Digital Portraits Photography Processing

How to turn a plain photography into a little masterpiece? Everyone has photos that usually won’t go to the album – colors are unnatural, face skin is too red, spots are vivid and so on. Though the moment seems good enough, still there are too many roughnesses. But do not hurry, because you can correct these problems, and then photos will look fine.

Let’s take as an example one of such photos.

Our actions:

1. Open the photo in Photoshop. At first let’s crop it – at the background there are many unnecessary things, the right hand has been unsuccessfully cut. It’s better to save a diagonal in the line of the right hand in order to make the composition solid.

2. Delete defects: select Clone Stamp tool with soft edges and optimal opacity (40-50%). It will allow us to paint the skin more accurately and avoid sharp tonal transitions. Or it would be better to set the Lighten mode with the same opacity level and lighten the target zones (Mode > Lighten).

3. Convert the image into the black-and-white mode. The simplest method for that purpose is Grayscale command. One more variant is using the black-and-white image from RGB channels swatch. The green channel seems to be most convenient for working with skin. 

4. If the skin looks like faded, it can be a little bit lightened. This is better to do via Image > Adjustments > Curves, having drawn the centre of the line down a little bit.

5. Sometimes pictures have some distortions. So, let’s try to correct them. Let’s correct the nose form. In the Filter menu select Liquify, in the window appeared select Pucker Tool. In Brush Size section you can adjust the effect force. 

6. Use Image > Adjustments > Layers and move sliders closer to the black zone in order to correct contrast and light shadows.

7. Copy the image in Layers swatch, having moved Background line to the new layer icon. Now you can implement soft focus. For the upper layer select Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and 20-28 pixels blurring radius. 

8. And the last thing will be the eyes accenting and making the eyebrows and lips clear. Select Eraser tool, a brush with blurred edges and 40-50 opacity. Start with the darkest areas and move to the lighter ones.

Finished! :)