Prairie Light Images

Portrait Editing In Photoshop-part 2 of a series

For today’s article I have invited a talented photographer friend of mine, David Van Deman, to write part 2 in a series on portrait editing software techniques.  David will be telling you all about how to use Photoshop to get the portrait editing results you want.  If you missed part 1 of this series on portrait editing in Aperture 3.2.2, it can be found here.

Portrait Editing in Photoshop

When Doug contacted me about writing a Photoshop version of his portrait edit, I was honored that he would trust me to provide a workup using “that other program”. I have no animosity toward those who prefer not to use Photoshop…everyone has their own way of working and I fully support that so long as you get the results that you want! Photoshop can be a very unwieldy program but my goal with writing tutorials is to make the program a little less frustrating.

So…get on with it!

Editing the RAW file and Basic Adjustments

Ok, when you bring a RAW file into Photoshop (either the full version or Express) it launches in ACR, or Adobe Camera Raw. This is essentially a preview window with some tools for making global adjustments like cropping, tone corrections, spot removal and other enhancements. This kind of forces you into a certain workflow, but it’s one that I prefer anyway – making the overall tonal adjustments before doing anything else.

Doug mentioned that everyone has their own taste when editing a photo…I tend to gravitate towards more contrasty images, and this portrait provides a great opportunity for creating just such an image. In ACR I went straight into the tone curve and boosted the Highlights by +4, Lights, cut the Darks to -3 and the Shadows way down to -68!! That setting draws the background way down into darkness and really gets your focus on the subject. Next I picked the HSL/Grayscale tab and boosted the saturation in the red, orange and yellow hues slightly to warm up some of the facial tones (more orange than the others). In order to make the eyes more vivid I cut some of the saturation and then boosted the luminance in the blue colors. Assuming you have a properly exposed photo, these color adjustments are usually subtle – in the 10-15 range. Like Doug, I prefer to stay as close to “real” as possible. Once I had all these adjustments looking good I clicked the “open Image” button to bring it fully into Photoshop.

Photoshop’s brushes and masks

Photoshop’s healing brush works wonders at clearing up any blemishes or other marks on the skin. Just set the brush size slightly larger than the spot you need to fix, hold down the alt (PC) or option (Mac) key and select a nearby point of clear skin to use as your “source”. Then click to brush away the spot. This works great at adapting the tones to match, but if you run up next to an edge line you may notice some strange discoloration. If this happens it is usually best to switch to the Clone Stamp tool. You don’t have to keep doing the “source click” for each new spot. If you have the “Aligned” check box at the top selected Photoshop will keep the same relationship between your brush and the source point (If you originally clicked 10 pixels to the right of your fix, it will continue to copy from a point ten pixels to the right of your brush). If the “Aligned” box is unchecked, Photoshop will copy starting from the exact point you originally selected every time you apply the brush.

With that out of the way it’s time to soften the skin a little. Photoshop doesn’t really have a built-in softening brush…there is a blur tool but the results you get with that always look a little ‘plasticy’ and don’t work the best for this kind of application. The best way I’ve found to do this is to use a high pass filter on a copy of your image layer. Hit Ctrl/cmd+J to create the new image layer and run the filter (Filter > Other > High Pass). The higher you set this, the more extreme the blurring effect will be….I usually go with something around 4-10 pixels. Once the filter runs you need to invert the image layer (Image > Adjustments > Invert) and then switch the layer’s blending mode to overlay. Finally for this step create a layer mask (Hold down Alt or Option while clicking the mask icon to fill it with black) and then use a white brush to paint back in the softening effect on her skin. I found after doing this that it wasn’t quite enough, so I quickly just duplicated the softening layer and then set it’s opacity a little lower to get a good effect.

 

Final editing adjustments

Finally, the lighting on our subject’s face still seemed just a little too cool for my taste so I copied everything into a new final layer and applied a warming filter (Image > Adjustments > Photo Filter). After processing this I decided I didn’t want the warming filter to affect the background or the whites of her eyes as much so as a last step I added a layer mask to this and used a low-opacity black brush to mask off the background and eyes a little bit at a time until it looked right.

~David Van Deman - editor of www.indyshooter.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2012 at 10:00 am. Filed under: portraits, software Tags: Photoshop, Portrait, software, technique RSS 2.0 feed.