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Every magazine model has been touched up - in Photoshop. It's become a regular feature of any high-end photography. So here's how the professionals do it.
You can work retouching magic into any image; it just takes time, commitment and some specialist Photoshop knowledge. We can help with the last bit:
Roll mouse over image for before and after
Overview:
Famous quote from The Matrix time: “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
If you just want to soften a model's skin quickly, this is the blue pill.
For the rest of us, fire up that Photoshop, the red pill beckons. Over the next few weeks, there's going to be some seriously meaty retouching to do, but we've thoughtfully carved it up into bitesize chunks, building into an entire step-by-step tutorial of professional-grade retouching.
Understanding Skin
Even the most beautiful skin succumbs to the perils of the world - it gets spotty, wrinkly, blotchy, freckly as we age and spend time in the sun. Worse, photography has the power to capture and reproduce at a larger than life capacity; that pimple on a model's nose or the tiny scar on a sitter's cheek might register on a camera's LCD screen.
Viewed at poster size, however, and these minor blemishes could be mistaken as an advert for acne cream and plastic surgery.
There are things you can do to reduce undesirable looks, before retouching:
Make Up lends itself to smooth and colour skin, and is used in abundance at fashion and beauty shoots
White light offers the capacity for neutral (and therefore decent) colour reproduction - if skin is lit by yellow, green or blue lights, don't expect an attractive result
Controlled light can also be positioned to 'smooth' out shadows, keep shots equally and perfectly exposed to the point of enhancing the way that someone will look
Each person's skin has a uniform tone. Although freckles, marks and abrasions appear different to the eye (because they are lighter or darker than the surrounding skin), the tone of the skin remains unchanged and these blemishes can therefore be 'reset'. The same goes for 'patches' of light and dark captured in a photograph. These can also be 'corrected'.
You can make a face 'more attractive' (select words with caution) by maintaining or enhancing symmetry, scale, smoothness and colour balance.
Graphics Tablets
Ideally, you need a graphics tablet for retouching. These 'virtual pens' allow you to make very organic movements and apply different pressures (no more adjusting 'pressure'/'flow' in Photoshop) - much like drawing with a pencil and paper.
Wacom is the name worth checking out, here. The big graphics tablets can set you back hundreds or even thousands of quid, but small and simple ones start at around £50.
Safety Nets
When you open a file in Photoshop it is absolutely vital to duplicate the layer, and have the 'original' sat in the background. This is your safety net - if you go too far, then you always have an original to fall back on.
Right click the background layer, and select duplicate layer. You will then have a copy layer appear. Rename this by clicking on the text (it will become blue and highlighted) and typing in an appropriate title, such as 'work'.
Get used to naming every new layer - there can be times when you will have so many layers open that you do not know which one you want to re-edit.
You can toggle the original on and off to see if the changes you have made are successful. Holding Alt on the keyboard and clicking the 'eye' symbol on the original layer will turn off all other layers so you can just see the original. Doing the same again reverses the process. (The same alt+click will work on any other layer as you see appropriate. It saves you clicking lots of eye symbols on and off!)
Layers have an inherent hierarchical structure. The same applies for masks, curves and anything else you may add - they only affect the layers below them in the stack. On occasion you may need to move layers up and down (simply click and drag the layer up or down the stack and place it where necessary).
Next time, our trip down the rabbit-hole goes all blurry and patchy…
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