Tuesday Tutorial: Retouching Photos of People in Photoshop

A few days ago I discovered this great blog called Kirsten Learns.  It's all about this girl named Kirsten and how she's learning to do things.  One of the things she's learning to do is edit photos with Photoshop.  She wrote a post with some photos she's edited and the tutorials she used to edit them.  She wasn't pleased with how the final photo of herself turned out, so since I like editing photos and haven't tried making a Photoshop tutorial yet, I decided to see if I could come up with a good edit of her photo and write a tutorial for how to do it.  I asked her for permission to edit her photo and post it and the tutorial on my blog and she said that I  definitely could, so here we go.

Here is the original photo.

It's not bad, a bit underexposed, but nothing too hard to fix.

So here's what I did, step by step.  (If you would like me to clarify any of the steps let me know in the comments and I'll add a screenshot of that step.)

1.  Adjust the exposure.  In Adjustments, click Exposure and adjust it so the photo looks like it's the right exposure.  (The exposure is the amount that the light lets in when the photo is taken.  If it's underexposed, that means there was not enough light let in and the photo will look dark, like this one.)  I adjusted the exposure of this photo to +1.7.

2. Add a photo filter.  In Adjustments, click Photo Filter.  I used Warming Filter (81) at 10% density.

3. Adjust brightness and contrast.  In Adjustments, click Brightness/Contrast.  I adjusted the brightness to 5 and the contrast to 10.

4.  Adjust vibrancy.  In Adjustments, click Vibrance.  I adjusted it to +10.

5.  Copy the background layer.

6.  Use the Dodge tool on the eyes to make them more lively.  I used the Dodge tool with Range: Midtones and Exposure: 20%.  Get the eyes nice and bright, then lower the layer fill (in the Layers panel) until the eyes look natural.

7.  Create a new layer.  Zoom in on the eyes.  You are going to add something called catch lights, which are just the reflection by a light source in a person's eye.  Adding them helps to make the eyes more lively.  Choose a brush with 50% hardness and make it the size that the catch lights would be.  (On this photo there were already very light catch lights, so I just used them to determine the brush size and then made them a bit more intense.)  I used a 56 pixel brush size.  Click the brush once on each catch light (if you're using a photo that already has them) or click once on each eye in roughly the same position (if you're using a photo that doesn't already have catch lights).

8.  Set the blend mode of the layer to Overlay.  Turn the layer opacity down until it looks natural.  (I used 25%)

9.  Create a new layer filled with 50% gray.  (Do this by clicking Create a new layer in the Layers panel, then clicking Edit, then Fill.  Set it to Use: 50% Gray, Blending Mode: Normal, Opacity 100%.)

10.  Set the blend mode of the 50% gray layer to Overlay.

11.  While on the 50% gray layer use the Dodge tool on the parts you want to brighten (such as the shine on the hair and the lips) and the Burn tool on the parts you want to darken.  (There might not be any but if parts of the face are looking flat and not 3D like they would be in real life, you can darken the edges to make it look more 3D.  For example, on this photo I used the burn tool just a little bit where the shadows around the nose were.)  This is the Photoshop equivalent of using highlighter and bronzer with makeup to contour your face.  Doing it on a 50% gray layer set to Overlay lets you add depth to the photo with a lot of control.

And that's it.  With this photo you really only need to adjust the exposure, if you're a Photoshop beginner, to make it look way better.  The other steps are all optional and more advanced.  I hope something from this tutorial is helpful for you.  And definitely let me know if there are any parts of this tutorial that you would like me to explain further or expand upon.  Like I said, this is my first Photoshop tutorial, so it's not perfect and I would love to improve it for you in any way possible.

Without further ado, here is the finished product.

A Simple Flower Photomanipulation

I saw this photo of a magnolia blossom on Witty Title Here and couldn't resist playing with it.

the original photo

my edited version

First I adjusted the Exposure.  Then I added a new layer, filled it with 50% gray, set the Blend mode to Overlay, then used the Dodge and Burn tools on it to bring out the highlights and shadows.  Finaly, I adjusted the Color Balance to give the photo a warmer tone.

Photo Retouching

I applied for a job as a photo retoucher.  I have the skills to do a good job of it, but I am not of fan of making people look fake.  In my opinion, Photoshop is great for correcting bad lighting and stuff like that, but I can't stand in when people use it to supposedly "improve skin" and they end up completely removing all of their skin texture.  Seriously, in real life people's skin has texture.  I can't stand all these Internet tutorials that are basically about how to make someone look like some sort of creepy android trying to pass for a human.  Here's a pretty extreme example of what I'm talking about.

 There is really nothing wrong with this photo, but the retoucher is thinking,

"Oh noes! Freckles! Quick, to the unreality maker!"



And then this nonsense happens.  I don't know who in their right mind would think

that this looks better.  They basically just blurred her entire face and removed all of

the texture from everything except her hat.

Unfortunately, there is quite a large job market for people to make other people look fake, or supposedly "perfect".  And the other big problem I have with most photo retouchers is that they constantly make people's skin lighter.  Like they'll take a perfectly fine picture of a woman who has darker skin, remove all the texture from it, and then lighten her skin until she looks Caucasian.  And then she's pretty, according to them.  Newsflash people, there are plenty of beautiful women of all nationalities.  It's not like you can't be pretty unless your skin is white.  That is just not true and incredibly racist.  Haven't you seen Megan Fox?  I'm a straight female and even I can say that she is smokin' hot.  Yet, some photo retouchers feel the need to lighten her skin too.  I just don't understand what is wrong with people.

Anyway, without any further ado, here are two photos I retouched.

I did not make this girl's skin lighter.  I just corrected the lighting of the entire photo,

so this is her actual skin color.  The other thing I did was make her eyes look

more lively by adding a little reflected light to them.

I diminished the appearance of this guy's scar.  Mostly just because people don't like their own scars.  I didn't remove any of his skin texture.  I actually sharpened it a bit.  And I removed the dark circles under his eyes a little bit, while still keeping the photo looking realistic.