I’ve been asked (on a couple of occasions) what my sort of workflow is.

I have to admit, I really don’t have one.  Some days I will edit ten pictures in exactly the same way, other days I will spend ten hours on the one image, barely doing anything to it except fiddling until I find something that I like.  I haven’t been able to do that much recently due to school but last night I did what I would call a relative “quickie” where I mostly followed my workflow for retouching photos.  Kinda.

I also wanted to have a bit more of a play with the new Wacom Intuos graphics tablet I won from Shutters Inc – though with a much more realistic retouch.

You can listen to that podcast and see my workflow here.

But before that, keep reading!

Firstly I started off with a picture I took of my dear friend, Tam…

Obviously her make-up is a little tired and some of it’s ended up under her eyes rather than over them.  She’s got a few blemishes and such, but all of that can be fixed.

This is the result of fixing blemishes and skin tone and pores.  Yes, it’s a bit extreme but I wasn’t going for realistic.  My aim is a painterly feel to the overall finished image so painting various skin tones under the eyes, on the forehead and nose was called for.

In this one you can see that Tam’s chest is a little flushed (probably from a touch of sun), because I felt lazy, I didn’t bother doing anything to get rid of this. My excuse is that she’s just eaten… Heh.

I’ve done a touch more overpainting in this one, and employed the use of the Liquify tool to pull in Tam’s cheeks a bit. I normally never use the Liquify tool on facial features, however in the spirit of this picture – which is a creative portrait as opposed to a real one – I did use it. Just a tiny bit.  I also wanted to make a real feature of Tam’s eyes so I “bloated” them (half a second touch of the bloat tool in Liquify) and the same with her lips.   I also ran a Median filter over the entire image to blur out most of her chest and highlighted the lighter bits of her hair.

Now, on to creative lighting…

Here I’ve used adjustments layers to start pulling the warmth out of the image and start turning early afternoon to twilight. The best way to do this is to selectively pull down the yellows and boost the cyans.

Here I’ve pulled more of the green and yellows out and boosted the magenta settings just a little to make things look purple-ish.  You can see that the highlights are really starting to twinkle at you now. However the bright background in the top left corner is distracting and not darkening up as I’d like, no matter how much green and yellow I pull from that area.

Whoa! What happened here?  Nothing much. I just duplicated the original layer and pulled down the brightness and contrast.  To do this correctly though, I had to switch off all my adjustment layers.  The point of this is to darken up the top left corner without destructively erasing it or painting over it.

As you can see now, I’ve masked out the brightness of the top left corner and some of the highlights from Tam’s hair on that side, as I want the light to be mostly coming in from one direction.    So when we turn our adjustment layers back on…

Et voila!  Instant twilight. That looks much better. (And it’s about here that I start chirping about how cool Photoshop is.)  Anyway, I’ve also taken the opportunity at this point to intensify the highlights in Tam’s eyes by running the dodge bush (set on Highlight) over them a few times.  You can’t see it in these pictures but it’s very obvious in the larger versions.

Now we’ve really accentuated the eyes out by using a new layer set to “soft light”, a very soft brush set at a low flow and opacity and a dark red colour.  I’ve also added a bit of war paint over one eye by using the pen tool for a very sharp crescent shape.  I’ve masked out the scar where it falls over her eye and eyebrow and then blured it a little to make it look part of her skin. This layer is also set to soft light and has been dodged a little to match the contours of her face.

I know I rant and rail about vignetting images but I did vignette this one just to make the edges a little darker so Tam would pop out of the image.  Sometimes vignettes are a good thing.

BUT ONLY SOMETIMES.

Anyway, I could have stopped it here but I wanted to add in some textural interest…

And that’s it.  I found a texture that I liked and added it, set the blend mode of that layer to soft light and then masked out the bits that I didn’t want that level of  texture on.  I also added a basic texture under this layer so I could add a bit more depth to the face, however you can’t see it in these little images.

If you’re curious, here’s my layers palette:

That’s it!  Any questions, feel free to email me.

