ADVANCED Photo Retouching Attempt 1

**Tim Gomez** · 05-27-2011, 06:38 PM

OK So here is a before and after of some advanced photo retouching. I modified specific areas, painted with light, liquified and modified shapes....I may have over done it a tad, but it was all in the name of learning :D What do you thing?

I reshaped the hair up top, the (screen) left shoulder and arm.

**jrome** · 07-10-2011, 12:21 AM

Awesome job for a first attempt on this picture. The skin tone looks great, you've got great DOF going on in the shot and it really comes together. For the touchup I like the hair color, you made it pop a little more, the brightening of the face is pretty amazing and you managed to take out the shadow going across her face for the most part. My only critique would have to be the skin smoothing, it's a little too much for me personally. I like seeing a litte bit of skin texture still in there. I think the wrinkle reducer looks great but I think the age lines under the eyes need a little more presence along with a little darkness as well so you can tell that it's more 3 dimensional. It really does look great and I'm sure she's thrilled with it.

**Tim Gomez** · 07-10-2011, 01:16 PM

Thanks Jrome. I completely agree about the skin texture...This was using the Gaussian blur technique, which obvious obliterates texture...I found a better technique using the inverse of a high pass filter that more subtly removes unwanted blemishes, but leaves the natural skin textures.

**jrome** · 07-10-2011, 02:39 PM

Usually what I do when working close up on skin like that is a dodge/burn technique. Create two adjustment curve layers, one with an upward curve to brighten and the other with a lower curve to darken. Fill both layer masks with black in order to hide the adjustment layer. Then create a 3rd adjustment layer with hue/saturation and drag it all the way to black and white. Now all you do is take your brush with white paint and a soft edge the size of the blemish and lower the opacity down to 40% or so and start to paint in white where the dark blemishes are under the dodge layer and where there's some uneven skin tone, paint in white on the burn mask to darken a little bit.

The cool part about having your top layer as the black and white is that color doesn't throw you off from splotches where you could normally over-process an image. Everything becomes just darker or lighter than what you want and you fix it while still retaining all skin texture. I'll do a tutorial some day when I have some time.

**Tim Gomez** · 07-10-2011, 02:49 PM

RIGHT! I actually have been using that (dodging and burning with layers-as you mentioned) technique on wrinkles, etc now as well (not on this pic though)...but in this case the skin is rather rough, so I want some extra skin smoothing all over...that's all I be using the inverse HP filter for (but used Gaussian Blur on this particular one, as I mentioned)...and used sparingly. I'll try to upload a new before/after using the better/newer techniques. Thanks for jumping in on this! It's great to have your perspective.

**jrome** · 07-10-2011, 03:03 PM

Have you ever heard of Portraiture? It's an amazing plugin that I've got that works wonders. Another great one is Portrait Professional. They're both great in that you can smooth skin without it looking processed, and even better, it takes hardly any time at all! With one of them (I forgot which one) you can even change their expressions and brighten teeth and eyes without it looking weird too. They truly are amazing!