Photoshop Creative

Not an easy one, Suzi. Not only it is a difficult skin (details, stains...) but you have also a mix of two sources of light, warm and cool. Luckily, this kind of character can stand a certain amount of roughness.
Softening by blurring changes this character. One trick to mask red veins is often to use hue/saturation on the reds, by increasing lightness and possibly moving very slightly towards yellows. If the color is not satisfactory, the tones might be, so a layer edited like this could be used in luminosity mode. Here, the result was not convicing for me. Various 'degrunge' techniques were not either. The following is the result of a mix of an edit in camera raw and an edit via CleanSkinFX, cited in one recent thread. Using the healing brush more and very patient dodging and burning would be the way to edit it according to your taste.

http://www.prestophoto.com/photos/image/1035592/21411

I can't thank all of you for your help with this. There are so many great ideas.

Here is what I have come up with so far. I used bits and pieces from everyone. John, I did your white balance and painting on blank layer. Geoff, I loved the deep colors of the background and shirt, so used adjust for that then added layer mask and put John and Michel's face back. Michel, I used your saturation and lightness thing. Rusty, there is some of yours in there also but not sure what. Kim, I have not yet had a chance to look at Jen's site but will later today. Shari, I am going to look into that program for sure. Be honest what do you think?? Can I make more inprovements??


before


after

Suzi, I think it looks wonderful.

Thank you, Sunny. It was fun putting everyones ideas together to come up with this.

Yes, Suzi, that's probably as good as it gets. My version was perhaps a bit too stylized and 'gritty' but you would know better what the original was like.

I like it, Suzi,
and I especially like the "backlight halo" in the hair.

When I first learned how to shoot Raw and use ACR, I was enamored with the recovery slider and did everything I could to avoid blown highlights. As I got older and wiser ( ) I came to realize that there is often a place for such highlights.

Rusty

This looked like it might be a good time to try the Soften Skin brush in LR2:



Its the only change I made to the original photo.

And temptation was too great, so I threw in a few more adjustments in LR2:



Did some sharpening on his beard, and then some saturation adjustments and tone curve adjustments. I also did a white balance adjustment off his beard.

Suzi, I think it looks great!

Suzi,

Forgot to add 1 step in my instructions.

Select the sift brush and change the mode to color as well as reduce opacity to 20-30%. Best value may depend on image.

This allows you to paint color on the new layer and retain the underlying skin features - wrinkles.

It works OK the way I posted, but this is better.

Edit:

Select the sift brush . . .

should read

Select the soft brush . . .