Retouching People

No, we are not going to touch anybody, no one will be physically harmed. We are just discussing retouching people's photos in Photoshop. This one of the most commonly used actions, when people's photos are incorporated into a graphic design.

In many cases the photos are taken with a home camera, or a digital camera with a low optical quality or low resolution, and people just don't look as pretty as they should. In this tutorial we will go over one of the techniques for general retouching and improving the overall look. This is a simple, quick, and easy technique, to comprehend and to use.

Abstract:

There are many techniques for processing and retouching photos in general and people's photos in particular. You can reach high levels of picture processing and bring the models to a very high level, even if they are not that beautiful in real life, or that the photo itself is problematic. In this tutorial we will use a very simple technique for retouching portraits. of course you can use this method for different kinds of photos and receive interesting effects.

Creating the new file:

we shall begin by opening the picture file, and for your results to come out similar to the ones on this tutorial, you should use the same definitions as we did.

file name: retouching
file size: 400 x 400 pixels
resolution: 300 dpi

Lets first look at the original photo.

And now the final result...

We can continue and improve the photo even further, by additional processing actions, but in this tutorial we will limit ourselves to the simple technique and let go of the professional methods.

So how was it done?...

For the sake of order we will name this picture layer MyImage .

Now we will duplicate the MyImage layer by selecting the layer and activating the command: 

Layer -> Duplicate Layer

Confused? To this new layer we will call ImageEffect and we will define it's blending mode as Screen .

Good. Now that the new layer ImageEffect is selected, we will activate a blur filter on the layer. 

Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur

The filter's dialog box will appear, where we will choose a radius of 5 pixels (expanding or reducing the radius will affect the blur intensity).

and there... we're done...

Of course you can go on and process the photo in various different techniques. here's the final result again:

That's all. Till next time, good-luck.