Photo Retouching: Glamour Photos

Photograph Re-Touching

Hi everyone. I've been looking for a tutorial(s) that explains how to touch up photographs to give them a sort of smooth painted look like those you would see in some glamour photos touched up with Photoshop. Here are 2 examples I've uploaded that show just what I'm looking to be able to do.

<http://www.geocities.com/suzyqt_2002/pic1.jpg>
<http://www.geocities.com/suzyqt_2002/pic2.jpg>

Thanks to anyone that replies

Suzy

P.S You may need to copy the web addresses and paste them into a new browser window, since Geocities doesn't allow some outside links...grrrr.

Are you certain that these are normal photos that have merely been "touched up" in Photoshop? It looks to me like they are professional photo shoots with elaborate lighting, makeup and hair stylists, etc. You can't get that kind of quality without the five or six person team that a pro shoot uses.

No, I've seen the before and after pictures, the after pictures being the ones I posted. I was told that the Photoshop Artist started off with High Res photos and used a few techniques using the Smudge Tool, Dodge and Burn tool. I've been told that these techniques have been used by professional Photoshop retouchers for a while, but I haven't been able to find a good tutorial that explains how. I'm guessing it's a secret most Photoshop retouchers are not willing to share. I've run into partial tutorials that explain the basics and have applied it to some photos I have with fairly good results, but nothing to the quality of the pictures I posted.

Here is one approach to digital makeup:
<http://www.shanzcan.com/photoshopmama/psm_tutorial1.html> Just like real makeup, there is no standard method that always works. Much depends on image quality, lighting, skin type, male or female and so on. Katrinn Eisman's books on Photoshop restoration and retouching offer a very good overview of glamour portraiture as well as many other excellent techniques.

Gary

I'm constantly re-touching. I cover blemishes first with the clone tool, but you could also use the healing brush. Then I use the blur tool with a medium to low pressure and smooth the skin. Smaller brush for around the nostrils. Don't blur them, or else then it shows you did something more than you want shown. Teeth - create a new layer (create a new layer for every layer of make-up!), get a small paint brush (about a 4) and get the white paint, opacity set to about 9, and paint the teeth. Eyes- you can add eye shadow or liner just like in real life (brush and color)then adjust opacity, etc., then if there's a dark lining around the eye then the smudge tool, size 5 or so, pressure about 30 percent, and drag out some lashes. If you want them very long, you'll need to paint them on. Use a dark brown, small brush, new layer, then paint them on. Adjust the layer opacity, add a touch of gaussian blur, and they should look natural. If not, delete the layer and try again or adjust the hue/saturation of the lashes. High pass sharpening of the eyeball area looks nice, too. Select the eyes with the lasso, feather at 2 px, copy and paste to a new layer. High pass at 10, hard or soft light, reduce opacity to about 70 if using hard light, merge with lower layer. Hair- use the clone tool to get rid of any unwanted stray hairs, use the dodge or burn tool to add highlights and texture. You could also do a little of the high pass sharpening on the hair. Accenting the eyes more - duplicate layer, on the top layer, erase the iris and pupil. Now go to the layer beneath and adjust hue/saturation (make sure "colorize" is checked). These are techniques I've used on about every woman or young woman I do and there's a few on my website. There are other ways of doing the things I've listed here, but these are my faves and they could be used to create the portrait samples that you posted. I haven't seen Janee's tutorial on this, but she does have some good ones. If you're doing this for someone, you need to be careful and not remove all that makes them them. I've had people get a little weird if I remove a mole (although I still do cover it a little bit), or too many wrinkles, or fix their teeth too much. I just try to enhance what's there and accent the good. I hope this helps!

~Cindy
<http://daydreamsart.com>

Another alternative: these have a look of being "medianed" - select the areas you want smoothed, feather the edges a bit & apply a suitable strength of median filter (filter>noise>median). It won't take much - possibly even the minimum setting may be too strong if your image is low res.

You could also play around with the sliders in Dust & Scratches within the selected areas for alternatives on the same look.

