-Right: High Frequencies
Ran High Pass around 4. When you do that, there will probably be some subdued medium frequencies that you want to get rid of. For getting rid of the medium frequencies, I used Patch. This is the level that I recommend Patch/Heal.

Lower-Left: Adding Frequencies
Here they are put back together. High frequency layer clipped to the low and set to Linear Light at 50%. Feel free to try other blending modes and opacities.

Lower-Right: Final
Here it is all set to Luminosity. As you can see, the saturation and hue needs some work. But fixing hue and sat is fairly easy compared to lum. Besides, we've got a solid start on fixing this thing as a whole.

Deal with hue and sat tomorrow.
Or maybe the next day.
Or maybe somebody will beat me to the punch.

Welles

Woof [bustagut] So much for an amateur effort.

Stroker

In case you couldn't tell, I have issues with Patch. It's one of those 'high level' tools and you can't always tell what it's going to do. When using it for large, gross fixes, it can do some really weird things. For that reason, I prefer to use it at the 'lower levels'. I've heard that the Patch tool in PS CS can be extremely weird at times. Causing bizarre rainbows and things.

Fine for the little fixes, but not the big ones.

Make sense?
(Of course, personal preference. If your Patch-style Kung Fu is good, go for it.)

Back to fixing the ribs. In particular, the hue and sat after messing around with luminosity. Lot's of different ways, but let's do something that is rather simple and straight-forward.

New layer above all of it.
Set blending mode to Colour.
Paint away.

I usually use Paintbrush with opacity around 50% or so for this kind of painting.
Also, use alt + click to sample colours from 'good' flesh.
Also, not a bad idea to have Colour palette open and set to HSB.
Colour mode is Hue & Sat (how convenient), so you only really need to pay attention to those two.
For this in particular, I like Hue around 3 and Sat around 25.

Caveat
In general, you can usually be really sloppy with hue and satuartion. However, the human brain doesn't always see things the way a computer sees the data. Sometimes a tiny little shift in sat can cause the brain to see a significant shift in hue. A classic example of this is veins. The brain will see veins as a shade of blue, but the computer will see red with low sat.
Just something to watch out for.

In the end, I'm a big fan of tearing apart and fixing the little things.
Tore the photo apart into colour (hue and sat), and luminosity.
Even tore the luminosity apart into high and low frequencies.
Didn't tear it apart as deep as I usually go, though, but tore it apart enough.

I love it.

The Coach

I think Welles idea behind his correction isn't that bad. Whether he should use the patch tool, I have my doubts about that too.

I personally think a combination of different techniques is more effective for this image.

Quite interesting approach you're using Stroker, there's always something in your posts that makes me think and that's good.

I hope that you don't mind me saying so, but I don't think your technique works very well in this particular example (although it could be used as part of the solution). The blurring has removed large and eye catching details that shouldn't be removed (B) or introduced shading that shouldn't be there, because you've introduced an unnatural looking bump (anatomy wise) in skin area A

Like I said, I would advice to approach this more as a painter, using reference images if you have to, copying/pasting/patching/cloning/blurring/blending/channels/filters/brushing or whatever you need to do to make it look like a natural looking chest.

Sometimes as a Photoshop user we have to admit that there is no simple approach to solve a problem and that we have to think as a digital painter instead, with the main difference that we can use reference imagery that can be used in our fix.

Anyway, that?s the way I look at it.

Stroker

Like I said, quick-n-sleazy.
I could have done a better job, but I'm not interested right about now.
Maybe next time when I'm not dealing with rampant illness (3 out of 4).