So many photographers have influenced me. Some directly with help and advice and I shall always be grateful to them.
And so I felt it was time for me to pass on some of the knowledge I have gained over the years and with this in mind I am going to start doing short tutorials and so I hope you find them useful.
Leave comments or questions if have any and I'll get back to you asap.
(Be gentle. Its my first tutorial, so I hope I haven't missed anything out..)
I see so many photographers still thinking that it is an acceptable form of post production to make the skin of a female model look like its been produced in the same factory as Barbie!
Well... Guess what folks?.. It aint!
The plastic look is so amateur hour. If you really want to make your subjects look good, keep them looking human!!
Trust me, unless you are into plastic dolls, (Hey! Whatever man, live and let live I say..) most people like to look like people and this is such an important aspect of studio portrait photography.
I am even seeing professional studios making this same mistake, but have no fear. Help is at hand. And I am going to show you a really simple technique using High Pass filter and Gaussian blur, plus some other bits and pieces..
This is done in Photoshop CC on a Mac. If you are using older versions you should be fine. If not. Get in touch and I'll give you a work around..
If you are on a PC then you may want to ignore the keyboard short cuts.... PC? Seriously??? :-)
OK, So lets get started...
Here's a nice shot I took about 5 years ago and this is the straight from camera. It was shot with a Nikon D300 using studio strobes. As you can see, its OK. Not perfect, but OK.
Her skin was reasonably good but for this demonstration I wanted to quickly show you the technique. Every image is different and if you get stuck just give me a shout.
So looking around the image there are a few blemishes a few stray hairs and all these I first get rid of with my healing brush, spot healing brush and clone tool. I also colour corrected the image in Adobe Camera Raw photoshop plugin. (I'm kinda assuming you know how to use these.. But if not... give me a shout...)
So we then have:-
Next we start to get our ladies skin nice and tonally smooth. But! We keep the texture!
So we have done all out spot healing and cleaning up and the image is now flattened in to one layer.
Duplicate this layer (⌘J)
Invert this layer (image-adjustments-invert) (⌘I)
Change the blending mode of this layer to VIVID LIGHT
The image will go almost completely grey.
Now run HIGH PASS filter. (Filter - other - high pass)
(This is the really weird bit as High pass is normally used for sharpening images but as the image is inverted it all becomes counter intuitive, but keep with me folks...)
The image will come back again but will be blurry. This is good! Seems wrong... But good...
I adjusted the radius for my image to about 19. What you are wanting to look at is how the tonality of the skin blends together. Don't worry about the eyes, mouth, nose, etc. We'll sort that out later dude!
Happy? Click OK
Next on the same level we are going to run Gaussian Blur (Filter - blur - gaussian blur)
Right! This now will work in reverse. The higher you go the sharper it will be so you need to reduce the amount of radius to get your blur. Adjust it until you get can see the skin texture. You want to start at around half what you had for the High pass filter. In my case it was 19 so started Gaussian blur at 8.
Still with me? If not? Just get in touch...
Happy? Click OK.
Right now create a black mask on this layer. Just click the 'add layer mask' button on the layers pallet and fill with black or hold down the alt button and the mask will automatically fill with black.
The black mask will hide all of your new layer and so you will just see the original layer below.
Right now select a round brush and make sure its softness is set to 0%
Ensure you have white in the colour pallet.
And now just paint in your soft skin, increasing and reducing the size of the brush to suit. Paint just the skin and leave the eyes, mouth, nostrils, etc..
When you have finished you may want to player with the layer opacity to get the exact finish you want.
You should have a flawless complexion but with all skin texture still visible. If not you may have over-cooked one of the stages earlier. Go back and try again... Naughty you...
OK so its quite hard to see the effect on my image. Partly due to the restrictions of image size and monitor but the last shot below is the finished image at 100% so you can still see the skin texture.
I can offer one to one coaching on photoshop so give me a shout if you want any help with anything.
Ciaox
