More Beautiful You

Back a month or so ago, I blogged about some friends that were starting up a website. I had helped them out with some seasonal photos.

Now that the site has been up for a while, I thought I would post a few more of the pictures from the photo shoot.

Why not have a look at their site at www.beautyu.co.uk and take a look.

Airbrushing - Because You're Worth It!

I have been doing a few projects recently that have involved some requested photo retouching / airbrushing. I use both Photoshop and Paintshop Pro so experimented with different techniques in each until I came up with something that I was fairly happy with.

This process does differ depending on the photo but I now use a general routine for the smoothing out of skin without making the subject look fake and also trying to keep the important details.

I was looking for a model but as no one was available I had to take a quick snapshot of myself to work on. After a long weekend and lots of late nights, a retouch was just what I needed!!!

Here is the before shot, straight out of the camera.



Here is the same shot again after some retouching.



Click on the images to enlarge as the differences are more noticeable.

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Here are the steps that I look to achieve this.

Opened the original image in Photoshop and removed any blemishes with the spot healing tool

Duplicated the background layer and applied the dust and scratches filter with a radius of about 3 pixels and a threshold of 0

Applied a gaussian blur with a radius of about 1.4 pixels

Applied some texture to the image by using the add noise filter (1%)

Added a layer mask revealing all and filled the mask with black

Set the colour to white and used a paintbrush to brush in the new smooth skin

Lightened up the areas around the eyes and brightened up the eyes themselves

Applied some adjustment layers (curves and colour balance)

This technique does seem to work better on photos of women but then we are used to them having much smoother skin than us guys anyway :)

Symmetry

I have seen many articles which report things like symmetrical human faces are more beautiful. I wonder if the same thing goes for photos?!?

Clever Stuff

Clever video manipulation from Adobe.