USM in portraiture

Yes – I have done that – it avoids oversharpening the wrinkles and skin pores, that those of us over a certain age would rather were not emphasised! I’ve also combined this with a slight blurring of parts of the face, avoiding critical details like eyes, nostrils, ears and hair where sharpness is more desirable…

<http://users.on.net/sestewart/Retouched.jpg>

It is easy to overdo it (as my example probably shows!) -I cloned sand and biscuit crumbs off her face and blurred the freckles heavily. And her eyes aren’t really quite that blue either….

Quite a nice portrait, Susan. I love these eyes too although I agree it is on the edge of being overdone.
Usually I apply a soft focus effect to a layer, erase the eyes and change the opacity of this layer until the difference is hardly noticable. Usually I dodge the eyes and the area around the eyes a little too to emphasize the eyes.

Leen

Thanks Leen – I think it’s really a technique that’s better applied to a more formal portrait rather than a casual one like this – the original is actually really more satidfying as it captures her "as she is" – biscuit crumbs and all!.
<http://users.on.net/sestewart/IMG_3075.jpg>

I was just playing around with some techniques I’d read about on the first full face portrait that came to hand. I think I also dodged and burnt around the eyes a bit too (lightened the whites and intensified the iris colour and darkened the pupil) but it’s several weeks since I did this and I can’t remember everything… It does look less exaggerated in print than it does on screen.

Susan S.
edited to add link to original.

Susan, She is beautiful no matter how you picture her.

But, to me, the first portrait (retouched one) was absolutely beautiful. My eye isn’t trained as well as most of yours are, but I thought it was a gorgeous portrait of a gorgeous child. Nothing looked retouched to me.

But aren’t those freckles darling?

Lorace

Susan, i love both pictures….I’d be very interested in knowing what tutorial or tip you were following. You did a great job !

Leen et al

I have been know to but two separate gausian blurs one applied as a darkening the other lighting and create a combined mask of these. Next I erase or mask the eyes, eyebrows, the mouth and teeth, the edges of the nostrils and enough of the hair to create a wonderful crispness. This contrast in softness to hardness looks very natural and really doesn’t need a USM. It goes without saying that I will do extra work on the zits and blotches and lighten up the teeth if need be. Almost for got may have to dull the high lights a bit. Finally if I have failed to watch my lighting I add catch lights in the eyes. use to be done with a small dob of white spot in the old darkroom days.

While this sounds like a lot if your careful with your lightening you can do it in very short order.

Grant

Thanks for the kind words..Lorace -yes she is very cute (I sometimes wonder how we managed to produce two such beautiful little girls!) Jodi – it wasn’t one particular tutorial that I was following, but a combination of several things mainly from Katrin Eisemann’s book- the trick of duplicating a layer, gaussian blurring and then masking out the eyes and other details (or erasing the blurrred layer with a soft eraser – I prefer to mask as it’s more easily reversible) came from there as as do some of the the cloning techniques I use. The eyes were also done with some of her tricks – selective dodging and burning to increase contrast -(I didn’t attempt the hand painting that she also uses to emphsise eyes even further!) I also saturated their colour strongly by roughly selecting and using a HSB adjustment layer targeted to blues and increasing the saturation and moving it a little further away from green. I used Richard Lynch’ s healing brush for Elements to reduce the shadowing under her eyes; I can’t remember where I read about selectively sharpening the eyes..but that was thrown into the mix as well.

I’ve used (but don’t think I did on this one) a Gaussian blur layer in screen mode to give a high key effect – I’ll have to try Grant’s trick of lightness and darkness blurring layers…

Susan S.

I think this might be the article Susan was referring to. If not, it’s excellent one anyway: < http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/smart_sharp.shtm l>

This one is for Elements only. I’m not sure you can access the actual tutorials without registering or logging in, but it’s worth trying: <http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/>

Patti

Patti – that’s not quite what I did – I just painted a mask with a brush – but it works rather nicely. I have used a slightly different version of this in the past (but it’s a while ago and I’d forgotten – thanks for reminding me!).

My elements version of smart sharpening (requires no add-ins) – it’s slightly more complex than the retouchpro one but gives you more control over the masking (but takes a lot longer to describe than to do) I don’t remember where it comes from, I don’t think I originated it!:

Duplicate the layer to be sharpened.
Enhance/adjust color/Remove colour
Use the glowing edges filter to create white lines on a black background – I prefer this to the find edges filter as you get more control over the width and other characteristics of the edges – with find edges you don’t have these options
Invert to get black lines on white background
Use the threshold command as in the original tutorials to convert to just black and white-move the slider until the required amount of detail is visible.
Magic wand (non-contiguous) to select the white bits, hit delete*

Gaussian blur slightly
Then duplicate the layer to be sharpened again, and move this duplicate to the top. Group with the layer below which should be the one with the lines in it. The top layer will now only be visible where there are opaque pixels in the layer below – ie along the edges. (the degree of visibility will depend on the degree of opacity in the masking layer – so blurring will effectively feather the transition) Sharpening the top layer will thus only sharpen the edges and the sharpening can be done much harder.
The advantage of doing it this way is that you can modify the mask by hand – by increasing the blur or deleting bits you decide you don’t want sharpened.
It actually gives a better effect around the eyes than my original effort – they eyelashes in particular are more cleanly sharpened.

* (up to here makes a good starting point for a pen and water colour wash effect – or with broader lines and more black, a lino cut- simplify the colours in the layer underneath using posterize).

susan S

Susan, wow! I had to print that one out for the special file – thanks!

Inevitably I missed a step – it may be obvious but it may not! – before Gaussian blurring after hitting the delete key you need to deselect (control/command D)…sorry!

Susan S.

Susan,
Thanks for passing along the technique. I tried it quickly on a radom picture and it works well. Shall spend more time on selected picture files and selections within.
Ken

Susan, thanks ! Amen for copy paste !