Alli (my first HS Senior shoot)

urbanaries

1. I was VERY nervous about this shoot but it turned out ok in the end. But, now that I'm doing HS seniors, I'll need to enlist the help of my skin-perfecting comrades here at dgrin! :wink


2. here's another (boy smugmug is sloooooow on the uptake tonight!)


3.


4. This one's for Scott...flash balance??


5. one of my favorite favorites....(this girl has some xpressions!)

Elaine

Wow, Lynne! These are wonderful! I LOVE #1 and #5 (although I wish there was a bit more space to the left on 5). The colors on #4 are great too! I'm sure she'll appreciate a bit of skin smoothing...that would make #1 a complete knock-out in my book. The comp and the colors and the bokeh are just fantastic!
I like the idea of shooting senior portraits...one person who really wants to look good...seems like it would make my job easier!
Congrats!

pyrtek

Wow, these are fantastic. Especially the last one.

urbanaries wrote:

I'll need to enlist the help of my skin-perfecting comrades here at dgrin!

Her eyes in the first one hypnotized me into having a go. Hope you don't
mind:

LuckyBob

Wow. For a first attempt you sure did well ! Took a relatively quick stab at the first one myself:



PS: Your original files don't have your watermark - is it supposed to be that way?

urbanaries

pyrtek wrote:

Wow, these are fantastic. Especially the last one.



Her eyes in the first one hypnotized me into having a go. Hope you don't
mind:

thanks for the compliments, everyone! she was a great model.

Oooooh bernard this looks fantastic! smooth without looking fake or plastic. I like Bob's too, I think he may have been able to retain more detail in the skin texture, which is amazing, although the colors on her face look a bit yellow/orange? It could just be me, interested to see what others think.

Are you guys using the healing brush to move larger blemishes, then doing a quick mask over areas + gaussian blur? That's the only way I know how to do it, and both of these look better than my attempts, by a mile.

Please share! Thanks!!!

lynne

(and bob thanks for the heads up on the originals, they were on for zoom thumbs, but i just turned them off. thx!)

urbanaries

Elaine wrote:

Wow, Lynne! These are wonderful! I LOVE #1 and #5 (although I wish there was a bit more space to the left on 5). The colors on #4 are great too! I'm sure she'll appreciate a bit of skin smoothing...that would make #1 a complete knock-out in my book. The comp and the colors and the bokeh are just fantastic!
I like the idea of shooting senior portraits...one person who really wants to look good...seems like it would make my job easier!
Congrats!

thanks elaine! I was very nervous because its a situation that calls for a lot of "traditional" posing and I am just terrible at that. But she was amazing, the clothing changes put me off a bit at first, I was like HUH? FIVE? but in the end, it really helped move things along, and every outfit inspired me to a different take on her. It was really a blast ...think I might be doing more of these in the future! Don't know why I've been so skeered.

~Jan~

Wow, those are really great! I love #1 and #5.

pyrtek

urbanaries wrote:

Please share!

I'll write up a complete step-by-step when I get home this evening.

~Jan~

I started out using this tutorial:

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=171753

and then added my own touches from there. I don't do the eyes like he does.

System

a very lovely girl, some great shots, and some very good pp-

urbanaries

~Jan~ wrote:

I started out using this tutorial:

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=171753

and then added my own touches from there. I don't do the eyes like he does.

Wow, this was helpful, although i'm not sure I understood everything I was doing Anyway, I tried his technique on #3, I think it is much better, but it's still "bumpy." What do you guys think?

pyrtek

Looks great!

Now go into quick mask mode, select the dark spots with a soft black brush,
leave quick mask mode (this will give you a selection of the dark areas), create
a curves adjustment layer (which will automatically use your selection as a
mask), control click on one of the dark spots and pull that point up on the
curve until it looks right. If the transition between the tweaked area and the
original skin is too harsh you can try blurring the mask with a small radius
Gaussian blur. Play with the opacity of the curves layer, too.

urbanaries

pyrtek wrote:

Looks great!

Now go into quick mask mode, select the dark spots with a soft black brush,
leave quick mask mode (this will give you a selection of the dark areas), create
a curves adjustment layer (which will automatically use your selection as a
mask), control click on one of the dark spots and pull that point up on the
curve until it looks right. If the transition between the tweaked area and the
original skin is too harsh you can try blurring the mask with a small radius
Gaussian blur. Play with the opacity of the curves layer, too.

