Image Retouching

[d&q]

As a little project, I've been working on my Photoshop skills, mainly the improvement of images and stuff, so I can make a little money off friends.

I found this image:

And mazeltoved it to this image:

Any comments/critcisms? I know it doesn't look like much of an improvement, but I just started doing this and its a bit more difficult than other PS stuff I've done  :).

[Sidoh]

Wtf is that on the first one?  A boil? >_>

That looks pretty good though, Deuce.  I think the teeth look a little bit too good, but that's hard to say in the first place.

I'm definitely not an expert with this, but isn't there a pretty easy way to neutralize the skin color?  In both it looks pretty blotchy with red patches here and there.

Even still: it's a massive improvement.  Good job.

[zorm]

It looks like you overdid the curve/levels or perhaps you oversaturated it. As a result the other imperfections in the skin seem to stand out more.

[ZeroX]

You could have just done the clone tool. Set the flow to about I say 60% and just keep going over it until the red volcano on her face was gone.

[Ergot]

It looks like you overdid the curve/levels or perhaps you oversaturated it. As a result the other imperfections in the skin seem to stand out more.

You mean the wrinkles?

[zorm]

Yes

[d&q]

Strange as it might seem, the ehancement of the wrinkles were on purpose  :).

[Blaze]

Those teeth reek of gingivitis and the retouched ones are virgins.

[MyndFyre]

LOL @ Blaze.  Really though, she ugly.

One thing you could do is possibly airbrush some shadows on the teeth.  The teeth appear to have unnatural light coming on them spot from all directions, whereas the face obviously does not.  The face looks to have a yellow light coming at it from the side (probably horizon light indoors), and white light coming down from in front to the left of the face (probably artificial indoor lighting).  I doubt you need to have anything related to the horizon light because it appears to be behind her, but the white light would not reflect those teeth nearly that much.

Perhaps a minor layer mask to take the edge off?

[zorm]

I figured I would post an example of what I've done, feel free to comment/critique.
Before:

After:


I do more post-processing instead of actual retouching, so this is still rather new to me.

[d&q]

Wow, I would really like to know how you did that!

And thanks to all the criticism from everybody.

[zorm]

Wow, I would really like to know how you did that!

And thanks to all the criticism from everybody.

I used curves and levels to adjust it for the most part.
Layer -> new adjustment layer -> curves
For curves be careful not to overdo it, I find a gentle 'S' curve tends to work the best for most things but this may not be the case for everything.

After that I used levels
Layer -> new adjustment layer -> levels
You'll probably only want to adjust the midtones which is the grey marker, be careful not to overdo it. This is very useful for bringing out certain features in a picture

Next I ran noise ninja over the picture, its a pay product but I used the free beta http://www.picturecode.com/. I had never actually used this before but I had read about it. Its useful when you know the conditions the picture was taken in. Most digital cameras will be noisy when shooting at high ISO in low light conditions. I tend to avoid taking pictures in such conditions so I'd never used this before. But it seemed to work well.

After that I used healing brush to remove a couple of spots on her skin, not that it was really necessary but its just a sense of what can be done.

Finally I resized it down and used 'Save for web' to save the jpeg.

There is another optional step that I should mention which depends on your picture. After you resize it you can run UnSharp Mask(Filters->Sharpen->USM) on it. I normally do about 125% with a .8 radius and 0 threshold for realistic looking results. However, you'll want to avoid doing this when you use something like noise ninja because that program in essence 'blurs' the picture so then trying to sharpen it again doesn't look so great. In general I switch back and forth between the preview/no preview with the USM dialog up to decide if I like the results of the sharpen better or not.

Also a lot of these depend on the source image you are working with. If you have a raw file then doing work in 16-bit mode is best. If you have something like a jpeg then the bigger the image is at the start the better(that is if you have a large source jpeg its good, don't resize your image to be large).

Hope this helps.