Hi all I have been reading these forum for a while now and there are so many talented people here it astounds me! I have been fiddling with photos in photoshop (cs2 v9) for a while now but I know nothing about photography and very little about photoshop.

I've decided to finally take my little hobby seriously and will no doubt be spending a lot of time here from now on. I'm also going to be buying some photoshop help books (any suggestions?) to get me started.

I went to a wedding recently and took a picture of my cousin and her boyfriend. The thing is there is a lot of shine to the skin and my cousin has said she hates the picture because she looks like a hamster and the top of her arm and tummy looks "big"!! I thought retouching the image and putting it in a nice frame would make a great gift for them for Christmas.

Does any one have any suggestions on how to change the skin tone and reduce the arm size and tummy size (not to a ridiculous amount - just to a more flattering amount I guess, I still want her to look like her!).

If anyone gets the time to have a look at this image I would be very grateful if you could talk me through what you have done so that I can recreate the technique. I'm going to have a go at this myself this afternoon and will post my version here and hopefully I will pick up some tips on how to improve it. Thank you all xx

PS> I've also uploaded a high res version to image shack: http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/5756/robandhayleylt1.jpg

Well, first of all it's a very small picture which makes it hard to do any detailed retouching. But then again it's big enough to give you a general idea of what can be done.

I just did some relatively careful liquifying (the Photoshop liquify plugin) of her arm and tummy. What still needs to be done is touch up on the dots on the dress and the guys tie - I've done a little of it here. Looking at it again I may have overdone the liquifying of her arm a bit (or else I need to further slim the tummy and breastarea). Then I removed the red-eyes, a bit of levels adjustment and a little sharpening. For the hotspots on the skin simply take the patch-tool, make a selection and patch it with some neighboring skin without the hotspot.

This is done with >Image >Transform >Distort, by pulling in the two left corners. The tummy was helped by copying some of the gentleman's shirt, moving it over to the left and liquefying some.
Painting on the faces with an airbrush took care of the shiny areas. Red eyes were removed and a little catch light added. Some sharpening.

Juergen

I took a try at this using the liquify filter. In additon to the arm and middle, I also did a little contouring of the face and took the redness out of the cheeks. As stated by a previous poster, this picture is rather small for retouching purposes.

dc

Forgot to remove some of the shine. Tried to correct that in the single posted picture.

My try - No Liquify

I made a selection as shown by the red line, copied to a new layer and moved it in the direction of the arrow. This slims her arm and reduces her waist by moving her back in a little.. Cloned a little of his shirt to move her tummy in a little. Her face seemed a touch wide so I slimmed it by about 3%. Removed red eyes and used the healing brush to remove glare on faces. Levels adjustment to set white point and mid-ranges.

Remove the table in the background and ran it through a noise filter

I can't add anything to the pic that hasn't been done but I wonder about actually doing this to a family pic. I'm all for color correcting, removing shine and cloning out parts of the image that are distracting and to make the composition better, but I struggle with altering a family members body, it doesn't seem right to me.

...but I struggle with altering a family members body, it doesn't seem right to me.
You are not necessarily doing that. In my example, using Distort, I actually changed the perspective some. If you shoot a group of people, for example, around a table, the person closest to the camera will appear much larger than in real life when compared to others at the table further back and more centered.

Correcting some of this lens distortion is quite legal, in my opinion.

Juergen