I've been teaching myself fashion/beauty photography recently (I mostly shoot weddings) and came across this image recently. Any idea how this was processed? How does one get such a beautiful skin tone?
To get even skin tones properly, you put away the clone tool, healing brushes, and any blurring technique or plug in.
Everything is done by dodging and burning. Many ways to D&B. I use curve layers. It's not hard but takes forever.
This example is average. They've added noise to fake skin texture in about 50% of the image.
A beauty dish with a reflector underneath is often used for lighting. The dish helps bring out the skin texture apposed to a softbox.
The goal from capture to finish edit is to get and maintain, even increase the amount of detail in the skin. Good make up is also key.
Looks like a beauty dish .. to get virtually anyone's skin to look like this you need to clone out the bigger imperfections then dodge & burn to get an even skin tone .. then contour to shape the face.
The same guy who put out the very funny faux Photoshop vid a couple of weeks ago (link is around here somewhere) also has an excellent skin tutorial that covers just how this look is achieved.
From observing her eyes, it translates to light from a beauty dish. Reason for that, over a soft box or umbrella is because the light is actually a hard light and bounces to produce more coarse skin details(hence why fashion photographers favor beauty dishes in contrary). Dodge and burn is primarily executed to shape geometry and occlude certain imperfections. What we have here, and what you wanted to know... has more to do with faking skin details.
I can tell by the repetitive details artifacting that he opted for noise selections, rather than the gaussian blur technique. Like Dave had mention(which I totally agree with), this is a mediocre example of how professional retouching is practiced. If ya interested in rectifying proper techniques, try out the forum at retouch pro or study some of Amy Dresser's work. Hope that helps.
I'm with innovis in that I see some added noise. The retouch is good. Start with a good mua, good light and good skin, and go from there. There are hundreds of retouching tutorials online.
