Photo Retouching: Recent Work

I thought I might show this to you. It's an image that I recently retouched for a client. When they first called and asked me to put a t-shirt on the boy where there wasn't one before, I didn't think I could do it, but I told her I would try and through a lot of trying out different methods, I got it to work! It's not my finest work, but it's not bad for the time I had to do it in (same day turnaround).

So sorry, but for this image there are way too many steps to make a tutorial, but as I teach you more and more techniques, you should be able to guess-timate the tools that I used! Good luck!

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Photo Retouching: Backgrounds 101

Sometimes, I am tasked with retouching things other than the actual model in the photo. Here, I had to take away the distracting lines behind this hair model. They were taking away too much from the image, as well as add a piece of hair to perfect the hair style!

Click after the jump to see how I did it!

Step One: Use the clone stamp tool to erase the lines off of the image. Because of small shadow differences in the colors, you'll want to choose a reference point that is as close to the part that you are painting over as possible. Use different size brushes and different opacities to make it look more realistic.
Your image should look like this when you have gotten rid of the lines.

Step Two: Select piece of hair. What I did here was to go into Quick Mask Mode (by pressing Q on your keyboard)to select a tress of hair that I could copy and paste into the area where the client wanted filled.

Hit the B button on your keyboard to select your brush tool and paint at 65% opacity.

NOTE: When you are in Quick Mask Mode, your layers will be highlighted in gray, not blue.

When you are done painting in your QM Mode, you can then hit Q again to exit Quick Mask Mode, and go to Select>Inverse to inverse your selection so that the piece of hair is selected.

Step Three: Place hair piece. While you have the piece of hair selected, press Cont/Comd C to copy the selection, and then Cont/Comd V to paste it.
You can then press Cont/Comd T to transform the selection and move it into place. If you work better with the lines hidden, you can press Cont/Comd H to hide the lines. Use your arrow keys to move and adjust the placement of the piece of hair.

Here is the final image again. Congratulations!

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Photo Retouching: Retouching Video

Heres a clip that will make you chuckle, in the same vein as my last post about the well known star who looks strikingly like a vice-presidential hopeful, I thought I would share this with you.

Thanks to Colbert Report

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Photo Retouching: Snap-shot to Portrait: Some Easy Steps

There are some fundamental differences between a snap-shot and a portrait: positioning, eye-contact and most importantly, lighting. We all know that it takes a lot more time to make a portrait than it does a snap-shot, but what happens when you want a portrait, but only have time to make a snap-shot? It's all about the eyes. By simply changing the positioning of the catch light in the eyes, you can create the illusion of off-camera lighting, with only the flash of your camera.

Photo by John Harrington

In this post I will concentrate on the changes you can make to the eyes of a person that suggest off camera lighting when the only lighting was actually a flash mounted on camera.
Step One: Brighten the whites:
This allows for the illusion of more light hitting the eyes. You will need to hit your Q key to enter into quick mask mode. Then paint with the brush tool (the harder your edge, the harder/less feathered the edge of the selection - so use a soft brush). Once you have colored in the eyes red, you will want to hit the Q key again, which will take you out of quick mask mode. Then you will need to invert the selection so you have the eye whites selected (do so using Select>Inverse). Once selected, you can use the mid times slider in the levels or curves window to lighten the whites.
Step Two: Brighten the eye color:
Select the bottom part of the iris with a half moon shape (see step one on how to select the area) and brighten the midtones using levels (Apple L) or curves (Apple M).
Note: If you would like to play around with the color/saturation of the eye color itself, use the Hue/Saturation (Apple U) window.Step Three: Remove the flash reflection:
Every photographer knows that when you take a photo of someone using a flash while they are looking at you, you are going to have a reflection of that flash in the persons eyes. That is a tell tale sign of on-camera flash, and you need to remove that evidence. Use the clone stamp to remove the larger of the two catch lights in the pupil of the eye. I like to use my clone stamp tool at 65% for this and make sure that you sample an area inside the pupil so the colors match.
Step Four: Make your own off-camera catch light:
I tend to use the paint brush tool for this next step. You want to sample the color of the small catch light that we left in the eye, and use that color (or a little lighter) for the larger catch light. Paint in your catch light into both eyes and make sure they match.
Step Five: Blur the catch light:
You will want to then blur the catch light a bit so that you can't tell it was painted into the photo. Blur using the blur tool on your tool pallet.

Here is the final close up of the eyes again: Great Job!

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Photo Retouching: Pay it Forward (cont'd)

In an effort to improve my blog, I would like to start showing people not just my retouching, but how I do it. I have some questions myself on what would be the best way to show readers how I do my retouching.
As of now, I have two ideas:
Written workflow: I would take screen grabs of the image at different points of the retouching process so that you may see the steps in the process.
Screen video: I could record my movements on the screen so you could see the the steps that I do and how to do them/where to find them.
This is open for discussion. I hope people will tell me which method they would prefer to see and I will start sharing my workflows!

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Photo Retouching: Digital Dentist

I think that teeth are one of the things that people are most self-conscious about. It's an obsession that I would have to guess originated in the US but is continually spreading, so when I have a client that decides not to smile in pictures because of their teeth, I try to assure them that they can have a beautiful smile post-photoshop.




How It's Done (Click on the images for larger jpegs):
1: Straighten the teeth using the liquify filter.
2: Mask the selection of the teeth (using quick mask or regular mask - use a soft edge).

3: With the teeth selected, go to the Hue/Saturation (Apl U) window. Select the Yellow from the drop down menu and decrease the saturation of the yellow.
4: With the brighten slider bump up the lightness of the teeth a tad to make them look better.
5: De-select the teeth (Apl D).

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