Photography: Extreme Retouching in Photoshop

Photography: Extreme Retouching in Photoshop

February 22, 2014

In photography class, last Thursday, we learned how to retouch photographs in Adobe Photoshop. It is useful for a little retouching when doing portraits, but it is crazy how much faces can be distorted! 

So here is my quick (40 min) photoshop experiment with my own face:

 

I. Liquify 

The liquify filter on photoshop warps a persons face. You can drag areas of the picture to where you want, so you can easily make a face thinner, eyes and lips fuller, and hair fuller.
 

2. Color adjustment

The lighting on my photo was really not that great: bad lighting and it is not that big of a file because the computer wouldn't let me use the RAW file which is a lot higher quality. Because the small file, some color was lost.

3. Spot Healing

The spot healing tool removes acne and scars from face.

4. Clone Stamp

The clone stamp tool duplicates specific areas of the photo. On low opacity, you can use the clone stamp as a foundation powder; it smooths skin tone.

5. Shadows for Contouring

Using a black paint brush with a really low opacity you can create extra shadows to help morph a face. 

6. Highlights

Using a white brush with a really low opacity, I added highlights on center of face and cheekbones. 

I could have done a lot more to clean up this photo: the highlights and shadows could be cleaned up a lot, fly away hairs could have been removed, and a lot more. But the computer I was using at the library started freezing and I had plans to go eat waffles with my roommates, so wasting more time on a creepy barbie face wasn't worth it :) It was fun using photoshop though, my next assignment in photography is doing two portraits. I definitely won't use photoshop to this extreme! I don't like the idea of morphing someone's face shape, I'll probably just use certain tools sparingly.

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