Adobe Photoshop

September 1st, 2008 by Steve Leonard

I have been using Photoshop for just over 5 years and its a very powerful editing tool and the industry standard for graphic design. You do not have to spend hour upon hour editing images, by simply personalising a picture or adding a little bit of spark to it will certainly make them stand out.

Air Brushing Tutorial

January 19th 2009 by Steve Leonard

I'm pretty sure you've heard a lot of celebrities say not to believe the photos that you see in the magazines because they aren't real. There's some truth into that and with this Photoshop tutorial you'll see why.

 

Step 1

Use the Heal Brush tool to remove any obvious marks or blemish. A small sized brush would be advisable so as to brush away the blemishes without losing any important detail.

Step 2

When you're done using the Heal Brush, duplicate the layer and add Dust and Scratches. In this example a radius of 5 and a threshold of 0 was used. Strive for a creamy blend of features without too much banding.

Step 3

Next step is to make sure that any banding that might have occurred is removed use the Gaussian Blur. A radius of 2 was used for this example.

Step 4

Achieve a more realistic skin texture by breaking the creamy plastic look of the skin by adding some noise to the photo. In the example 0.7% noise was used.

Step 5

Add a layer mask to the layer that you've been filtering. Fill that with black. What this will do is make the layer beneath (the original) to show through.

Step 6

Select the Brush Tool and set your color to white. Choose a brush size of 30 pixels and a hardness of 0%. Take note that you'll have to eventually make adjustments on the size of your brush as you progress to fit into the images tight corners. The aim is to "paint" over the original skin without interfering with details you'd want to retain like the hair, eyes, mouth, etc. If you accidentally painted over something you didn't want to, simply change the brush colour to black and you can erase your mistake.

Step 7

After finishing Step 6, you're suppose to have an image and layers panel that looks something like this.

Step 8

The model's skin is slightly reddish maybe because of too much exposure to the sun. So what we'll do is even out her skin tone by adding a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer. Adjust the Hue slider by 6 points.

Step 9

Add another adjustment layer to give the skin a more realistic tone. Select Photo Filter and then Sepia. Use a density of 50% and click on Preserve Luminosity.

Step 10

Liven up the eyes in a few simple steps. Create a new layer and make a circular section to match the eye. Fill this layer with green and set the layer to Overlay.

Step 11

Add a Layer mask to the inner eye and mask away using a brush with black as its color, on the areas that the color green shouldn't overlap. Reduce the opacity of the layer to around 30% to give it a more natural look. Repeat the process on the other eye.

Step 12

Instead of using Unsharp Mask to sharpen your image, we'll take a more complicated approach to it. Duplicate the original layer. Drag the original layer onto the new layer button on the layers palette. Set this new layer to Overlay the original layer.

Step 13

Apply a High Pass filter to the new layer. In the example, a radius of 23.2 pixels was used.

Step 14

After the application of the filter, you can adjust the opacity of the layer and it will increase/decrease the level of sharpness. In the example the opacity used was 30%.

Result

Original