Adjust hue & sat for further enhancements to the colour.

Quick & easy for large areas with little important detail (e.g. skin).

Fred.

Cool ...

Digital cosmetics!

I saw one book at Borders that even went into removing love handles. I could not believe my eyes. There goes all those great B/W's of old wrinkly hands!

wrote in message

I'm constantly re-touching. I cover blemishes first with the clone tool,

but you could also use the healing brush. Then I use the blur tool with a medium to low pressure and smooth the skin. Smaller brush for around the nostrils. Don't blur them, or else then it shows you did something more than you want shown. Teeth - create a new layer (create a new layer for every layer of make-up!), get a small paint brush (about a 4) and get the white paint, opacity set to about 9, and paint the teeth. Eyes- you can add eye shadow or liner just like in real life (brush and color)then adjust opacity, etc., then if there's a dark lining around the eye then the smudge tool, size 5 or so, pressure about 30 percent, and drag out some lashes. If you want them very long, you'll need to paint them on. Use a dark brown, small brush, new layer, then paint them on. Adjust the layer opacity, add a touch of gaussian blur, and they should look natural. If not, delete the layer and try again or adjust the hue/saturation of the lashes. High pass sharpening of the eyeball area looks nice, too. Select the eyes with the lasso, feather at 2 px, copy and paste to a new layer. High pass at 10, hard or soft light, reduce opacity to about 70 if using hard light, merge with lower layer. Hair- use the clone tool to get rid of any unwanted stray hairs, use the dodge or burn tool to add highlights and texture. You could also do a little of the high pass sharpening on the hair. Accenting the eyes more - duplicate layer, on the top layer, erase the iris and pupil. Now go to the layer beneath and adjust hue/saturation (make sure "colorize" is checked). These are techniques I've used on about every woman or young woman I do and there's a few on my website. There are other ways of doing the things I've listed here, but these are my faves and they could be used to create the portrait samples that you posted. I haven't seen Janee's tutorial on this, but she does have some good ones. If you're doing this for someone, you need to be careful and not remove all that makes them them. I've had people get a little weird if I remove a mole (although I still do cover it a little bit), or too many wrinkles, or fix their teeth too much. I just try to enhance what's there and accent the good. I hope this helps!

~Cindy
<http://daydreamsart.com>

Nice work Cindy ... you have some very nice images. I like the couple in the heavens.

wrote in message

I'm constantly re-touching. I cover blemishes first with the clone tool,

but you could also use the healing brush. Then I use the blur tool with a medium to low pressure and smooth the skin. Smaller brush for around the nostrils. Don't blur them, or else then it shows you did something more than you want shown. Teeth - create a new layer (create a new layer for every layer of make-up!), get a small paint brush (about a 4) and get the white paint, opacity set to about 9, and paint the teeth. Eyes- you can add eye shadow or liner just like in real life (brush and color)then adjust opacity, etc., then if there's a dark lining around the eye then the smudge tool, size 5 or so, pressure about 30 percent, and drag out some lashes. If you want them very long, you'll need to paint them on. Use a dark brown, small brush, new layer, then paint them on. Adjust the layer opacity, add a touch of gaussian blur, and they should look natural. If not, delete the layer and try again or adjust the hue/saturation of the lashes. High pass sharpening of the eyeball area looks nice, too. Select the eyes with the lasso, feather at 2 px, copy and paste to a new layer. High pass at 10, hard or soft light, reduce opacity to about 70 if using hard light, merge with lower layer. Hair- use the clone tool to get rid of any unwanted stray hairs, use the dodge or burn tool to add highlights and texture. You could also do a little of the high pass sharpening on the hair. Accenting the eyes more - duplicate layer, on the top layer, erase the iris and pupil. Now go to the layer beneath and adjust hue/saturation (make sure "colorize" is checked). These are techniques I've used on about every woman or young woman I do and there's a few on my website. There are other ways of doing the things I've listed here, but these are my faves and they could be used to create the portrait samples that you posted. I haven't seen Janee's tutorial on this, but she does have some good ones. If you're doing this for someone, you need to be careful and not remove all that makes them them. I've had people get a little weird if I remove a mole (although I still do cover it a little bit), or too many wrinkles, or fix their teeth too much. I just try to enhance what's there and accent the good. I hope this helps!