]]> http://www.getifa.com/2010/05/vampire-tam/feed/ 1 http://www.getifa.com/2010/04/skin-retouching-mad-photoshop-skillz-or-something-equally-as-leet-er-733t/ http://www.getifa.com/2010/04/skin-retouching-mad-photoshop-skillz-or-something-equally-as-leet-er-733t/#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:56:17 +0000 Ren http://www.getifa.com/?p=215 Right.

So, let’s say you’ve done a great photo shoot, you’ve got some mad photos of some beautiful women* and you want to make them look their best for your portfolio and theirs.  Problem is, their skin? Not so good.  Great make-up but there’s a little too much in the pore department?  A little mottling from too much sun?  Dreaded acne breakout that couldn’t be hidden with a trowel’s worth of foundation and concealer?

Easy to fix.  Photoshop to the rescue.  Again.

Take this picture for instance…

(Stock image found here: BerlinElliott aka Shai – I didn’t take the picture!)

This is Shai.  Shai is GOR-JUSS.  Seriously.  But her skin…  There’s a few scars, a few pimples, a few more bumps and discolourations than she’d like, I’d bet.

Here’s a close-up of the image at 100%:

See? Like I said. Not so good.

So let’s fix it!

By the way this method works really well for younger women. Older ladies with life lines need a little more specialised work which I’ll cover in a future tutorial sometime.

* Not really for the men folk.  You WANT texture for men.  The girls always look better softened, especially for glamour shoots (in the author’s opinion, ahem).

What you want to do first off is duplicate your original photo layer, just so you’ve got something to flick back and forth with so you can see the changes you’ve made more clearly.

Rename the new layer to something else… like “surgery”, because that’s what we’ll be doing next; a little surgery.

On this new layer, you’re going to want to use a combination of your Patch and Clone tools.  The patch tool can be found in the Healing Brush tool option.  (Hint: The healing tool is the one that normally looks like a band-aid, but you want the tool that looks like a hobo patch – click and hold on the healing tool to get the extended tool options and select the patch tool.)

Oh, now would be a good time to tell you that if you don’t know how to use these tools, go look up some info.  There are really cool descriptions of how it works and how to use it all over the web.  And if you don’t know layers, look them up too.

Ok, back to Shai.

*sigh* Shai.

Ahem.

It’s at this stage that you want to get rid of all the major blemishes, leaving the skin texture intact however, because we’ll need that in a few steps’ time.

After all my cloning and patching, which was relatively easy as Shai’s skin is fairly good condition in most other respects, you can see my result, at 100%:

If at this point, your picture looks really, really good – STOP. Assess what really needs to be done before continuing.  Sometimes less is more.

For this tutorial, we shall continue.

Shai’s face still has a problem with pores and some uneven skin tone, so I want to smooth that out a little more.

Plus it gives me a reason to keep looking at Shai a little longer. She’s so preedy.

The next step is softening the skin.  For this, you will need to be on your surgery layer and then head on up to Select – Color Range.

Use the eye dropper tool and select an area of the skin. If your settings are like mine, much of the model’s face will be white (this is what we’re selecting).  If there’s a lot of grey, select your eyedropper tool with the plus (+) symbol and select some of the grey areas.  Play with the fuzziness slider so you’ve got a good bit of contrast.  The below picture shows my eventual settings for this example… don’t worry if you can’t get all of your model’s face white!:

When you hit OK, you will see the “marching ants” of the selection that Photoshop has made.

Ctrl+C (copy) this selection and then hit Ctrl+J to paste it to a new layer.

When you switch the visibility off for the layers below, you will see a fairly ghostly image of skin…

In the above image, I have started deleting the insides of the eyes and will delete the lips.  You can also use your eraser tool on the hair and everything else that isn’t skin that you’d like to soften. Don’t forget to erase over the eyebrows as you don’t want to soften them.

Right. Still with me?

Good.

Duplicate your new skin layer.  Call the bottom skin layer “soft” and the top skin layer “texture”.  Toggle the visibility of the texture layer OFF and select the soft layer.

Right. We’re going to soften this. With Surface Blur.

