I am a newbie here, but I would like to know how do you add gloss to the skin when doing glamour retouching. When I retouch a lot of my photos the skin tends to look dry. When I look at some other photographers photos the skin looks nice and glossy. How do I do that?

see if you can find a photo that illustrates exactly what you mean (although do be careful not to violate anyones ©-- print only a portion of the face/etc. or post a specific link) That way we can try to come up wi th some help for you. Cheers!

-Kate

This is what I am talking about:
http://www.jolancephoto.com/men6.htm

Look at the picture of the guy with the fur hood on his head.

I haven't actually tried it because I'm usually trying to get blown-out highlights out not put gloss in but here's an idea that you could mess with. Transfer the image to LAB and use the Dodge tool in the L channel. Make sure the tool is set to midtones and the exposure is low. I'd probably set the exposure to like 5% to start. I wouldn't go any higher than 10% max. That's just a guess though. You can give it a try and see where it gets you. Oh, doing it on a duplicate layer also gives you the option to play with opacity later on.

i would try two things.. first add a softlight layer and paint with a white brush, low flow setting, on areas like cheeks, foreheads, arm curves, etc..

Then add a unsharp mask with a low amount ~40%, and large radius.. varies with resolution but probably greate than 40 px.. Then mask out the areas you don't want effected..

Looks like the diffuse glow filter ;)

If you want to know how to get some of those skin tones:

Look at Ro's tutorial on skin, then do exactly what he tells to "never do, because it looks artificial" ;)

looks like a softlight layer to me as well... there is an action that can help you with this called paint with light II (often called PWL) available for free download here: http://www.atncentral.com/download.htm It will put the layer in for you and all you have to do is use a soft low opacity (15% or less usually) brush (white for highlights like this, black for shadows) to paint on the effect. It takes a little messing around with, but works great. Good luck!

-Kate

A lot of it of course come from the original lighting, maybe thats where your images are lacking. Can you post a example of yours so we can judge where the problem might be, or we can try and improve it and then tell the steps needed.

that is really a hard job. but this tutorial can help u. i hope u didnt read it.

http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=212


i have try it. has anyone an idea how to add water on skin....