How to do portrait retouchingMost of this was done with curves. You can check your color info palette and it will tell you exactly what kind numbers you have going on. Initially, this shot had a lot of yellow, and a lot of Red. By playing with those channels in curves, you can lower the amounts of those colors so that you get a more even ration. I also added a 'Photo Filter' to this. It's right there in the Adjustment layers palette. You should play around with it some and see what kind of effects you can achieve. While I don't think it's for everyday use, it's still a useful tool.
What took the longest on this shot was cleaning up the straggly hairs that were all over the top of her face. This was done by creating a new layer when all of my color-correction was done, and using a combination of the clone tool and the healing brush. Don't forget, across the top of the information bar, at the top of your workspace, there will be a little drop-down menu that will give you the option of 'Current & Below', 'Current Layer' or 'All Layers'. Personally, since this is one of the last things that I do, I set it to 'Current & Below', that's what works for me.
And also, save save save your work as you go. There's been too many times where I've been almost finished with a piece, and PS has unexpectedly quit. Try to avoid that, cause it really sucks when you have to go back and re-do what you've already done.
I'll try to back to this in more detail soon, let me know if you have any questions, comments or anything at all.
Peace and have a great weekend.
Hey David,
ReplyDeleteFirst off, VERY COOL!!
One trick (for fly-away hair type trouble) I've been trying out lately (with some pretty nice success) is a combination of surface blur, add noise, and small gaussian blur (to a copy layer). The surface blur keeps more rough detail than gaussian blur. Then I often create a blank layer on top of that and paint with the brush tool, add noise, set opacity. It's probably faster than the time it took me to write this...
Best,
Ken
Hey Ken,
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like a pretty cool technique, I may try that and see what happens. I know that there are dozens of different techniques and styles out there and people should always use whatever way works best for them. I'm also happy to hear of new methods, mostly because they could be better than my own. Thanks for the kind words too, I appreciate the feedback.