Now, a lot of photographers use this filter but don’t use it properly.  This is a proper way to use it.  The filter I am talking about is Surface Blur.  It’s an evil tool, but it’s evil can also be used to good ends. So keep up.

Filter – Blur – Surface Blur.

You will need to play with the settings here.  You don’t want it so blurry that the detail is lost but you also don’t want to make it subtle either.  A nice, even coverage with some detail is what we’re after.

Here are my settings:

(Remember, your lips and eyes will be properly erased. My example picture hasn’t been fixed up at this point.)

Nice and even?

Toggle the visibily of the layers below your soft skin layer back on and have a look at the effect.

It’s looking better but it’s too soft. All the texture has been removed.  This is where a lot of retouchers fall over.  You need to have the skin texture for it to be a realistic effect.

But first, we’re going to reduce the opacity of the soft layer to about 75% for this one.  Just reduce the opacity until you start to see some of the details in the skin, but only just!

See? You can just make out the pore detail on her nose and cheek.

Alright, remember that texture layer we made?

Turn that back on.

OMG! The bad skin is back!

Yes, but we are going to do something special.

We are going to use the High Pass filter.  High Pass is hightly underated as a tool but to bring back contrast, sharpness and definition, I personally find it very handy.

Anyway, go to Filter – Other – High Pass.

Now, your settings will definitely vary from mine, but you want to play with your sliders until you see some definition in all that grey in the preview window.

Don’t worry, we’re almost done.

Actually, no… I’m lying.

Once you’ve got your grey mud mask going on your model, you then need to change the blend mode of the texture layer to Soft Light.

Et voila!

Texture is back, sans ruddy colour.  Nice tone and no big blemishes.

Now, what you need to do is play with the opacity of the texture layer a little.  You don’t want all of your texture to show through, you want to minimize pores but not kill them off completely.

My texture layer ended up going down to about 60% opacity.

Here’s the finished product:

Finished result, extra tweaking done to brighten hair and eyes.

If you find that the texture is too sharp in some areas but in most other areas it looks perfect, use your blur brush or erase some of the texture layer by using the eraser or masking.  (Look layer masks up if you don’t know what they are.)

Here’s a close-up of how it all looks:

That’s it. Go play.

Postscript:

This is ONE method of retouching skin in Photoshop. If you know a better way or a different way and you like your way better, keep doing that.  This is the way I like to retouch.

Noir Magazine - Conceptual mazine and masthead design.

I must apologise for the lack of content here recently.  As a design student now in my second year of my course (part time) I am pretty busy with homework a lot of the time. I hope to have a range of different tutorials up over the coming weeks though.

Not to mention photos and assignment pictures.

*** The above assignment features photography by yours truly. The image is one I took of up and coming singer, Katie Weston.

Tam in colour. So preeeety.

Converting Colour to Black and White, the Cool Way.

In the Beginning, God (in this case, Adobe) created Photoshop. And on the seventh day, He edited his photographs in Photoshop and was pleased; for they were good.   And on that day, He bade his subjects go out into the world and teach.

“Lead my people home!”

And that’s when Ren decided she knew everything… and so the story continues.

This is a demonstration of how I create most of my black and white images. I’m presuming you know about layers and adjustment layers however if you don’t, either look up a tutorial ot two – there’s heaps online – or just head on up into your Layer menu in Photoshop and start playing. It’s easy. Don’t be afraid. Go now. I’ll wait…

While we’re waiting, I’ll say many, many thanks to Tam for the use of her lovely face and apologise unreservedly for any offense or boredom that may be caused. Please note, there are umptymillion ways of getting a single result in Photoshop for just about anything you want to do. This is just one method of creating black and white images – there are heaps that I’ve discovered but this is my favourite so far.

Ok, onto the tutorial.

But first, some general stuff that Ren doesn’t like.

Ren doesn’t like people who just use the Desaturate option.  Yep. Yank the colour out. It’s black and white now. Right?

WRONG!

More often than not, it’s grey and grey.  No tone. No depth. Nothing.

