I’ve been working on my skin retouching techniques to get my images up to better standards. I’ve stumbled on to some good approaches at it but nothing real solid. Apparently the ways of professional retouchers are closely guarded secrets. I’ve been able to dig up bits and pieces of techniques but I’ve yet to find a solid workflow. Here’s an example of something I’ve been working on:

I’m pretty happy with the results but somewhere along the way I lost a bit of the sharpness of the skin texture. I also made the skin so flawless that it now it looks fake. It looks great at 100% but when its reduced, things start to get soft.

Here’s a 100% crop of the cheek area:

See! Skin texture looks great to me at 100%… which makes me think that prints of this image will look great and I shouldn’t worry about what it looks like on screen at reduced sizes. Maybe I should look into different methods of resizing and sharpening.