OH WOW! I learnt something today!!! Thanks so much! I think it looks tons better. awesome!

Scott_Quier

Love these photos!

• #1 Love the perspective. And, her eyes! Wow!
• #3 The lighting is wonderful. Love the use of the wall. I've seen this done with the model's head turned more towards a should, almost parellel to the wall. I think I like this much better.
• #4 The light is good. Better would have been to incude some sort of catchlight in her eyes. Maybe you can put one there in post?
• #5 OK, I've died and gone to heaven. This is simply wonderful. Maybe just a touch dark? Love the contrast of this shot, but I love contrasty B&W.

You last attempt at skin smoothing is wonderful. I think you selected the toughest of those you posted to learn on and it came out really nice. This is something I'm going to have to learn as well.

It was really a blast ...think I might be doing more of these in the future! Don't know why I've been so skeered.

I don't either. These are simply great!

BTW - I guess your focusing issues have been put to bed?

pyrtek

As promised, my step-by-step.


1) I duplicated the background layer and activated the Spot Healing Brush.

2) I changed the blending mode of the brush to Lighten (so that only areas
darker than the source are affected). Making sure to use a brush size slightly
larger than the blemish I'm removing I went through all the most obvious
spots. In Lighten mode sometimes you'll have to click on a spot more than
once.

3) I created a blank new layer, changed its mode to Opacity and filled it with
50% gray.

4) Using a very soft white brush at about 5% opacity I painted over the
wrinkles on the sides of her mouth and under her eyes until they weren't
as obvious.

5) This trick I learned from Crawford's tutorial. It is an extremely
simplified version of it (there was no point in going through the whole thing
on such a low res file). I urge you to check his tutorial out for the full thing.
Anyway, I merged all the visible layers (Ctrl - Shift - Alt - E) and opened the
Gaussian blur filter dialog. Making sure "Preview" was checked I increased
the radius (watching the image at 100% magnification) until the exact moment
I was satisfied that all the remaining imperfections on her face were blurred
beyond recognition, but no further than that. It is crucial to get the
radius right for this technique to work. I made a note of the radius (2.1, I think)
and cancelled out of the Gaussian blur filter. I next ran Filter->Other->
High Pass and input the number I made a note of above (2.1).

6) Next, I ran the Gaussian blur filter and input the number above divided by
three (0.7).

7) I inverted the image (Ctrl - I), set its blending mode to Linear Light,
changed its opacity to 50%, created a mask for this layer and filled it with
black.

8) Finally, using a soft white brush at about 30% opacity I painted over the
areas of her skin I wanted to smooth. I went over the more blotchy areas
more than once.

9) The curves thingy I described in a previous post.

10) Made coffee.

11) Drank coffee.

saurora

Lynne you really nailed these girl!!!! Fantastic set ...she is a great model. Number one is just fabulous!!! I only wish she hadn't used clumping mascara, it detracts from those gorgeous eyes. Hey! Now you're learning skin retouch, pretty soon you'll have it all down pat!!! Congrats on the LPS BTW.

urbanaries

pyrtek wrote:

As promised, my step-by-step.


1) I duplicated the background layer and activated the Spot Healing Brush.
......

10) Made coffee.

11) Drank coffee.

Awesome detailed process. Thanks for this! Now I have an arsenal of skin smoothing weapons, NICE! die, zits, die! :gun2 (sorry, I have a minor obsession with emothingys).

I am getting the hang of the process Jan posted, and have really fallen in love with the use of the sepia warming filter, as well as the trickery leveraged in the high pass.

One thing I never could get my small brain wrapped around, in 10+ years using photoshop, (sad isn't it) is exactly how layer masks work. I understand quick masks, but I still feel like I'm shooting in the dark when I "fill the layer with black" and "paint over it with white". I can follow a recipe but I don't understand it, if that makes sense.

urbanaries

saurora wrote:

Lynne you really nailed these girl!!!! Fantastic set ...she is a great model. Number one is just fabulous!!! I only wish she hadn't used clumping mascara, it detracts from those gorgeous eyes. Hey! Now you're learning skin retouch, pretty soon you'll have it all down pat!!! Congrats on the LPS BTW.

Ha, thanks Susan! sometimes in your posts when you underline things, I am drawn unconsciously to mouse over the word "nailed" and expect a wikipedia link to explain the concept.

