Please some advice on this photo

[deZines]

I have been working on this image for a few ours now. It was horrible resolution. I've been following some of the tutorials here on channel correction to smooth out the skin. It still seems really fake to me. I think I smoothed it over too much.

Can you give me some advice on how to make it more natural. Also the hair is awful. I do not use the soften or heal tooks much. I do more brush work or airbrushing to fix things. I work in psp or photoshop/illustrator. I've been a graphic artist for 12+ years and am quite familiar with the tools if someone can just point me in the right direction.

Thanks

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pi...00001851640856

[mistermonday]

Re: Please some advice on this photo

deZines, it looks very blurred and very fake. It is a pity that you have spent several hours on blurring it when you could have used that same time to do an excellent job doing pixel level Dodge and Burn. You can search here at RP for D&B tutorials and there are about a million of them if you do a google search. There are also lots of videos on YouTube.
Regards, Murray

[deZines]

Re: Please some advice on this photo

Thanks I'll do that Yes, I thought it looked very fake also. I appreciate the advice

[shanegoldberg]

Re: Please some advice on this photo

I have been working on this image for a few ours now. It was horrible resolution. I've been following some of the tutorials here on channel correction to smooth out the skin. It still seems really fake to me. I think I smoothed it over too much.

Can you give me some advice on how to make it more natural. Also the hair is awful. I do not use the soften or heal tooks much. I do more brush work or airbrushing to fix things. I work in psp or photoshop/illustrator. I've been a graphic artist for 12+ years and am quite familiar with the tools if someone can just point me in the right direction.

Thanks

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pi...00001851640856

Just tone it right back (the skin). Skin does NOT have to look like a plastic model to have a good look It doesn't help either starting on a Low Res. image. If you've used layers and are able to reduce the opacity of your skin edits just scale it back to at least 50% of what you've done now and see how that looks.

[deZines]

Re: Please some advice on this photo

This photographer keeps sending me crappy low resolution pictures. I'm just trying to break into the pageant business. I've never even done photography retouching before. I'm a graphic artist, and know the tools but am learning the techniques to retouch. For me I've always worked with minimum 300 dpi when rendering images. So, I know this is a really stupid question, but how would I go about changing a crappy 72 to a workable image that can print well? Is there an easy way to do this in photoshop or psp, or is it still going to come out pixelated? Besides the blur there was all the digital noise in that one above that I had to try to get rid of first before I could ever retouch the girl herself? I'm so tempted to just tell this photographer that I don't want to do work for her. It kind of sucks to have to get paid to fix the photography mistake than working on the girl herself. Do you know what I mean?

[Alan_P]

Re: Please some advice on this photo

In Photoshop you can resize the image to a higher resolution (image resize). Check the bicubic smoothing option for resampling. This will work for modest increases. There are no miracles. There are plug ins which may do a somewhat better job.

Alan

[shanegoldberg]

Re: Please some advice on this photo

Yeah, I've had pretty good success enlarging with PhotoZoom Pro
http://www.benvista.com/photozoompro

Or another one is Perfect Resize (used to be Genuine Fractals):
http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/perfect-resize/

You CAN get some pretty good results from these bad boys!

[sirrduke2010]

Re: Please some advice on this photo

The old Glamour versus traditional portrait argument. Fantasy versus reality. I think anytime you dress up a photo to look like a glamour shot the vast majority of traditional portrait photographs will have something to say. Glamour is a more about making the face look perfect. A softer cleaner perfect blemish free look is the Glamour style. The other difference is after you have had the model made up, photographed, and edited she won't look like the real person. Traditional portrait photographers and some glamour photographers will hate this. I think you have to come to terms with what kind of photograph you are doing. Generally a portrait will be slightly touched up but at the end of the day she won't look foreign to the person themselves. You don't want to completely cover everything up by making it too soft and wiping out all blemishes and/or wrinkles. I alway like to do the test that at the end of the shoot the person will look like the finished product. If it doesn't or everything is too perfect than you probably over-edited and/or had a poor original to work with. The resulting perfect image will look more like glamour. I have seen some glamour artists do original renditions of the model but the model is usually blemish free and perfect. GarageGlamour.com has some great Glamour images. I would also check out a traditional portrait site. I saw one image of a glamour shot with editing and the girl looked totally different than she looks like in real life. Portrait will soften the wrinkles, get rid of some of the blemishes, and make the face look better but it won't eliminate everything. The person will still look like the original only it may look like she has had a face lift without the drastic change. Wrinkles will be still there but softened so they aren't as unflattering.

[deZines]

Re: Please some advice on this photo

I've used Photoshop. It works just fine if I'm shrinking the image down for web view but still leaves all the horrible resolution pixels for print. Doesn't smooth the pixels out quite enough. Haha. Think I'm finally going to break down and get a camera to do the photoshoots myself. Maybe Santa will bring me one!

I really like the natural look Sirrduke. I've done many minor retouch of eliminating stray hairs, brightening their hair, etc. You wouldn't believe the craze over "glitz/glamour" shots in the pageant world. Many of them do not even look like themselves. They make them look like the American Dolls or a porcelein doll. Nothing like the girl themselves. I often wonder if these retouchers are using presets or brushes to totally repaint these girls to an exact specification.