analog

With a fresh pair of eyes on it, I agree. I might go back and soften it a bit later, but I will leave it here for now.

Authentic meaning I actually did it? lol yes, I assure you this is my own work.

The freckles were actually pretty easy to do in concept, but a pain in the ass to execute... basically I used the burn tool set to "shadow" on a very low exposure setting (I think like 5) with a very large (maybe 100), very soft brush to accent parts of the face I wanted to indicate as darker, or more sunken, or add a bit more depth to (like around the eyes and cheek bones). When that was done, I dropped my brush down to a size 5, 0% hardness, and put the burn exposure around 30%.

Then came the pain in the ass... every freckle is hand-applied. I basically just clicked over and over and over, moving the mouse slightly each time... sometimes i'd move the mouse during a click and i'd get a small streak instead of a freckle, and i'd have to back up a few steps, but it wasn't that bad. But yeah, every single freckle (and keep in mind some are much lighter than others, there are many that you can't see as "freckles", per se, but they are there enough to give the skin texture). When I was happy with the freckling, I increased the exposure level just a little and added a few strategic "larger" freckles here and there, because no one has all freckles the same size, some are going to be larger.. and the darker the exposure, the bigger it ultimately look. I also freckled all her skin, and to varying degrees of "freckling", because she would have freckles pretty much all over, but there are normally more freckles on the face than on the chest and neck areas, so I accounted for that when I "freckled" her chest and neck areas after having done the face. I also paid attention to freckle patterns on the face, not just randomly freckling the whole face with the same freckle distribution... there are more or less in some areas.

For the chest reduction, you'll notice the new pic is slightly shorter in width, and that's because I basically lassoed, copied, and pasted each breast individually back over top of itself, then I moved them up to make them look smaller. After I moved them up, I blended the original into the copy on both the skin and the shirt, recreating/changing/shortening cleavage lines on both sides to indicate the cleavage of pushed-up smaller breasts. I also had to change/recreate some shadows here and there, because the larger breasts cast deep shadows in the recesses of the raised shirt... so I had to dial back shadows by adding more skin so it would look like a natural shadow for a shallow breast.

I indicated a bit more tightness in the skin over the sternum, collarbones, and neck areas with a 100 size soft burn tool set to "shadows" and about exposure 8, I think. I played around a bit with the setting in different areas, but it's essentially all between 5 and 10, tops. It's easier to do the shading in small increments so that you can see the shadow develop naturally, rather than rushing in with a 10 or 20 exposure burn tool and harshly dropping hard burns on everything.

Ok here are two files I saved as I went... the top one is after i'd done most of the color/brightness/contrast corrections, and I'd also rounded the jawline already and thickened the eyebrows, but before I had done any of the shadow/freckle work. Note the large shadow the left breast casts under the raised part of the shirt. Now look at the bottom pic.

Smaller breast means less shirt raise, so I did away with the shadow. The layer you can see is a mask I created... sometimes when creating skin to extend into a small space, it's easier to copy and paste the whole area and just create more skin than you need because clone stamp is best used as a wider brush than a scalpel, then put a layer mask on it and use a precise tool to cut and reveal exactly what's needed.



There are no other layers, as everything I did had to be re-blended back into the original... skin that was copied and moved or adjusted was then merged back in and blended again. This is a stark contrast to my "zombie world" pic, which had 12 layers because it had new elements to add in, not just changes that had to be blended in. ("Layers" window made huge so you can see them all at once... pic is NSFW because of the breasts in the zombie pic... http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h2...rs_example.jpg)