I'm not very good at retouching and would like to become better....i have submitted a before and after shot of a model i shot a few days ago. Any tips, suggestions or otherwise would be a great help. Thanks in advance to all.

hi tmosley,

and welcome to RetouchPRO!

first thing is, what effect do you want to achieve. are you looking to make this a high glamour shot, an artistic sort of image or what?

if you're going for glamour, the first thing i'd do is adjust your lighting. the picture is somewhat dark. i'd brighten it up a bit and add a bit more contrast, probably. you can do that with 'curves' or 'brightness/contast' either as an adjustment layer or directly applied to the layer.

the second thing i see is the 'pasty' look. this is mostly in your retouched face. it comes about from having cloned or smudged too much. you lose the texture and get a monotone look which gives the 'pasty' look.

Craig

Here is my attemtpt. Using color correction on midtones. Before adjust saturation

hi tmosley,

and welcome to RetouchPRO!

first thing is, what effect do you want to achieve. are you looking to make this a high glamour shot, an artistic sort of image or what?

if you're going for glamour, the first thing i'd do is adjust your lighting. the picture is somewhat dark. i'd brighten it up a bit and add a bit more contrast, probably. you can do that with 'curves' or 'brightness/contast' either as an adjustment layer or directly applied to the layer.

the second thing i see is the 'pasty' look. this is mostly in your retouched face. it comes about from having cloned or smudged too much. you lose the texture and get a monotone look which gives the 'pasty' look.

Craig
Yes i'm going for a more glamourous look for her......i think she has good potential and i want the pictures to give her justice. I'll try your techniques and see what i come up with. Thanks Craig. I'm Tre by the way!

Here is my attemtpt. Using color correction on midtones. Before adjust saturation

I can see the difference in the pic.....looks brighther...tones are good too.

Here's a 10 minute retouch ... could have made it much much better but decided to see how far I could get in 10 minutes

Here's a 10 minute retouch ... could have made it much much better but decided to see how far I could get in 10 minutes
now you're just showin off, lol...
Seriously that is a great job...you guys are really showing me something. question, are you using photoshop or paint shop pro? How do you add the highlights to her hair?

tre,

yes, we like to show off here. it's the second best thing we do ;)

get them to post how they did the things they did, though. we want you to learn too ;)

Craig

tre,

yes, we like to show off here. it's the second best thing we do ;)

get them to post how they did the things they did, though. we want you to learn too ;)

Craig
that was my next post.....how did u guys do what you did? I sat in front of my photoshop last night with a blank look on my face....i tried some stuff and it sucked and i went to bed frustrated. I know a lot of people have a bad taste when it comes to tuts, i sure need a few.

Never really done any of this kind of work, but I do like to play on occassion.

Started with a Curves Adjustment set to Luminosity to brighten it up a bit and to add a touch of contrast. Then I got rid of the medium frequencies using a frequency variation that I learned from Greg Apodaca. Then added the tiniest bit of saturation.

No idea how well I did, but sure it nice to try something a bit different to see if my muscles can flex that way. The only thing that really strikes me that I prolly should have done but didn't is sharpen the hair a bit.

Never really done any of this kind of work, but I do like to play on occassion.

Started with a Curves Adjustment set to Luminosity to brighten it up a bit and to add a touch of contrast. Then I got rid of the medium frequencies using a frequency variation that I learned from Greg Apodaca. Then added the tiniest bit of saturation.

No idea how well I did, but sure it nice to try something a bit different to see if my muscles can flex that way. The only thing that really strikes me that I prolly should have done but didn't is sharpen the hair a bit.
nice....real nice. ill be workin on some techniques tonite.

Then I got rid of the medium frequencies using a frequency variation that I learned from Greg Apodaca

Hi Stroker. Nice picture, but I don't understand what you mean. Please can you explain.

Ken

TBone did an excellant job of explaining Greg's technique over at PSt:
More skin smoothing (warning - lots of images) (http://photoshoptechniques.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8822)

I took a simple approach. I just assumed that the picture was underexposed so I just made a RGB curves adjustment, pulling down from the 3/4 tones.
The other things I noticed were very small catchlights so that the eyes looked dead. Also, the model has a lip droplet which I would think she would prefer to have removed.