Never mind, I'm loopy today. Shooting until 10p and then being SO excited to get home and edit them, export them, upload them and THEN the LPS results posted at 12:13, made it really difficult to settle down to sleep last night! er, this morning.

Thanks for your encouragement as always. I 110% agree on the clumpy mascara. She's the second model of mine recently to do this. What is the deal? Are they just putting on WAY too many coats? I wear cheapo mascara too and my eyes don't look like spiders. The bad thing is there is nothing I can do about it in PS. I imagine she'll see it and be mortified...?? It really ruins some of the shots. Especially the few where she's looking down.

urbanaries

here are some more....I am getting nothing productive done at work today....

6.


7.


8.


9.


10. It was getting dark so the "open shade" just wasn't working (Jan, you must be some sort of genius) so as an experiment I put her RIGHT in the golden rays. Then when I color-corrected the strong orange cast in PS, it turned the twilight-fall blue on the stairs. not exactly what I expected, but hey, I think it works!!!

pyrtek

urbanaries wrote:

One thing I never could get my small brain wrapped around, in 10+ years using photoshop, (sad isn't it) is exactly how layer masks work. I understand quick masks, but I still feel like I'm shooting in the dark when I "fill the layer with black" and "paint over it with white". I can follow a recipe but I don't understand it, if that makes sense.

It's really quite simple. Imagine you have a painting lying flat on your desk.
It's a portrait of someone with gray hair and you'd like to spray paint the
hair brown. If you just start spraying the painting you'll get brown all over it,
not just in the parts you want to actually paint. So you get a piece of
cardboard, place it over the painting and cut out the part covering the hair.
Now you start spraying the painting again, but this time, everything that is
covered by the cardboard is protected and what you cut away is affected by
the paint since there is no cardboard there. Now, translating that into
Photoshop-speak: the background layer is your painting, the cardboard is
your mask (specifically, the black part of the mask) and cutting away part of
the cardboard is painting with white on the mask. In other words, what is
black on the mask in unaffected by what you do on that layer, and what is
white is affected. The only difference between the cardboard and the PS mask
is that with the cardboard you only have two states - it's either there (so
it's completely black, in mask-speak) or it's not there (so it's completely
white in mask-speak). PS masks give you another possibility. If you paint
on the mask not with white or black but with gray you will be partially
hiding and partially showing what is beneath. The proportions depend on how
dark a gray you use. If you use, say, 50% gray, then you will be mixing what
is below and what is above in equal proportions. You can think of this as
a matted piece of glass on your painting instead of the perfectly opaque
cardboard.

urbanaries

pyrtek wrote:

The only difference between the cardboard and the PS mask
is that with the cardboard you only have two states - it's either there (so
it's completely black, in mask-speak) or it's not there (so it's completely
white in mask-speak). PS masks give you another possibility. If you paint
on the mask not with white or black but with gray you will be partially
hiding and partially showing what is beneath. The proportions depend on how
dark a gray you use. If you use, say, 50% gray, then you will be mixing what
is below and what is above in equal proportions. You can think of this as
a matted piece of glass on your painting instead of the perfectly opaque
cardboard.

Thank you for the analogy, very helpful. So, after reading this three times, I think I get it. So, would painting a layer using gray (as opposed to white) give you virtually the same control as painting with white, but then changing the opacity percentage of the layer?

pyrtek

urbanaries wrote:

Thank you for the analogy, very helpful. So, after reading this three times, I think I get it. So, would painting a layer using gray (as opposed to white) give you virtually the same control as painting with white, but then changing the opacity percentage of the layer?

Yes and no. When you change the opacity of a layer you are doing it
globally. In other words, the opacity change affects the entire layer.
When you paint on the mask, though, you are only making a local
change. So yes, you can think of painting with gray on the mask as changing
the opacity of the layer, but no, it's not the same since the change only applies
to where you place a stroke on the mask. But this is an unnecessarily convoluted
way of looking at it. Just remember that what is white reveals what's under
the mask, what is black conceals it, and what is gray partly reveals and partly
conceals. Also, bear in mind that you will rarely actually paint with gray on a
mask. Most of the time you will paint with white or black, but at a lower than
100% opacity. This is equivalent to painting with gray, of course.