Even worse… Ren doesn’t like people who Greyscale their images.  Like the Desaturation, it’s grey. Grey, grey, grey, grey. Only flatter.

Sometimes the flat grey works, other times it really, really doesn’t.

Example:

Greyscale conversion. BORING.

A simple conversion to greyscale means that the image is flat tones of grey.  It’s soft and can be pretty on some lighter images and if you like it, more power to you, but I don’t.

Desaturation. Better, but still lifeless.

Using Desaturation is slightly better than greyscale. There’s a bit more tone but because it’s just had the colour pulled out, many tones that were different colours are now mashing into each other, still giving that flat, dark appearance. Again, straight desaturation may work for some images. I rarely think it does and prefer to spend a few minutes more on photos I really like.

Here’s the photo after I’ve converted it to black and white my way:

Cool B&W conversion a la Ren

I think it’s better. There’s tone, definition, contrast and it’s definitely black and white.  And here’s how I do it…

Once you’ve done all your pre-post-processing (before you decided to make it black and white, that is) we’re going to play with the Channel Mixer.  The Channel Mixer is a fabulous tool which is not only excellent for adjusting colours but tone in black and white.

Select Layer (top menu) – New Adjustment Layer – Channel Mixer.

You will get a “New Layer” dialogue box as the program will be adding the adjustment on a separate layer (this is where an understanding of how adjustment layers work comes in handy).  Name this layer B&W Conversion, or something to that effect, like so:

Click OK on that and then you are presented with the Channel Mixer dialogue box as pictured below.  Check the Monochrome box to to do the basic conversion to black and white then, and here’s the bit where you get creative, play with the sliders.  Please be aware that even while your image looks black and white, Photoshop will still be accessing the red, green and blue values of the image to make the adjustment.

Tip: Red represents your darkest tones.  Pull this slider back for dramatic shadows and use the green and blue to balance out your highlights.

The image below shows the settings I was happy with.  Once you’re happy with what you’ve done, hit OK. You should have an image that’s fairly dark in the shadows but with some contrast without highlights being blown out.

How’s it looking? A little better than Greyscale and Desaturation, I hope!

Alright, next step!

Have a cup of tea and congratulate yourself for getting this far.  You can also take a peek at your Layers palette (if you can’t see your Layers palette, go to Windows – Layers or hit F7).  You’ll see your original photo, still in colour at the bottom, with a new layer sitting over the top. Toggle the visibility button to turn it off.

Then on.

Then off.

Then on.

Then off.

Then on.  We need it on.

Then make a new Adjustment Layer!  (Surprise!)

This time we’re going to adjust the Levels a bit.  Levels are cool. They let you mess around with the highlights, midtones and shadows a bit more.

Again, go to Layers – New Adjustment Layer – Levels.  You’ll get another new layer dialogue box up, just call it whatever and hit OK.

Now, with the Levels, it’s good if you can understand histograms. If you’re an experienced photographer used to using histograms, this is very familiar. If not, just trust Ren, she’ll take care of you.

Play with the sliders.  If you think the highlights should be a little brighter, pull the right slider in towards the middle a bit.  If you think the shadows should be deeper, pull the left slider in a bit, if you think the tones between the highlights and the shadows should be lighter or darker, move the middle slider towards either side.  The following image shows what I was happy with for my image.  Hit OK when you’re happy too.

If you’re happy and you know it, hit OK…

Sorry. Just keeping myself entertained.

Anyway, check out the Layers palette again. New layer! Cool, eh? Toggle visibility, just for gits and shiggles…

Alright, next bit.  Just guess what you’re going to do now?

Yep, new adjustment layer.  This time we want the Curves option.

Mmm… Curves….

And I’m not even going to tell you how to find it.  (Hint:  Layers – New Adjustment Layers – Curves.  D’OH!)

Actually, we’re doing Curves now because when I made my highlights and midtones a little lighter, I lost a bit of detail with the shadows.  The levels tool could bring them back but not in a nice way.  It looked a little rough.  Curves allows for ultra-fine tuning of contrast and I want to add some more depth.

