Digital Diversity

I see so many professional portrait photography shots around these days. In magazines, on TV and even in peoples homes. People may think most of this is down to the camera taking amazing pictures but the reality is that it comes from a combination of heavy make up and post processing. If you have had a professional photo shoot you may have noticed you have to wear a huge amount of make up. You think you look silly but when the pictures come back you look great. Well its all about covering skin blemishes and smoothing the colour tones. Its all fixed later in post processing in programs like Photoshop.

This tutorial will run through the basic process of retouching portrait photo’s and show you some of the techniques that are used. You can use these on your normal snaps as well. The reason the Pro models wear a lot of make up is to make the post processing easier, so its a balance of the two. Less make up means more post processing.

There are many areas of portrait retouching so in this tutorial I will be concentrating on cleaning up and softening the skin and also whitening the teeth.

I don’t do any portrait photography my self so I once again have to refer to stock.xchange to get an image to use. Its a free stock image site which I find very useful. You will need to create an account but its a quick and painless process. You can find the image for this tutorial here http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1141475

Before you start I suggest you make sure you have already done the following tutorials:
• Layers and their masks
• Basic  photo processing
• Cloning and healing
As they will all be used here.

First up is to correct the levels of the image. Add a levels adjustment layer and move the highlights and shadows sliders in slightly to correct the contrast. Reduce the slight red colour cast by changing the channel to Red and move the shadows slider in a tiny amount.

Next up is to remove the imperfections on the face such as spots and skin blemishes. This is done using the cloning and healing tools. First select the top layer (the adjustment layer) and press Shift + Ctrl + Alt + E to create a new flattened layer at the top. Then create a new blank layer on top of that. Select the healing brush and make sure its hardness is set to 0%. Make sure ‘sample’ is set to ‘Current and Below’ and that you have the top blank layer selected. This means all the cloning and healing will be on a blank layer so it is non-destructive editing. If you make any  mistake you can just delete them  and start again without ruining the main image.

Use the healing brush to remove some of the larger spots. Leave the vain and areas close to the hair alone for now as the healing tool wont work effectively there. The image should now have less of the larger spots and blemishes.

Now select your clone stamp tool.

Using the clone tool on the same layer and a hardness of 0%, carefully get rid of the vein’s on the side of the head and neck.

If yours looks a little bit fake don’t worry to much. Try and get it as realistic as possible but it will be smoothed over later.

The skin in this portrait is very red. We need to tone this down and give it a more natural complexion. This can be done using a Hue / Saturation adjustment layer. Add the adjustment layer and select the Reds channel from the drop down menu. Move the Hue slider to the right (to about +7). This has made all the reds in the image slightly more yellow. As you can see the skin already looks a lot better.

There are still red patches on the cheeks, nose, chin and above the eyes. To remove these duplicate your previous Hue / Saturation adjustment layer. Select Reds from the drop down menu and increase this to 10. Now use the mask so that this only effects the areas that are still red. Use a soft brush so that it blends smoothly.

The end result should have no large red patches and a smooth natural skin tone.

With the large problem areas removed and skin tones corrected its time to smooth over the skin. Create a new blank layer at the top of your layers stack. Select the brush tool. Make sure its hardness is set to 0% and the brushes opacity is set to 10%. Now colour pick an area of the skin that is midway between the light and dark areas.

Using these settings carefully paint over the skin. You will notice the minor blemishes and freckles start to fade away. Don’t go overboard as you will ruin the depth of the face and have a flat image. You can also use this to lift some of the shadows on the face and neck.

The final skin smoothing technique is to add a surface blur. Press Shift + Ctrl + Alt + E to create a new flattened layer at the top of your layers stack.  Go to Filter > Blur > Surface Blur

This opens up the surface blur options window. You have 2 sliders to play with here. Radius and Threshold. Play around with the sliders to see what they do but the settings needed for this image are a Radius of 1 and a Threshold of 8. Click OK.

Once this is done add a mask to the layer and make it all black. This will hide all the blur. Using a white soft brush at 100% opacity, select the mask and start to reveal the blur on the skin. Go over the the skin but be careful on the parts that add depth such as the smile lines in the cheeks. If you blur these then you will tone down the facial depth resulting in a flat looking image.

The last thing to do is whiten the teeth. Add a Hue / Saturation adjustment layer. Use the mask so that these effects will only occur on the teeth. From the drop down menu you will need to alter the saturation of both the Yellows and the Reds till the teeth are nice and white.

Your retouching is now complete.

Here is the original again for comparison.

Tags: adjustment layers, advanced editing, blur, colour correction, colours, contrast, elements, highlights, hue, layers, levels, lighting, masking, masks, photo editing, photography, photoshop, portrait, saturation, shadows, skin, teeth, thoughts, tones, tutorial, tutorials, whitening

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 11:06 and is filed under photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.