EDIT: Applying this to the step-by-step I posted above. I created a layer that smoothed
the entire image, but I wanted to apply that smoothening to only certain areas of the
image. So first I created a black mask for that smoothening layer. This resulted in completely
blocking the effect from the layer underneath. In other words, it was unaffected by the
smoothening layer. I next took a 30% white brush and started to paint on the black mask.
This resulted in 30% of the smoothening to be applied anywhere I placed a stroke on the
mask. In other words, I got a mixture of 30% of the perfectly smooth skin and 70% of the
original skin everywhere I placed a stroke on the mask.

urbanaries

pyrtek wrote:

Yes and no. When you change the opacity of a layer you are doing it
globally. In other words, the opacity change affects the entire layer.
When you paint on the mask, though, you are only making a local
change. So yes, you can think of painting with gray on the mask as changing
the opacity of the layer, but no, it's not the same since the change only applies
to where you place a stroke on the mask. But this is an unnecessarily convoluted
way of looking at it. Just remember that what is white reveals what's under
the mask, what is black conceals it, and what is gray partly reveals and partly
conceals. Also, bear in mind that you will rarely actually paint with gray on a
mask. Most of the time you will paint with white or black, but at a lower than
100% opacity. This is equivalent to painting with gray, of course.

Oh no I've gone crosseyed!:uhoh

JK, I think I get the major concepts, even if you lost me from "Also bear in mind" on...

pyrtek

urbanaries wrote:

Oh no I've gone crosseyed!:uhoh

JK, I think I get the major concepts, even if you lost me from "Also bear in mind" on...

Forget that part, then. It's not essential. Just remember the basic rules:

1) What is white on the mask reveals all of what is below it.

2) What is black on the mask hides all of what is below it.

3) What is gray on the mask reveals part and hides part, depending on the
shade of gray. Obviously, the more you get towards black with the shade,
the less you'll see of what is below the mask, and vice versa.

PineapplePhoto

Also, she could use some Proactiv

Seneca

This is your picture before the touch-up.






As you can see I fixed her face a bit. Some of my high school seniors had lots of acne...I asked if they wanted me to air brush them a bit...they were all for the instant beautiful skin. I called it a unit touch up and also charged for this. Hope you don't mind. If so I'll remove it.



It's not a clean job cause I did it in less than 5 minutes. As you might be able to see...I left some of the airbrush and opacity on her left eye (her left).

Seneca

Ooopsie...should've read all the replies...didn't see that someone already discribed what should be fixed. Sorry. :cry

urbanaries

Seneca wrote:

As you can see I fixed her face a bit. Some of my high school seniors had lots of acne...I asked if they wanted me to air brush them a bit...they were all for the instant beautiful skin. I called it a unit touch up and also charged for this. Hope you don't mind. If so I'll remove it.



It's not a clean job cause I did it in less than 5 minutes. As you might be able to see...I left some of the airbrush and opacity on her left eye (her left).

Seneca, WOW! I think you did a bang up job. The texture looks really smooth, smoother than I could get using some of the other methods. I swear, there's a zillion ways to skin this cat! I totally agree with you on charging extra for this. I almost wish now I wouldn't have put some of the "retouched" ones in her gallery, just saved them for if/when they actually ordered. Now I've set a precedent my "billable time" can't keep up with.

So what's the secret to your "unit touch up?"

Seneca

urbanaries wrote:

Seneca, WOW! I think you did a bang up job. The texture looks really smooth, smoother than I could get using some of the other methods. I swear, there's a zillion ways to skin this cat! I totally agree with you on charging extra for this. I almost wish now I wouldn't have put some of the "retouched" ones in her gallery, just saved them for if/when they actually ordered. Now I've set a precedent my "billable time" can't keep up with.

So what's the secret to your "unit touch up?"

I was able to present the fixed photos to my clients (like a before and after PROOF)...and they all agreed that would rather have the touched up photos. Kids don't want to look back 10 years from now and say... "Wow look at my face it looked horrible".

I figured 5 minutes of work, and they don't need to know how much time it took me...it's worth the extra money. It's a win-win situation.

I will send you the directions on how I did it. It's very simple.

photogmomma

Wow. Just wow. I cannot believe she's a senior! Amazing... She's gorgeous and I LOVE the shots you have!!!

chopsky

Well, I took a stab at retouching her skin myself. I didnt use any layer masks or the healing tool. I did it the 'cheap' way. Cloning-tool only Probably the more painful way too...

Sorry if it's not what you wanted.

Here's my rendition: