Digital Diversity

A common question I get seen asked is about how to adjust skin tones in a photo. This can be anything from someone coming out looking a bit overly red to hiding a rash that isn’t normally there.

There are many ways to fix these things but the method I will show you is simple and fast. A few adjustment layers with some masking can fix all sorts of issues like these in no time at all.

The most common people to ask this question are people photographing newborns. The Reason for this is that newborns often have bruising or skin discolouration when they first arrive in the world. While some people happily include such things in there photographs, others prefer to hide them. Because of this, this tutorial will use a new born picture to demonstrate this technique. The picture is owned by ‘New Beginnings Photography’ and you can find her on Flickr here.

For this tutorial you will already need to understand:
• Layers and masks
• Adjustment layers

In this picture the baby has had some bruising to the face during delivery. This has caused it to go very red and also dark in comparison to the rest of its skin tones. The idea here is to use adjustment layers and masks to make the face match the rest of the body.

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1. This tutorial will go through the making of my image “Too much TV”. I named this image after the old wives tale that watching to much TV will turn your eyes square.

This tutorial can be done in both Photoshop Creative sweat (CS) and Photoshop Elements

It will cover colour correcting the image, reshaping the eyes with the Liquify tool and adjusting the light on the subject With adjustment layers and textures.

You will want to already know how to do the following:

• Layers and Masks
• Cloning
• Adjustment layers (related tutorials here and here)
•  Layer blend modes

Finding an image to create this from was fairly tricky. There are plenty of images out there of people staring at the camera with eyes wide open but that wasn’t enough for the idea I had in my head. I needed a subject that not only was staring but had an almost transfixed expression on their face.

I searched several free stock sites to find the image and did eventually get exactly what I was after.

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Seeing as I haven’t really had the chance to go anywhere of particular interest as of late I started to get stuck into some digital art again. It has been a while since I have done much due to my photography addiction. I almost forgot just how much I actually enjoy doing it, so I’m glad I did.

As I was browsing through some stock images I remembered an idea I wanted to create for a while now. I wanted to give the impression of someone being sucked into the digital world. How this could be done, I’m sure there are many ways, but my idea was to have someone being digitised into pixels (hence the title of the piece).

This tutorial will go through the steps I took to create the image.

Get Digitised

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