Digital Diversity

One of the most common tasks in photo retouching is sharpening up the image (or at least parts of an image). No matter what camera you have (or what lens if you have a DSLR) the image will almost always come out a little soft. This Varies from camera to camera and if you have a DSLR you can get sharper results by buying higher quality lenses. Even so, images still tend to need at least a small amount of sharpening no matter what.

This tutorial will go through 3 different methods of sharpening your images. You just need to  find which one suits your needs the most. They all work just fine but have different methods and adaptability.

For this tutorial you will need to have an understanding of the following Photoshop techniques:
Layers and Masks

These 3 methods are:
• The UnSharp mask
• High Pass sharpen
• UnSharp mask plus lighten and darken blend modes split over 2 layers.
(more…)

E3NPFTXFZSNK

In this third instalment of my Portrait re-touching Photoshop tutorials I will be talking about altering the hair. Hair is a big part of some ones over all look and simply changing the colour can give big impact to your photographs.

This tutorial will cover 2 areas. The first is removing stray hairs from around the head and face. The second is changing the colour.

For this tutorial I recommend you have an understanding of the following. Each subject is linked to the appropriate Photoshop tutorial
• Layers and Masks
• Adjustment layers
• Hue / Saturation adjustment layers
• Cloning and healing

(more…)

So you have been out taking photos of your family, friends or even for a client. You get home and you have plenty of decent single portrait shots but not a single decent group shot. They are looking the wrong way or pulling faces, generally not giving you the picture you want.

Well you can always save the day by replacing the heads using some other shots you took that did come out well.

Using a combination of photographs that already match up, colour & light correcting, some clever masking and a bit of cloning you should be able to get a result your happy with.

For this tutorial it will help if you already understand the following.
• Layers and masks
• Adjustment layers and colour correction
• Cloning and healing

The images in this tutorial are the property of Blueberry Moon Photography. She was kind enough to let me use these shots for this tutorial. These in no way represent her high standard of work. You can view her excellent photography work here.

Using this technique you can go from this

To this

(more…)