Retouching for fun

[Photomart]

Ok, so I was showing a model some before and after images to relax and amuse her a bit and make her feel comfortable with my photography and Photoshop skills. She was so amused by the images, she said I should put them online. So .. without further adieu, here are nine fun interactive "Before and After" examples of my retouching -- some a very subtile makeup changes, and other are ... uh, downright cheesy! They're big images, so give the page time to load. Enjoy!

http://www.martysphotography.com/retouching/

[lsc1]

Marty,

Great retouching work. Can you share your process for making the flatter image "Tiffany-Digital makeup" pop more? I've got a couple from a shoot this weekend and I need to make them pop like that but I'm not getting the right effect with my normal methods. Here's an example (low res).

[The_Glamour_Spot]

I can remove a pimple!!

[Photomart]

Here's what I would do. I set asside 10 minutes to work on this images. My techniques are definitely NOT the only way to make this image "pop", but it's how I do it and I can do these steps very quickly. .

• Crank up the contrast using either curves or the brightness/contrast settings
• I used the clone tool to smoth out the redness in her cheeks.
• Used the hue/saturation tool to brighten her eyes, then added larger catch lights with the paintbrush tool
• Added some additional color to her lips with the color balance tool
• Pumped up the color of the water using the replace color tool
• Finished off the image by "stroking" her hair with a small diameter dodge tool to bring out the highlights.

This may sound like a lot, but it actually took longer to write this post than to fix the image. Finally, if she needed to have a blemish fixed, I'd send the image to Bobby G.

[jford]

Nicely done. Enjoyed it.

[lsc1]

Marty,

This is great, a real improvement on the original. Thanks for taking the time to help me out. If I can ask one more quick question - When selecting the eyes or lips for adjustment, what selection tool do you use? I am still having some issues with getting just what I want selected without any deviation.

Cheers,
LSC

[Photomart]

I'm all about speed and flexibility, so I use the lasso tool to draw around the lips, set the feather to around 3 or 5, make a copy of that selection, then create a layer from that copy. Do the same with the eyes. Now you can do all the adjustments and use the blend layers or layer opacity tool to blend the layers together and give it a realistic look. If you screw up, just delete that layer and start again. And, there's no accuracy required when making the selections as long as you use the brush tools. If you want to use global tools like changing the levels or saturation of the lips layer, or eye layer, you'll need to erase the outer skin on the layer or it will look different - but that's another lesson.