Skintones

[tmosley]

I'm not very good at retouching and would like to become better....i have submitted a before and after shot of a model i shot a few days ago. Any tips, suggestions or otherwise would be a great help. Thanks in advance to all.

[Kraellin]

hi tmosley,

and welcome to RP!

first thing is, what effect do you want to achieve. are you looking to make this a high glamour shot, an artistic sort of image or what?

if you're going for glamour, the first thing i'd do is adjust your lighting. the picture is somewhat dark. i'd brighten it up a bit and add a bit more contrast, probably. you can do that with 'curves' or 'brightness/contast' either as an adjustment layer or directly applied to the layer.

the second thing i see is the 'pasty' look. this is mostly in your retouched face. it comes about from having cloned or smudged too much. you lose the texture and get a monotone look which gives the 'pasty' look.

Craig

[superfrasky]

Here is my attemtpt. Using color correction on midtones. Before adjust saturation

[tmosley]

Originally Posted by Kraellin

hi tmosley,

and welcome to RP!

first thing is, what effect do you want to achieve. are you looking to make this a high glamour shot, an artistic sort of image or what?

if you're going for glamour, the first thing i'd do is adjust your lighting. the picture is somewhat dark. i'd brighten it up a bit and add a bit more contrast, probably. you can do that with 'curves' or 'brightness/contast' either as an adjustment layer or directly applied to the layer.

the second thing i see is the 'pasty' look. this is mostly in your retouched face. it comes about from having cloned or smudged too much. you lose the texture and get a monotone look which gives the 'pasty' look.

Craig

Yes i'm going for a more glamourous look for her......i think she has good potential and i want the pictures to give her justice. I'll try your techniques and see what i come up with. Thanks Craig. I'm Tre by the way!

[tmosley]

Originally Posted by superfrasky

Here is my attemtpt. Using color correction on midtones. Before adjust saturation

I can see the difference in the pic.....looks brighther...tones are good too.

[megl]

Here's a 10 minute retouch ... could have made it much much better but decided to see how far I could get in 10 minutes

[tmosley]

Originally Posted by megl

Here's a 10 minute retouch ... could have made it much much better but decided to see how far I could get in 10 minutes

now you're just showin off, lol...
Seriously that is a great job...you guys are really showing me something. question, are you using photoshop or paint shop pro? How do you add the highlights to her hair?

[Kraellin]

tre,

yes, we like to show off here. it's the second best thing we do

get them to post how they did the things they did, though. we want you to learn too

Craig

[tmosley]

Originally Posted by Kraellin

tre,

yes, we like to show off here. it's the second best thing we do

get them to post how they did the things they did, though. we want you to learn too

Craig

that was my next post.....how did u guys do what you did? I sat in front of my photoshop last night with a blank look on my face....i tried some stuff and it sucked and i went to bed frustrated. I know a lot of people have a bad taste when it comes to tuts, i sure need a few.

[Stroker]

Never really done any of this kind of work, but I do like to play on occassion.

Started with a Curves Adjustment set to Luminosity to brighten it up a bit and to add a touch of contrast. Then I got rid of the medium frequencies using a frequency variation that I learned from Greg Apodaca. Then added the tiniest bit of saturation.

No idea how well I did, but sure it nice to try something a bit different to see if my muscles can flex that way. The only thing that really strikes me that I prolly should have done but didn't is sharpen the hair a bit.

[tmosley]

Originally Posted by Stroker

Never really done any of this kind of work, but I do like to play on occassion.

Started with a Curves Adjustment set to Luminosity to brighten it up a bit and to add a touch of contrast. Then I got rid of the medium frequencies using a frequency variation that I learned from Greg Apodaca. Then added the tiniest bit of saturation.

No idea how well I did, but sure it nice to try something a bit different to see if my muscles can flex that way. The only thing that really strikes me that I prolly should have done but didn't is sharpen the hair a bit.

nice....real nice. ill be workin on some techniques tonite.

[Cameraken]

Then I got rid of the medium frequencies using a frequency variation that I learned from Greg Apodaca

Hi Stroker. Nice picture, but I don't understand what you mean. Please can you explain.

Ken

[Stroker]

TBone did an excellant job of explaining Greg's technique over at PSt:
More skin smoothing (warning - lots of images)

[Duv]

I took a simple approach. I just assumed that the picture was underexposed so I just made a RGB curves adjustment, pulling down from the 3/4 tones.
The other things I noticed were very small catchlights so that the eyes looked dead. Also, the model has a lip droplet which I would think she would prefer to have removed.

Dave

[Cassidy]

tmosley have a look at a couple of tutorials in here in the tutorials section, namely:

http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/index.php?m=show&id=191
and
http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/index.php?m=show&id=148

For my part I thought I'd have a go at this image and my steps comprised as follows

Adjusted levels
Removed Stray Hairs and as much of the shadow as possible
Fixed Blemishes with the clone tool
Selected a tonal area of the skin I liked and used a low opacity brush in Hue mode to even the tone a bit
On a new empty layer using a very large soft brush with same colour but
in normal mode, applyed a 3% opacity quick brush till I was happy with tone.
On a new layer, filled with 50% grey and set it to overlay and using a 3% large brush and only using black and white, added some highlights and some
shadowing for interest.