~Cindy
<http://daydreamsart.com>

I think the effect in those two pictures is overdone and phony looking. I would have almost ventured that they were actually Bryce creations...

If you're going to use the Dust & Scratches filter, I'd strongly suggest using the following method: Apply the filter, make a snapshot, undo the filter effect, then paint over problem areas with the history brush pulling from the D&S snapshot using lighten or darken. This lets you fix things like wrinkles or whitespots without blurring the whole image.

tye

Heh, it's a funny old world. CG artists spend all of their time trying to make their character models look more like real humans and less like 3D renders, and here's you lot discussing how to make photographs look more like CG renders and less like real people.

:)

Actually it seems like the pendulum is swinging back the other way and people want to see more stylized images, such as the use of the illusion of cell shading in 3-d video games.

It's so true and the scary thing is that in a couple hundred years the two worlds will merge with clone humans designed for service. Think all those StarTrek episodes were imaginary??? I heard that the realism for the princess in Shrek had to be tuned down.

wrote in message

Heh, it's a funny old world. CG artists spend all of their time trying to

make their character models look more like real humans and less like 3D renders, and here's you lot discussing how to make photographs look more like CG renders and less like real people.

:)

You are absolutely right Ol' Whozit, they do look somewhat phony and just after reading your post and Iain McFadzen's, your posts brought out a twinkle in my eye. It's this type of plastic or phony look that I'm hoping to create. I've seen some work from other Photoshop artists that have repainted so-to-speak photographs with smooth skin tones etc. turning regular photographs into smooth airbrushed effects.

I've uploaded 3 new examples by one of my absolute favorite artist Drew Posada. I've been looking all over the web and through books to learn how to create smooth skin and highlighting/ shadowing effects such as these images.

If you're a bit squeamish about the female body then don't look at these images, they're not pornography but 2 of them are pretty risque. These images are not hand painted (traditional airbrush, or oil paints). Drew had used photographs and smoothed out the skin tons, highlighted etc.

<http://www.geocities.com/suzyqt_2002/drew_posada1.jpg> <http://www.geocities.com/suzyqt_2002/drew_posada2.jpg> <http://www.geocities.com/suzyqt_2002/drew_posada3.jpg>

Again because of Geocities, you'll probably have to copy the web addresses above and paste them into a new browser window to see them.

Thanks all

Suzy

One of the ways I've learned to make images look softer (not full on glamour makup) is sort of a smaller version of Gary's link.

Lets see if I can remember how to do this...

Basically get your image to the point you feel its blemish free and ready for the softening effect.

go to Select>Color Range

Try to select ONLY skin tones. use the slider to adjust your selection. Once you feel all the skins is selected do a Layer Via Copy.

This will make a semi transparent layer of the person, this is commonly called the ghost layer.

Hide your image layer and erase any unwanted areas in the ghost layer that may appear.. background parts and such. Try to leave nothing but skin.

reveal your image layer now and select your ghost layer

Next gaussian blur the ghost layer. I read that you should go up to 6, but use your judgement on this. It really will vary from image to image.

Once your ghost layer is blured and you've adjusted the opacity so the skin looks how you want it take a small eraser brush and (on the ghost layer) erase over lines that you want to keep like the mouth, nostrils, eyes, eyebrows...etc.

This is a quick dirty way of doing it.. im sure there could be more depth added.

There's a great discussion on skin smoothing at the Photoshop Techniques forum. Some of the examples are pretty close to what you're after.

<http://photoshoptechniques.com/forum/>

If memory serves, the thread is in the Photography forum which is located in the members area, so I guess you'll have to register if you want to check it out. It may be worth your time...