Here's a pic from a photographer that represents the touch up work I want to do to my pics. Does anyone care to tell me what he did? What I wonder is how did he get the skin to look like that? also, is there a way to isolate a color? I'm thinking the wall had a lot of boost regarding the color blue.

Any tips is apprecieated!

Thanks
jay

To start off with it depends a lot on the image you start with -- careful lighting at the stage of taking a picture makes a big difference.

One general approach is to use an Overlay layer to enhance contrast and lighting. ByRo's action (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=9211) and his associated tutorial (http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=149) are a good place to start, or you could just add an Overlay layer filled with 50% gray and use a very low opacity (around 5%) very soft brush to brush on in black to darken or white to lighten. In the example below, which is just a very quick 5-minute initial attempt to illustrate a possible approach, I've used several layers generated by ByRo's action and then tweaked with an additional Overlay layer and some brushing by hand on top.

Then something like a Gaussian blurred layer, possibly in Screen mode, with lowered opacity and a layer mask added so that detail doesn't get obscured, will help get the kind of texture you are after. In the example below after I'd adjusted contrast and flattened I duplicated the background, ran Gaussian Blur, changed the blending mode to Screen, added a Hide All layer mask and then brushed onto the mask in white where there was skin texture I wanted to soften.

So far as the colour goes I suspect that wall was pretty blue to start with -- but you can tweak by, for example, adding a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and selecting that you want adjustments to apply to the blues only (for added specificity, you can sample from the original). Just as an example, I've used that technique here to boost the colour of her straps. But, again, it depends on the original image -- there might be more appropriate techniques.

Wow, Leah.
It's really rewarding seeing my little bag of tricks being put to such good use.
Which reminded me that I was owing some rewriting of the tutorial - should be a little easier to read now.
Rô

From a little book by Scott Kelby that I picked up the other day...

Open the photo you want, in this case your bathing beauty with the surfboard. Make a selection around the area you would like the soft light to be.

Go the the layers palette, add a new layer above. Fill that layer with your desired color. In this case, it was probably a blue in the same family as the blue on the wall. Alt click on the mask icon and it will automatically fill the mask with your selection. Choose Gaussian Blur from the filter menu and move the slider all the way to the right. Slowly drag the slider back to the left until you get a soft halo around your subject. Because it is a mask, you can edit the halo until you are satisfied. Lower the opacity of the layer to your liking and you are nearly done.

If the picture is to be printed, the artifically created halo will be smooth and not have any noise. You will need to add a slight amount of noise to match the original photo or it tends to look fake.

This technique really works. I promise. I've used it countless times and the results are outstanding.

Muito obrigado!

Thanks, I'll give these a try!