Remove facial hair / stubble in Affinity Photo?

[Ulysses]

I came across a tutorial for reducing 5 o'clock shadow or stubble from a photo. Can anyone help me accomplish the same thing in Affinity Photo? 

In particular, there's a step in this Adobe Photoshop tutorial (link below) where a "pattern" is created, and then the Healing Brush makes use of this pattern to effectively reduce the stubble. I'm not sure there is such a feature in Affinity Photo for creating a pattern that would be usable by the Healing tools. 

 

Or..... as often seems to happen inside Affinity Photo, maybe there's a better way than the Adobe approach. Thanks for any good input anyone can provide. 

 

*** Photoshop tutorial: Reducing 5 O’Clock Shadow And Beard Stubble In Photoshop ***

[toltec]

There is certainly a simpler and quicker method in Photo, I don't know about better?

First thing is to apply a Dust and Scratches Live Filter layer and adjust the slider until the stubble disappears.

Select the filter layer and invert it, Layer > Invert which effectively removes the dust and scratches effect.

Set the Dust and Scratches layer blend mode to Lighten.

On the filter layer (built in mask), paint over the stubble using a paint brush with white paint, which paints the dust and scratches effect just where you want. 

A little bit of retouching does no harm.

Would have been a little bit better if I had the original image.

 

[Ulysses]

Thanks for spending some time thinking about this, @toltec. Much appreciated. 

What you described seems to take into account the Dust and Scratches approach mentioned in the Photoshop tutorial I linked to in the original post. But it doesn't account for the use of a Healing Brush pattern. I believe the tutorial's technique might perform a bit better in the end by saving some of the skin texture while removing much of the stubble. Ultimately, that's what I want to figure out here: How to remove the stubble / shadow while retaining the appearance of normal skin texture. 

[galileo]

let’s make things easier and simpler. You can do everything you see on the tutorial, except from the pattern. Wich is just a copy/paste or a duplicate layer,  then masked only where needed. 

 

So use dust filter in live mode, duplicate main layer+love filter, apply a mask

 

 

[toltec]

52 minutes ago, Ulysses said:

Thanks for spending some time thinking about this, @toltec. Much appreciated. 

What you described seems to take into account the Dust and Scratches approach mentioned in the Photoshop tutorial I linked to in the original post. But it doesn't account for the use of a Healing Brush pattern. I believe the tutorial's technique might perform a bit better in the end by saving some of the skin texture while removing much of the stubble. Ultimately, that's what I want to figure out here: How to remove the stubble / shadow while retaining the appearance of normal skin texture. 

I went for removing much more of the stubble than the tutorial version. If you look, there is also some very ugly, mottled black and white stuff left on the subjects chin.

tutorial version

I cleaned it up more but there was not much more skin detail to work with in the first place. I expect it might be a bit better with a similar amount of stubble left in, or a bit more light reflection. A matter of taste I suppose.

It was a bit hard working on a fairly low resolution web version. Better to work higher and reduce later. I would be interested to try with a better image, if you have one.

[toltec]

6 minutes ago, galileo said:

let’s make things easier and simpler. You can do everything you see on the tutorial, except from the pattern. Wich is just a copy/paste or a duplicate layer,  then masked only where needed. 

 

So use dust filter in live mode, duplicate main layer+love filter, apply a mask

 

 

Would love to see a sample image of that. New techniques are always great to learn 

[Ulysses]

7 hours ago, galileo said:

So use dust filter in live mode, duplicate main layer+love filter, apply a mask

This is actually the approach I've been using because of my desire to retain as much skin texture as possible. I believe the key is going to be the recipe for the Live Dust and Scratches filter, which will probably vary a little bit from image to image.

 

The difficult part is getting the "shaved" skin to look less stubbly, while also looking like real skin with some degree of texture. I'll also try to pay closer attention to the finer detail as I paint back certain areas. 

[Ulysses]

9 hours ago, toltec said:

I went for removing much more of the stubble than the tutorial version. If you look, there is also some very ugly, mottled black and white stuff left on the subjects chin.

I cleaned it up more but there was not much more skin detail to work with in the first place. I expect it might be a bit better with a similar amount of stubble left in, or a bit more light reflection. A matter of taste I suppose.

It was a bit hard working on a fairly low resolution web version. Better to work higher and reduce later. I would be interested to try with a better image, if you have one.

@toltec it seems for my purposes your modified approach is working best, at least for what I'm trying to achieve while retaining some skin texture. 

It's also likely that to achieve best results, a global solution may not work quite as well as paying attention to specific  zones of the face one at a time. For example, stubble is rarely exactly even, and also the angles of certain portions of the face may present stubble more prominently than in other areas thus requiring more aggressive adjustments.

This has been an interesting practical exercise. Thanks for all the input.

[bugmanmd]

On 6/22/2018 at 2:39 AM, galileo said:

So use dust filter in live mode, duplicate main layer+love filter, apply a mask

 

 

Above posts are 3 yrs old now  - sorry I don't fully understand the quote above --

here's what I do understand so far:

1. duplicate original photo layer
2. add dust and scratches live filter layer, bring the radius up until the stubble disappears
3. set the blend mode of dust and scratches layer to "lighten"
4. invert the dust and scratches layer
5. paint over the areas where you want to remove stubble, with white paint brush on the "dust scratch" layer to remove the stubble.

But like the posts above me asked, what can you do after that to restore some SKIN texture to those areas, without showing the stubble?

the comment above by galileo hints that there is a way to do this, but I can't figure out how, from the brief description.

can anyone give me some elaboration / clarification? If I duplicate the main layer and live filter that removed the stubble, how do I use that to restore skin texture?

[smadell]

This whole convoluted method of creating a pattern layer, using it as a healing brush, dust and scratches, and so forth. Way too complicated. Why not just use the Healing Brush straight up?

I created a new Pixel layer, set the Healing Brush to "Current Layer and Below" and brushed away the stubble, using nearby skin for color and texture. I set that new pixel layer's Blend Options to show up only when the Underlying Layer was dark, and got the following. This took me all of about 4 minutes.