A Little Photoshop Magic

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A lot of people ask about photo manipulation or photo correction, so I thought I'd give a little example as this one was rather interesting, and a little further than I normally go.

As mentioned before, we both came down with stinking colds, she didn't put on any make-up, and I wasn't trying very hard, especially with the lighting. But there were a couple of photos we really liked, the first was a good composition and we liked the hands.
But the second photo had a nice look on her face... but the hands weren't nearly as nice.

The solution is rather simple, combine the two images. It can easily be done in Photoshop, Gimp or similar programs, although I used Photoshop on this occassion.

So I started off with the JPG images as they were straight off the camera (No I didn't use RAW). I put the second image over the first and then turned down the opacity to 50% so I can see when I move it using free transform. A little rotation, a tiny bit of scaling and I was able to match the arm from the elbow to just below the wrist.


Oh really by ~DannyBillArgent 

Then all you do is use the erasor tool with a soft edge and erase the part of the top image which you don't want. Once happy with this I flattened the image and saved a copy as a JPG (Which I know isn't best practice.)

Next I opened up this flattened copy in CameraRaw to ajust the colours. This photo has a bit of a problem in that the light in front of her is white, the light to our left is blue, and the light above/right is yellow. As you can see her hands have a pretty good skin tone, but her face and chest have a yellow cast. This makes editing rather tricky, but basically we colour corrected the photo for the forground and saved a copy. The colour corrected for skin tone, saved a copy, and then colour corrected for her hair colour and saved a copy... because when we took the yellow/orange out of the skin, it also took it out of the hair.

All you have to do then is follow the same proceedure again in photoshop, loading each copy onto a layer and erasing everything but what you need.

I then added some more layers, first job was to paint in an overlay to remove her very red nose... as I mentioned she had a cold! There were layers for blusher, mascara, eye-liner and lipstick -- there are dozens of online tutorials for doing this if you are interested. I also added an overlay to give the background a bit more blue.

Finaly, I added a layer mask to tone down the saturation because I purposely turned up the colours in CameraRaw by using Vibrance and Saturation. I like to turn up and then tone down later... it's just the way I work.

Once happy I saved a copy, flattened the image and then saved another copy.

And we are almost done, we just now have to apply the standard filters that I usually have to use because my camera is so old! Firstly I use the heal tool to get rid of all the white dots which are caused by my sensor having seen better days. Next I used despeckle filter as my images tend to have loads of noise.

Next I apply a sharpening filter which is done by duplicating the layer, applying a high pass filter, then an unsharp mask. Then setting the layer property to overlay and ajusting the opacity until it looks right.

Next I applied a contrast mask which is done buy duplicating the layer, desaturating, inverting, bluring, and then setting the layer property to overlay and ajusting the opacity until it looks right.

I often apply a colour map, but on this photo I had already taken care of the colours in CameraRaw. so maybe I'll explain that another day.

Lastly, I used the heal tool to remove some wrinkles and soften shadows on the hands. Total time taken was about 4 hours... although I spend a lot of time fiddling about and trying different stuff, which in my opinion is the best way to learn Photoshop.