Dave

tmosley have a look at a couple of tutorials in here in the tutorials section, namely:

http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/index.php?m=show&id=191
and
http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/index.php?m=show&id=148

For my part I thought I'd have a go at this image and my steps comprised as follows

Adjusted levels
Removed Stray Hairs and as much of the shadow as possible
Fixed Blemishes with the clone tool
Selected a tonal area of the skin I liked and used a low opacity brush in Hue mode to even the tone a bit
On a new empty layer using a very large soft brush with same colour but
in normal mode, applyed a 3% opacity quick brush till I was happy with tone.
On a new layer, filled with 50% grey and set it to overlay and using a 3% large brush and only using black and white, added some highlights and some
shadowing for interest.

Here is our shot at it.

Here is our shot at it.
Very natural look to it....good job

tmosley have a look at a couple of tutorials in here in the tutorials section, namely:

http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/index.php?m=show&id=191
and
http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/index.php?m=show&id=148

For my part I thought I'd have a go at this image and my steps comprised as follows

Adjusted levels
Removed Stray Hairs and as much of the shadow as possible
Fixed Blemishes with the clone tool
Selected a tonal area of the skin I liked and used a low opacity brush in Hue mode to even the tone a bit
On a new empty layer using a very large soft brush with same colour but
in normal mode, applyed a 3% opacity quick brush till I was happy with tone.
On a new layer, filled with 50% grey and set it to overlay and using a 3% large brush and only using black and white, added some highlights and some
shadowing for interest.

Soakin it all up.....if you guys were in fla (jacksonville) i'd save you plate of BBq from the cookout, lol.

Very natural look to it....good jobHi Tre,
Thanks for the props. If you're interested, here's the methods we used.

As you can see we replaced the background using a solid color and then applying Lighting Effects (2 light sources). The first real challenge was the harsh shadow on the left of the model. We removed it by creating a layer mask (with the new background showing through).

The other challenges were the eye-shadow makeup (too harsh for a glamour shot) and the parting of her lips which gave her an almost snarling expression. We painted the lips closed (sampling color from the image on the fly), emphasized the irises of her eyes (dodge/burning), lightened the whites (dodge), and used the Clone Stamp Tool set to Color to change the color of her eye-shadow makeup to her natural skintone (referencing her cheek color).

We used the Patch Tool to eliminate blemishes and irregular wrinkles around her neck. For the softening of her skin we duplicated the background and used Gaussian Blur (7.5 pix) then created a layer mask and painted (white soft brush) in the mask avoiding any lines or edges of the model (staying within the large areas of her skin). This layer was set to 75% Opacity. This is a common method among glamour retouchers for softening skin and eliminating rough or irregular areas (and splotchiness) while still keeping the tone and texture. It also gives the model's skin an added glow.

We spent about 45 minutes on this and with more time would have focused on widening the mouth and making the transition of the mask better. Of course, a higher resolution photo would have helped with the masking. This was just too low to make a really convincing extraction or mask.

After getting some guts and really reading all the stuff you guys gave me....here is one of my final touches.....be gentle. I know i need to work on some stuff (like removing the stray hair without it LOOKING like i was tryin to remove the stray hair)....but im workin on it

Hi Tre,
Thanks for the props. If you're interested, here's the methods we used.

As you can see we replaced the background using a solid color and then applying Lighting Effects (2 light sources). The first real challenge was the harsh shadow on the left of the model. We removed it by creating a layer mask (with the new background showing through).

The other challenges were the eye-shadow makeup (too harsh for a glamour shot) and the parting of her lips which gave her an almost snarling expression. We painted the lips closed (sampling color from the image on the fly), emphasized the irises of her eyes (dodge/burning), lightened the whites (dodge), and used the Clone Stamp Tool set to Color to change the color of her eye-shadow makeup to her natural skintone (referencing her cheek color).

We used the Patch Tool to eliminate blemishes and irregular wrinkles around her neck. For the softening of her skin we duplicated the background and used Gaussian Blur (7.5 pix) then created a layer mask and painted (white soft brush) in the mask avoiding any lines or edges of the model (staying within the large areas of her skin). This layer was set to 75% Opacity. This is a common method among glamour retouchers for softening skin and eliminating rough or irregular areas (and splotchiness) while still keeping the tone and texture. It also gives the model's skin an added glow.

We spent about 45 minutes on this and with more time would have focused on widening the mouth and making the transition of the mask better. Of course, a higher resolution photo would have helped with the masking. This was just too low to make a really convincing extraction or mask.

I'll try one using your method too, thanks.

I brightened this one up a bit....

Here's a quick one I done.
I duplicated the layer and put a slight blur on it, I then masked over the parts that I needed to stay sharp. Adjusted the hue/saturation, then removed some of the slight blemishes with the healing tool. :classic: