Hi,

It was my girlfriends birthday on Saturday and there was not many chances to get a decent photo.

We got one... but she is not very happy with it... the red eye, she says she thinks her skin is to red rather than being tanned, her skin is shiny and her face looks fat. (Women Eh!!!)

I have played with it in Photoshop but cannot really do anything with it as I am not an expert!!

Its a bit much to ask, but would anyone be so kind as to try and correct these problems. And maybe even do something magical with the photo so it is worth putting on a wall!?!?!

I know it is only allowed to be 100kb, but hopefully will be good enough to print. It will be available by email though in all it's glory...(peter.cashen@blueyonder.co.uk if anyone is kind enough.)

Thanks so much.

Hello peterc,

RetouchPro is a place for people to learn. For some reason, people have recently posted pictures that they would like to have retouched or restored by others, and they have left frustrated at times. Other times they learned how to do it.

If you want to learn to do it yourself, you will get plenty of help learning how to do it. Just post the results of your work, and ask for help. If you want someone else to do the job for you, there are quite a few members who would be willing to take on the job for a fee.

I'm not trying to sound mean, but just clarifying the purpose of the site. It's for learning. Good luck. We have a lot of great people here, willing to help.

Ed

Hi,

Even advice would be great, I just do not know where to start.

The only way I seem to accomplish things is by looking around websites for exact step by step guides... but the pics still do not turn out great.

Peter:

If it's any consolation, learning to do what you want to do here and get satisfying results takes time and practice. Speaking for myself, the pace of skill development is never as fast as I would like it to be, but I can tell you I'm better at this kind of stuff now than I was a year ago.

That said I sense you don't have a lot of time. Given the culture of this site that Ed correctly described ("Teach, not do"), may I suggest you post an SOS message in the DPReview retouching forum. A request like yours is not uncommon in that forum. Participants are eager to take a shot at correcting an image like this as well as offer "what I did" advice.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1006

Important:
* You cannot upload/attach files to DPReview posts like you can here, but you can include a URL in the text so the image can be viewed and subsequently downloaded. Include .jpg at the end of the url, too. That way the image will be visible in the post.
* If you don't have something like a www.pBase.com account (free) where the original can be uploaded, do that in advance of creating the thread at DPR.

Good luck on your project and be happy she shows interest in (vs. ignoring) how she looks.

~Danny~

Hi Peter, What Ed and Danny say is true, this is a site to learn retouching. However, I've done a really basic job on your photo, and you should be able to do this yourself on the original. What I did was as follows.

To remove red eye, create new layer and set the blend mode to colour. Paint in relevent colours to iris and pupils of eyes.

To modify sun tan of girlfriend. Create another layer set to colour blend, and paint in tan colour to her skin, blur slightly using Gaussian Blur, then adjust opacity of layer to get best results.

Adjust brightness and contrast of picture using levels.

Lastly I cropped the image to centre you in the image.

As I said, this should not be beyond someone of even limited experience.

Hope this helps.

Hi Peter

Here's a couple of relatively simple things you can do.

For the red eye, zoom in close to the pupil, choose the Desaturate brush from the tool bar. With a small brush setting, desaturate the color out. You may also want to try to accentuate the color in the iris. Pick a color you think is close and with a small brush set to color mode and low opacity, paint in the color gradually . Make sure you don't overdo it. Go back to full screen mode to check your progress.

For the skin, use the color picker and select an area of skin that looks tanned. With a soft brush set to 20% in Color mode, paint over the areas that are too red.

Hope this helps

Dave

Hi Peter, everybody,

I adjusted red eye, tone and contrast and skin colour just like Gary did ...

I also 'cleaned up' and change the background a bit...

Hey all,

Here is another nice method for removing red eye.

1. Click Image>Adjustments>Channel Mixer
2. Adjust the red channel to 0% red, 50% green, and 50% blue, this removes the red light reflection and replaces it with the lower reflection from the other two channels.
3. Set the new history state as the source for the history brush and back up a step.
4. Use the history brush to fill in the eye.

You know how it goes, there are a dozen ways to do everything. This one works particularily well on large photos with a lot of pixels in the eyes because it very accurately simulates proper eye lighting.

Take care,

Michael