Hi all,

I am a newbie interested in re-touching Glamour Pics and Portraits.

Hope you good folk could answer a couple of Questions for me please.

1. Is there a trick or easy way to get nice soft and 'pinky' flesh tones using Adobe Photoshop 7 or Photoshop CS? (I have both versions).

2. Is it best to fix up pimples, blemishes, wrinkles etc first then deal with brightness, colour, contrast last?

3.what is the best tool/method for removing unwanted blush, shadows etc from faces, necks arms?

4. When I save my picture after re-touching (jpeg) does it still retain all the image file size, parameters etc?

5. How, what do I need to calibrate my monitor to the monitor that the images were originally from?

any tips greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Minskie

Im sure you'll have question and others will add much more but here is a quick run through your questions

1. Is there a trick or easy way to get nice soft and 'pinky' flesh tones using Adobe Photoshop 7 or Photoshop CS? (I have both versions).

Soft skin there are many ways and debates over how much texture to retain. The most generic way in PS7 is to use the median filter or gaussian blur and then adjustment opacity of the layer. In CS2 there is surface blur. Proffessionals from what i understand use dodging/burning and healing (darkening/lightening) to smooth the skin pixel by pixel. You can also look into denoise software to soften skin such as neatimage or noiseninja..

"Pinky" I am not sure what you mean. You can use color balance adj layer to adj the colors. A more advanced way to adjust color is using the curves adj layer.

2. Is it best to fix up pimples, blemishes, wrinkles etc first then deal with brightness, colour, contrast last?
Yes healing blemishes is generally number one. If you increase contrast before healing you will exaggerate all the blemishes

3.what is the best tool/method for removing unwanted blush, shadows etc from faces, necks arms?

I add a softlight layer and use white brush at 5-10% fill to remove shadows. There is a thread right now on removing shadows also.

4. When I save my picture after re-touching (jpeg) does it still retain all the image file size, parameters etc?

Everytime you save a jpeg it loses quality, it's compressed everytime. If you think you might save more than once save as a psd or tiff. What do you mean parameters?


5. How, what do I need to calibrate my monitor to the monitor that the images were originally from?

Generally you need to buy hardware to calibrate a monitor. It will cost $200 or more for a good one. You can use something like quickgamma (google it) if you want something free that will get you a decent color but by no means professionally calibrated.

Thanks Delic,

Appreciate the help.

I guess by 'Pinky' I just mean more glossy, smooth, 'Magazine' looking than natural skin tones.? :chinese:

One more thing if I may?

When I create a new layer, I can't seem to make any changes to it.

What gives? Must be something I'm doing wrong.

Thanks,

Minskie

Once a professional model told me about retouching.

"Ok, your work it's not bad, but I choose use real make up on real skin and then you have a better picture".

Does anyone here have take make up lessons to do a better job?

Minskie,
Delic gave you some great responses. To amplify on the Monitor Calibration, you may not be aware that every version of Photoshop installs a control panel called Gamma.cpl. It is free and you can use it to do a very good calibration job on your monitor without having to buy a $200 h/w & s/w package. I contend that the calibration you get with Gamma is not noticeably different from the hardware devices for most monitors and ink jet printers which are not very high end. The control panel is stored in different locations depending on the operating system. If you do a Start > Find File, windows will locate it. Just double click it and use the set up wizard which will walk you through step by step.
Regards, Murray