Episode 161: Playing with Wavelets

The human skin isn’t as smooth and even as it used to be. At least if you are older than 12 or so. One way to keep up the illusion of eternal youth is image manipulation. Today I explore one way to smooth skin and keep it looking natural. That’s the problem with overly done make up and postprocessing – if you overdo it, faces look like made out of plastic.
There is a difference in size between “good” and “bad” skin structures. The Wavelet Decompose plugin can divide an image into “scales” and a “residual”. Each scale contains a part of the image with structures of a similar size. If you work on one of these scales, you are changing only these structures, not the smaller and larger ones. The plugin website does a better job of explaining this.

The show starts with a look back at Photivo and some comments I got in their Flickr group. “What’s wrong with some people?” – Well, some people haven’t read the Nettiquette……

The TOC
00:20 Photivo revisited
01:25 GUI setup of Photivo
03:00 Right mouse button everywhere!
03:00 Detail curve depending on colour
05:20 Portrait “Make up”
06:40 Smoothing skin with Gaussian Blur
07:40 Masking out the eyes of the blur
08:20 Wavelet decompose
09:35 Plugin registry
11:35 Decomposing the image
13:20 A lot of ways to proceed
14:00 Painting with gray to hide details
14:40 Changing the opacity of some of the scales
15:15 Adding a layer mask
17:00 Looking at the scales in normal mode
17:25 Increasing contrast with a curve …
18:50 …sharpens the image
19:00 There is much more!