Beautiful and lots of potential

[AtlanaAnna]

Beautiful background, Phil! I've never done level adjustments to the individual channels. This may be a good solution for another picture I'm struggling with. Thank you! Sylvia

[CJ Swartz]

Sylvia, I'd forgotten about a very nice resource available -- Vikki Hansen wrote an article that follows her process through the retouching of a portrait image. It was published by the on-line photo gallery, PBase in their first on-line magazine in pdf format. Her article begins on page 16 and runs thru page 18. Vikki is a working retoucher and is a stickler for a natural look in coloration and skin smoothing -- this would be a good article for you to download and keep if that is possible on your computer system.

http://i2.pbase.com/o1/mag/pbase_mag...l2_jul2005.pdf

[AtlanaAnna]

Thank you, C.J. This was a very good tutorial. I tried it on another portrait I'm working on. I got lost when it was time for me to paint on the mask. I couldn't seem to make the mask the active layer for me to paint. Anyway, I'm sure I need to start over and go through the steps again slowly. I'm pretty sure I've made some mistakes in the instructions. But I love using the eyedropped and painting on a smoother skin tone. I was able to remove this child's dark circles under his eyes. I'm probably not suppose to add another picture to this thread but since we're on the topic, here it is. Thank you!

[CJ Swartz]

Sylvia, if you have not already worked through both of these RetouchPro tutorials on layer masks, please do -- one was written by Vikki Hansen, and the other by Flora.

http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=63

http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=166

Your work looks good to me on the boy's face -- if I hadn't seen both photos, I wouldn't have noticed the difference. I question taking the smile line away from his mouth, however -- if I knew the boy, I might miss seeing "that look".

[AtlanaAnna]

I think you're right about the smile line. I went too far and I couldn't back up. I need to go through the tutorial by Flora. She is also very good and she is self-taught so there's hope for me. Thanks!

[CJ Swartz]

Originally Posted by AtlanaAnna

I think you're right about the smile line. I went too far and I couldn't back up. I need to go through the tutorial by Flora. She is also very good and she is self-taught so there's hope for me...

It was a good practice session for you; we all start off trying everything, and then try to learn when to stop (believe me, there are threads on that subject! ) Learning to "back up" is one of the skills you will also pick up -- using adjustment layers and layer masks that can be "thrown away" or changed, backing up in your history palette, saving snapshots of each big step along the way so we can "go back" is all part of the process. I've lost a lot of my work over the years because I didn't get in the habit of saving snapshots etc.

You are quite right -- Flora is excellent, and has written excellent tutorials. Look also at her challenges and her posts helping people with a difficult image -- she explains what/how she did and we all learn a lot from those posts. Most everyone here is self-taught (except some of the "kids" who are working in the trade and grew up on computers at home and school), and you are doing fine. I had been working (ok, playing - I don't make any money with it) with Photoshop for years before this website was created, and I didn't learn to start looking at channels until after I signed on here. [Don't feel the need to jump into channels until you feel ready, but they're just a basic part of the image we look at, and it is important to learn to look at them and use them when there are color casts, or we need to make difficult selections, etc. I'm just making the point that we can use Photoshop for a lot of things even before we know how to work all its features and parts.]

Remember -- enjoy the journey while you are learning -- don't worry about not knowing everything -- no one knows it all, but we sure enjoy the parts that we know!

[printmeister]

A colourized version...converted to monochrome via channel mixer and colour added back by curves adjustment.