Texturing Skin in Adobe Photoshop, Part 3

Tutorial: Page (1) of 1 - 03/24/05

Texturing Skin in Adobe Photoshop, Part 3 Creating freckles, blemishes and sun damage By Dave Nagel In the two previous articles in this series on texturing skin for 3D models, we've created the basics of a skin texture using paint brushes in Adobe Photoshop. These basics include the base skin, as well as some other surface characteristics, such as translucence and veins. Now we'll move on and take a look at the creation of additional surface details, including skin blemishes, sun damage and freckles.

If you haven't done so already, you should probably go back and review the two previous articles in this series.

? Part 1: Creating the base skin texture
? Part 2: Adding surface details

And, of course, in order to complete this new tutorial, you'll need to download my set of brushes for Photoshop that we're using to create the texture.

Download: Nagel Series 27 Brushes (160 KB)

For this tutorial, we're going to focus on the shoulder area of our subject and introduce various sorts of skin damage and wear, as well as freckles. (Not to place freckles in the same category as skin blemishes; it's just that they're created in a similar way.) Open the texture that you've created so far, and, just to make things simple, flatten the image so that you don't have extra layers to deal with. Here's what we're starting with in Photoshop.

And here's what our base texture looks like applied to my model.

Basic sun damage
We'll begin modifying this texture with some basic sun damage. This process, depending on how you apply your brushes, can manifest effects ranging from a slight sunburn to full-blown, decades-long sun exposure. To begin, select the brush called NagelSeries27-17.

This is a large brush that will scatter light and dark patches over the surface of the texture, and you may want to adjust its master diameter a bit to get a size that works well with your particular image. In my case, for the first step, I'm going to resize the diameter to 71.

I'm also going to set my current color to a violet-purple shade with the HSB values of 291, 91, 72.

The first step here will be to create a new layer and set its blending mode to Color Dodge. Then begin painting over the area where you want the sun damage to appear. This will have a subtle effect, but it's important for the next step to lighten up this area with the Color Dodge layer.

Now add a second layer, and set its blending mode to Color Burn. I'm going to use the same brush, but I'll decrease its master diameter to 51 and alter some of its parameters in the Scatter category. I'm going to turn the Count down to 1 and change the scatter amount to 383 on both axes. And I'm also going to change the color to 20, 93, 43 (in HSB values). Then I'll paint lightly on the area I want affected by the sun damage.

And here's the result.

Adding blemishes to the sun damge
I can also increase the effect dramatically (adding blemishes) by painting with more pressure on the layer, producing something like this.

And then I can highlight the blemishes further by adding a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/Contrast), as in the following example.

And this give me a much more harsh result, accentuating the blemishes on my subject. Play around witht he opacity of each layer to fine-tune this for the result you desire.

Making freckles
Finally, if I don't want to create sun damage, but would rather just add freckles to this area, I'll use the same brush with a master diameter of 51. I'll cut out the Color Dodge layer, and I'll do my painting on a Color Burn layer using a grayish brown, in my case 33, 26, 32 (in HSB values). A few quick swipes of the brush gives me this.

And here's the result on the model.

Next time around we'll take a look at adding wrinkles and skin creases to the model. If you have any questions int he meantime, be sure to visit me in the Adobe Photoshop forum by clicking here.

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