Photography Tip #6 27/02/2011

Editing Portrait shots in Photoshop.

In this tip I’m going to show you some quick and simple methods to really make that portrait shot gleam .

So go ahead and open your portrait shot. (Try and find one with the subject smiling)

Ctrl + J to duplicate the layer, and select the ‘Spot healing brush’

Zoom in a little to see some more detail ( Hold ALT + Scroll mouse wheel ).

Check your brush size and hardness, this all depends on your image but for mine I have it set like this:

It’s best to have the brush size small and the hardness soft to medium.

Once we have that set up go ahead and click on any un-wanted blemishes, spots, moles and whatever you don’t want to see

 

Thats the first ‘stage’ complete, On too the second!

 

Zoom into the eyes, and select the ‘dodge tool’

This will brighten the eyes, so keep your brush size small and the hardness low and simply paint around the pupil on the iris

Tip: Don’t go too crazy as it will look fake, two strokes is plenty for my example here.

Now select the ‘Burn tool’

This will darken the area around the eyes.

So set your brush size small and hardness fairly low, as said it depends on your image.

Then just brush around the iris creating a thin dark line

 

If it seems too dark just press Ctrl + Z to undo the previous action and slide the Exposure percent down, You’ll find it at the top of the screen.

Thats the eyes done, Now to teeth.

Make a rough selection of the teeth, There are plenty of way of selecting in Photoshop but for the tutorial I used the ‘Polygonal Lasso Tool’

Simply press your mouse once then go around the teeth clicking every time you change direction

Now press Ctrl + U to bring up the Hue and Saturation box and select ‘Yellow’ in the drop down box

Now click and drag the saturation slider down until you see the teeth whiten.

Now you should have your portrait shot with clean skin, eyes that stand out and nice white teeth .

Now you can go ahead and mess around with the blending modes or save it for a future tip .

Hope this helps!

Thanks

Dan