Best method for blending skin?

[Ikarus]

I don't have any links to tutorial right now, but you have you tried using a layer mask to blend one color into another. You can use a gradient on the layer mask to make the transition nice and smooth.

[thistly]

Are you talking about a digitally painted face or photo blending?

[Whipyo]

The way I blend skin tones is by cloning using a large soft brush with a low opacity. Try 10% opacity as a starting point.

You need to gradually clone the darker areas over the lighter areas and vice versa. This effectively blends the tones together.

If your image is grainy and your blended tones become too soft (ie. lose too much grain) you can add some grain back into the softened ares using the following technique:

1. Create a new layer and fill with 50% grey. (Command-F5 on mac to bring up your fill dialogue box and select 50% gray from the pulldown.)

2. Set the grey layer to Overlay mode.

3. Add noise to this layer. About 10-15%.

4. Apply gaussion blur to this layer. Basically the more blur, the chunkier your grain will look. Try and get it looking a similar size to your existing grain in your image. Try between .3 to 2 pixels.

5. Mask your whole layer off with a layer mask. Hold option and click the Add Layer Mask button. All your grain will now disappear.

6. Using a large soft brush with a low opacity, paint white onto your layer mask over your softened areas. This will reveal the grain in those areas and help your cloned ares blend in with the rest of your image.

Hope this helps.

[dave247]

sorry, i meant in digital painting..

i saw a wip of a face and the person painted a base color of pinkish colour and then a much lighter pale yellow color.. then in his tutorial he said to "blend" the colours in.. he didnt say what tools he used or how he did it, but the next pic has very smooth transitions and looked really good.. i just wanted to learn the best method to blend colours for digital painting.

usually, i have tried to use the smudge tool, but it doesnt do very good job of blending since it seems to create a "wake" in the smudge path... i could be doing something wrong though.

[EricChadwick]

Many ways to do this. I just make a selection of the area, with the select tool set to a generous Feather, then I filter it with Gaussian Blur.

[csgirl]

Enayla has a great tutorial on this: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=253711

[ub52]

You should really check Nebezial's tutorial thread here:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=259286&page=1&pp=15.

He uses strickly Photoshop and is an absolute master with it. I've learned more from his thread than anywhere else on CGTalk.

-ub52

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