[spectrrr]

Originally Posted by kenstogie

Well I think I have the hang (somewhat any way) of masking. A very powerful tool. With that I PS'd a pic. Constructive criticism/praise is very welcomeThe first is the untouched and the second is retouched.

My main C&C points would be:
1) Too much blur in the face, ends up looking a little unnatural. Best way to do it is have a layer of heavy blurring, then paint in the mask, then lastly, dial back the fill or opacity on the layer itself until it looks good. The first few times you’ll want to make it too blurry, but in most cases, you have to under-do it a little bit so it is subtle enough to deceive the eye.
2) The face is too dark, even darker than the rest of the body. Make a curves layer to increase the brightness and then brush it on with a mask over the face. Use a brush with 100% opacity and 10% flow. Big size, 0% hardness. Practice big subtle strokes, so that a little bit of the adjustment bleeds off the edges of the face or wherever you are painting. Then the viewer won’t be able to tell you brightened the face.

Helpful hints:
1) Be SUBLTE! You really don’t need to go crazy with an effect, just do it lightly. A touch here, a touch there. Always use a soft brush and a low flow so it will blend together well.
2) Pay attention to your edges!! Look at the optical illusion below. If the colors were side by side, you would know they were the same color. But you believe they are different colors because of the edges that separate them. The same principle holds true in Photoshop, and also it’s inverse. When you have two dissimilar regions, you can trick the eye into thinking they are the same by blending or altering the edges between them.


Helpfull shortcuts:
1) Ctrl+backspace will fill the mask with the background color
2) Alt + backspace will fill the mask with the foreground color
3) When you are painting, the X key switches between the foreground and the background colors (effectively switching between black and white, show and hide)
4) Holding Alt and clicking on a layer mask will display the black and white layer mask. With this, you can see how your brush strokes appear.
5) Holding Shift and clicking on a layer mask will temporarily disable the mask (same effect as filling it with white).
6) Holding Alt and clicking between two layers will make the top layer ONLY apply its effect to the layer below it. It will also be subjective to the layer mask below it. Sounds a little complicated with words, but try it and you’ll see.






So here is my take on retouching the image. Below the image, there’s some explanations and a link to the PSD file.
Retouching is always a bit of a subjective thing, as are the monitors we’re viewing on. I gave a couple options, and depending on the monitor you are viewing it on, one will look better or the other will.

retouch 1


retouch 2


The PSD file for these can be downloaded HERE


I got a little carried away with the retouching and went beyond adding just a couple layers of brightness. You probably want to download and open the PSD file before reading further. I’ll give a quick rundown of the layers and what they do. You can turn off all the layers and then, starting from the bottom, turn each one on and you will see the individual effect of it. 80% of the retouching could have been accomplished with just two layers to blur and brighten. All the other layers are just the final 20%, the details.

The layers:
1) This layer is the only difference between the first image I posted and the second image. This just adds a little bit of edge contrast. The layer was created by blurring the image, then heavily sharpening it, then dialing back the fill % on the layer. The final touch wad a layer mask to brush out the eyes, because a natural side effect of this kind of adjustment is that the eyes get darker, and we don’t want that!
2) Just your standard garden variety Gaussian blur, but very subtle. Pay attention to the lines of the face. Cheeks, mouth, nose, eyes, these all need to be sharp. Everything else is optional.
3) Just a plain blank layer of white. Turn on this layer and off to see the effect of the retouching layers above it.
4) I used the healing brush to take out the strand of hair in her face, and some misc. pimples, color splotches, and other things.
5) I used the clone stamp tool to take out the errand strands of hair on top of the head, and to retouch a couple of the healing brush’s mistakes.
6) Her teeth were not bad, but I went ahead and did it anyway to show you. Create a layer that just desaturates it, then brush this in over the teeth and the whites of the eyes. This is an example of where a HARD and precise brush is needed over the usual soft one. Finally, dial back the fill on the layer so that the effect is very subtle, NO ONE has perfectly white teeth, so if you make them too white and bright, the eye knows something is wrong!
7) In addition to the whitening, I also wanted to brighten the teeth ever so slightly. This layer ONLY applies to the layer below it (and thus is subjective to the layer mask of the layer below it). It is achieved by holding alt and clicking between the two layers.
8) Here is one of the most important layers, because it corrects the darkness in the face.
9) Shadows and bags under the eyes are always difficult to deal with. Sometimes there is very little you can do for them, because anything you do will look strange an unnatural. In this case, the best bet was to soften them a little. Without them, her face looks flat, the bone structure appears off. This was not the best example of how to deal with that, but it gets the job done. I just clone stamped some cheek skin over the bags, then dialed back the fill on the layer so you could still see them, just softened a little.
10) I like my images nice and bright, so here’s a general boost!
11) The eyes needed just a little more brightening than what we got from the teeth layer, so this layer is just a subtle boost.
12) She has beautiful green eyes, so I wanted to bring out the color a bit more. Subtlety on this one is extremely important – too much and she gets lizard eyes! Play with this layer a tad, increase the fill on the layer a little bit, and you’ll see how quickly the effect is overdone.
13) In Photoshop, the colors on the image look great to me (and would print great from a lab). BUT on the web, in the sRGB color space on the browser, the image gains A LOT of red saturation. This adjustment layer fixes that by dialing back the red channel a little bit. I only masked it into the face, because the skin tones were the only areas that was bothering me. Depending on your monitor, this may look great or terrible.
14) Same as the above, except I duplicated the previous layer and masked it in again on a couple extra saturated spots on the cheek
15) This layer is subjective, you may like it or not. I reduced the laugh lines a little bit by completely erasing them with the healing brush tool (precision is not needed). Then I dialed back the opacity on the layer until I liked the level of the effect. Then I filled the layer mask with black and just painted in the lines.
16) That’s it! Here’s the original image, you can show and hide the layer to compare and see the difference!