I've been sitting by my laptop with the Wacom tablet for maybe 7 hours straight, teaching myself better ways to retouch skin. I don't think I've ever shown you a before and after images this brutal, so here goes nothing.
It's no secret (okay maybe it's a bit of a secret as almost every photo of me is photoshopped) that I've struggled with acne for years and it's a bane of my fucking existence, especially as I love to create self portraits. I'm doing everything humanly possible to fix my skin but there is no way in hell I can go without using Photoshop, not with the type of photography I do which is mostly very harsh light. I love the artistic effect of hard light, which this photo btw is not, but it's an absolute nightmare to my skin.
I have had basically the same skin retouch process for years and years; healing tool mainly, and dodge and burn to accentuate shadows and highlights, and while it has worked to a certain extent, it's never been great and the process has been painstakingly slow. I have discarded hundreds of pictures, or not even take them at all, just because there was no way that I could retouch my skin enough with my skills.
This evening I was in the right mindset and started to research better ways to retouch skin, and thank god for Youtube, it's full of amazing tutorials. I had heard about frequency separation, and dodge and burn with curve layers, so those were what I started to search for. Even before the first frequency separation tutorial was done and I was trying it out on this very same image, I was basically crying happy tears. I realised it would make a world of difference to how I would edit my photos from now on, and I could finally get results I would be happy with. My only regret is that I didn't learn these things earlier.
And here is the brutal before, so you can see the huge difference:
PS. Those who say bad skin and fat are normal and every human is beautiful, you can go fuck yourself.
