Glossy porcelain skin effect in photoshop

I’ve seen a few porcelain effect tutorials for photoshop but none of them really convinced me. So, I found a portrait and started a process of trial and error applying different filters and blending modes. Eventually I achieved the nice glossy effect you can see below.

The first thing you need is a portrait. I used a photo by *faestock which unfortunately is no longer available on DA because she took it off but you can find lots of portraits on sxc.hu or deviantART.

The quality of the photo is not very important here but I would suggest you get a higher resolution one. The details of the skin are not so important because we are going to apply a lot of blurring to make the face as smooth as possible.

Blur softening

Open your photo in photoshop and duplicate it to have one as backup.Turn the duplicated image to black and white and using the Levels, increase the highlights and middle tones, Basically increase the overall contrast.

We are going to use the Surface Blur to soften the skin because it keeps the edges sharp. So, go to Filter>Blur>Gausian Blur. Depending on the resolution of your image you must add more or less blur. Apply the blurring multiple times. You want to make the face as smooth as possible but keeping the edges as sharp as possible by using a small radius and threshold. Also use the Blur Tool (Shift R) with a big soft brush, strength 80-100% and Mode Normal. The advantage of the Blur Tool over the Surface blur is that the blur is only applied on the places that you want so you have more control over the edges of the face using smaller brush sizes.

Eliminate the eyelashes and eyebrows using the Clone Tool (S). This may be a little tricky and it can take a while because you have to be careful not to damage the surrounding areas. I spent about 15 minutes on this step and this is what I got.

The glossy effect

This effect is very easy to obtain using the chrome filter. Duplicate the softened face layer and go to Filter>Sketch>Chrome. Set Detail to 0 and Smoothness to 10. Click OK. After the effect is applied, reduce the layer’s opacity to 10-15% and set Blending Mode to Multiply.

At this point, the face looks almost like it’s dirty because it has too many details. We are going to fix that by hiding some of the details created by the chrome filter and let only the most important ones which will give the glossy effect  and the reflection illusion. We will use a layer mask to hide the details.

Create a Layer Mask for the chrome layer and mask some parts like the lips and under the the mouth to hide some of the details. The details that you have to hide also depend on the photo that you have, the position of the face and the illumination of that face.

That’s it, this is the porcelain effect, its looks pretty cool but I wanted to introduce some color on the image so I made a pair or futuristic robotic eyes.

To create the eye shape use the Elliptical Marquee Tool (M) or the Ellipse Tool (U) and fill it with any color.

Use the following effects to achieve an eye like in the image above. If you use a low resolution image use smaller sizes for the effects.

Inner Shadow

Inner Glow

Color Overlay

This is what you should get:

Create the pupil and fill it with black. The white spotlight was made using the Pen Tool (P). Apply a 1px Gaussian blur to the pupil to soften it a little.

Use a strong white and low opacity brush to make another light on the upper part of the eye. Set Blending Mode to Overlay and lower the opacity to about 50%.

For this step you have to create a custom brush. Grab a small diameter white soft brush and press F5 to open the Brushes Editor. Set Shape Dynamics to 85% and Scattering to 1000%. Paint over the eye on a new layer and set Blending Mode to Overlay. If the particles are not very bright, duplicate the layer.

Use a black soft brush and paint the top part of the eye to create a soft shadow.

Create a new layer and make a selection the size of the eye using the Elliptical Marquee Tool and fill it with black. Keep the selection and go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise. Use Monochrome and Amount 400%. Set Blending Mode to Overlay

Done. Now do the same for the left eye or just duplicate the layers of the right eye (group them first). You can change the color of the eyes simply by changing the color overlay on the first circular shape that we made.

This is the final result. Click for full view.