So what you want to do once you’ve got your Curves dialogue box up is make a very shallow S-shape by clicking and holding on the line and dragging one side up and then clicking and holding on the line again somewhere else and dragging the other side down.  Have a play with this. Go to extremes.  You can even add extra anchor points for ridiculously minuscule tuning.  We’re not going that far.

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

The changes can be as subtle or dramatic as you like.  What I tend to do is take it to the extreme and then pull back until you think it looks great.

Click on OK once you’re happy.  This next image shows where I got my happy:

There. That should be it. End of tutorial.

Sorry, that’s a little anticlimactic.

TADAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!

Cool B&W conversion a la Ren

See?  Nice B&W image.

Because this is fairly labour-intensive I would recommend you do this only on the photos you think are great, though you can create actions in Photoshop which will automate the process as much or as little as you like – but that’s a tutorial for another day.

Last tip:  Because everything you’ve adjusted is on a separate layer, you can go ahead and tweak or, if you’re feeling ultra brave, add MOAR layers.  Or even delete them, because that’s fine too.  Just double click on the specific adjustment layer you want to mess with and start playing again!  You can even duplicate the layers to keep building up the effects.  Like I said, endless ways of doing things.

I hope this was of some use, in my next manic tutorial, I will show how to pull detail back out out of shadowy images.

Coastal Woodlands... and not a vignette to be seen.

Vignettes, those wonderful dark edges in photos and artwork alike are the bane of my existance. Why? Because they are overused and they are used in the wrong flippin’ way.

Vignetting should never be used simply “because [you] can”.  It should be used to increase the appeal of an image – providing that the image actually calls for for that sort of treatment.  Unfortunately many photographers, including my very talented friends, are getting swept up in the evil power of vignettes.

THEY ARE VIGNETTING EVERYTHING.

Always, always, ALWAYS use vignetting sparingly.  Think before you use it; “Will this make my image look better?”

Please note that a craptastic photo will always be a craptastic photo. You cannot make a silk purse out of a pigs ear and no amount of digital fucking-with (oops, I sworeded) will make a craptastic photo any better. Believe me, I have tried and tried.  Many of my photographs have vignettes but these were all taken long before I learned precisely where vignettes should be applied.

Vignettes force focus to the centre of the image.  If the main subject of your photograph is not towards the centre of the image, then for Gods sake, do not use a vignette.

This is something I have picked up from my studies at graphic design school. Product placement isn’t as naff as it sounds. The layout of an advertisement is done in many different ways to provoke many different reactions but all are done in such a way that the viewers eye are led through the image with no bumps or roadblocks to the important information contained therein.

The same also applies to photographs. If you’ve placed your subject to one side of the frame, if all the details are very close to the side of the frame, then you should not be using a vignette.  The same goes with images which are absolutely saturated with colour. Do not vignette these. The impact is already there in the colour and hopefully in the image itself.  Why add a vignette that will just make it murky at the edges? And why mess with people’s natural discovery of the image itself by forcing them to look into the middle of the photograph when the eye may well lead them there anyway, thus making them appreciate the picture even more for it’s entirety rather than just the bit in the middle?  Seriously, if you’re going to add a vignette to an extremely colourful image, set the vignette layer to OVERLAY or SOFT LIGHT rather than leaving it on NORMAL or MULTIPLY blend modes in Photoshop.  What this will do is darken the edges by saturating the colour without adding a murky black which kills the colour altogether.

And I have to add this… if your images are white or very light around the edges, for the love of all that is good and right with the world, don’t murky it up with a grey-black vignette. That’s just all sorts of wrong.

Of course, rules are meant to be broken, you can add vignettes to anything but seriously folks, think before you apply.  Criticise your work – stand back from it, disassociate yourself from sentimental feeling and evaluate what you have done with it or what you want to do with is. Visualise, apply and, if it sucks, DELETE.

About the photos in this post:
These were taken in July 2009 in the front yard of a house situated just off the beach in Portsea.  The light was so beautiful – it had just been pouring with rain and there was a break in the clouds that lasted just a couple of minutes, I just had to try and catch it.

Coastal Woodlands... and still no vignettes!