[bcheung]

Not sure how related this is but seems like the right crowd to ask...

As a photographer who also does programming full time I've been wondering what would need to happen to synthesize skin texture to remove imperfections. Example, removing small scars, wrinkles, etc. Currently I just use the healing brush in Photoshop but wondering if ML can be used to automatically do it.

Does anyone have any recommendations on what sub-fields or papers I could read to get a better idea of what would be involved to create a solution like that?

[whataretensors]

Sounds like a problem for inpainting.

Here's a paper around synthesizing human faces. It includes inpainting http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/seminar2009/papers/VisioFa...

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.07379.pdf this uses a GAN to inpaint with arbitrary data. This is probably a couple of iterations from being easy to implement, as training GANs efficiently and accurately is still a technical challenge.

[shostack]

Not fully automated with ML, but as a fellow photographer I think you'll find tutorials on frequency separation in Photoshop helpful and relevant.

Now if only that existed in Lightroom so I don't need to have a massive PSD and can keep my nice and tiny .dng files.