Portrait retouching skills used for skinning

[OBIO]

I spent a good portion of yesterday using my portrait photography retouching skills to retouch an image for a skin that I am working on for a plane that is still a work in progress. The techniques I used to remove pimples, scars, braces, glare on eye glasses, fly away hair, lint on jackets and dresses, were all put to good use fixing a photo of a painting on the side of a fairly historically significant aircraft. The finished product isn't perfect, but it is close enough for government work. Unless you have been to a museum in Italy (can't remember the name of it) and seen the plane this painting is on, you would never know that some areas of the painting just aren't right.

Here are two screenshots, one of the original photo of the painting, and one of the post-retouch work.

OBIO

[Helldiver]

A very nice job. I'm jealous.

[JSpal]

Did you fill in the areas where the painting on the left is obscured by lettering and the wing strut?

If so, you can't tell at all on the picture on the right that those areas have been retouched.

Nice work!

[OBIO]

Yep, that's what I do. I erase the back ground, then fill in/retouch all the areas that are covered over by lettering and plane parts. Using Photoshop's Clone, Patch and Heal tools, I simply replace the bad areas with stuff copied from good areas and do some blending to get it all to look natural. Using these same techniques, I was retouching school pictures....taking kids with horribly bad complexions and severe acne and making them look like they had never had a pimple before in their life. For the fun of it, I took a gal who looked like a back alley hooker and made her look like a super model, then took a gal who looked like a super model and made her look like a back alley hooker. I did this on my lunch break..but the supervisor was less than happy. She was afraid that the wrong image would be printed and shipped to the customer.

OBIO

[lifejogger]

That is one heck of a retouch OBIO, actually it looks like a complete restoration. Good job.

[EMatheson]

Very nice... but I see where it could be further restored... you have fissures on the third ribbon up, right side, and the shape of the outer curve bottom ribbon left side does not match the photo...
are those the bits that you mention as "just aren't right"?

Of course, this is only because I took your words as a challenge... it took me a good 10 minutes cross-referencing the images to notice the differance!

[OBIO]

Yep, EMatheson, those are the two places that could be better...and they may be better before it is all said and done. I spent nearly 7 hours working on the restoration/retouch...that includes three majors goof ups were I had to start over from scratch. And after that length of time replacing as little as 1 pixel worth of color at a time....it kind of gets on your nerves.

Since the plane that this painting is being used on is still in an early beta form, I have time to fix those two areas and get it looking just right....which I feel that it needs to be since that image is on the plane in three places.

OBIO