GIMP Tutorial - naturalistic skin and eye retouching

This video has instructions in the ANNOTATONS so if you want to read them, make sure you have annotations switched on. Click SHOW MORE below to see more IMPORTANT information on this tutorial. This is GIMP tutorial showing how to do some lovely naturalistic retouching making sure not to lose natural skin textures. For this tutorial you will need the G'MIC plugin available here: gmic.sourceforge.net/gimp.shtml

You can also view my new tutorial which shows how to install G'MIC for GIMP 2.8 here: youtube.com/watch?v=TrMEeGqBS2o

GIMP can be downloaded free here gimp.org

Unfortunately despite the fact that this video is in HD, the image of the final result is not as good as the actual edited image. So with that in mind, you can view a high quality version of the before and after shots side by side here: coastalartgroup.freeola.net/data/_uploaded/imag…

First of all, I wish to thank all commenters who have thanked me for posting this tutorial. I am very grateful for these comments.

However, this video unfortunately seems to generate more silly, idiotic and irrelevant comments than any of my other video tutorials put together. Of course I want to warn those people that I BLOCK ALL MORONS AND TROLLS and delete their comments. So beware!!!! Perhaps it's because editing of the human face is seen by some as controversial. I did not make this video to suggest that you should edit faces in this way - this is to show some of the techniques that can be used - for educational purposes to aid those using GIMP. I want to reiterate that you do not have to do this to someone's photo - if you don't like this type of editing then I humbly suggest you don't do it.

If you want to discuss the ethics of photomanipulation, then this is NOT the place to do so. There are plenty of forums all over the internet for this type of discussion. If you want to discuss the technical aspects of this tutorial or you are having problems then of course you may comment. But PLEASE KEEP IT RESPECTFUL. I also ban people who swear on all my video comments and I also BAN ALL SPAMMERS!!!!

Also be aware that this video shows several techniques in GIMP. Since this video is for educational purposes I am not suggesting that you have to use all of these techniques on a photo. You can for instance choose just to do the skin retouching, or you could choose not to do the eye retouching. In GIMP you can also reduce the intensity of the edits by reducing the opacity of the edited layers, so you can make the editing much more subtle.

Special Note on the Ethics of Photomanipulation: I do not condone the editing of celebrities to make them look better than reality, or making them look thinner than a skinned rat - the editing that is frequently seen in the press and media. The image editing I do condone is when adding what amounts to little more than a touch of make-up. My ethos is that something that resembles plastic surgery is probably not going to look good anyway.