I think your result shows too many harsh transitions between regions. Banding for want of a better way of putting it.
Here is the approach I'd use applied to one of your images :
The procedure is :
At each step duplicate the result layer. This makes backtracking easy and allows opacity blending when needed.
Take the levels dropper and try a white balance of the whites of the eye. This is a surprisingly effective way to get a quick and pleasing white balance.
It's sometimes useful to adjust curves. This can help flatten tones.
- Step 3 : Use the free select tool to choose the areas of the skin away from key features. Combine selections by adding or subtracting as needed.
Note that you should avoid edges and strong lines - these are features - not problems. GIMP lets you easily add and subtract selections so use that.
You do not need to select up to the edges of anything. You can correct edges later when you have the overall done. In practice you usually don't need to do much fixing up for anything but the most demanding clients - people who will view at 100%, like magazines and people printing BIG.
- Step 4 : Feather the selected region
Feathering creates a boundary region between slected and unselected where an effect is applied less. It avoids harsh transitions been processed and unprocessed areas which are instantly visible to a human eye. Default settings usually work fine.
- Step 5 : Duplicate your layer
We do this before we adjust because we expect to blend the adjusted layer with the existing one - we want two copies of the existing one as well as our adjusted layer.
This will only affect the selected area. Not too much or smooth becomes cartoon-like !
Of course you can use any blur you like - gausssian is what's handy.
- Step 7 : Adjust the opacity of the blurred layer and merge it down with the layer below ( the unblurred one ).
- Step 8 : Use the Smudge Tool to smooth any remaining regions, particularly the boundary regions outside the area you changed.
This approach has several steps where you can control the extend of the smoothing.
The final result has kept the features we want completely intact - the mouth, the eyes, the hair. We haven't needed to mask heavily we just used a simple freehand select. We're not relying on plug-ins or non0standard tools, so this works just as well with Photoshop as GIMP. Lastly we respected the lady's look and appearance without making her look like she cakes on make-up ( your opinion may differ from authors
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StephenG
Pentax K100D
Fuji S3 Pro
Fuji S9600
