Photo Stop

  James Davidson

I admit that I know next to nothing about women.  Really.  The one thing that I do know about the women in my life is that they love photographs, but never like themselves in them.  I am shocked to hear all of the things they can find wrong when I think they look beautiful. 

I asked a few scrappy women what they would like the next column to be on and the most popular answer was a very resounding "retouching" photos.  As requested, ladies--here is Glamour Shots 101.

Glamour Shots 101

I asked our editor Dora for a self portrait shot.  Now, I think she looks fine here, but she insists that I can make her look better.  Let's see if she is right.

First, we want to duplicate the photo (control J).  Now, on the top layer go to filter--blur--gaussian blur.  Choose between 3 and 6 pixels depending on how soft you want to go.  Then, lower the opacity to 50% (located just above your layers in the bottom right corner).

 Next choose a soft edged brush and erase over any of the areas that should be sharp--eyes, teeth, lips, etc.  Merge those layers.

Now we are going to whiten the eyes.  You can go a couple of ways.  One is to:  choose the lasso tool and draw a selection around the whites of one of the eyes.  Hold shift and draw around the second eye, as well.  Go to select--feather and enter 2 pixels.  Under enhance--adjustment color--hue/saturation choose reds and drag the saturation slider to the left lowering the red in the eyes.  Switch back to master instead of reds and slide lightening around +20.  You may also choose to use some of our dodge/burn tools to darken or lighten the eyes using the techniques we learned in previous lessons.  I am also going to crop and darken the edges of the photo a bit.

See The Beauty by James Davidson.  Supplies:  Flower Girl kit by Jessica Sprague, Stitches by Ronna Penner, Fonts:  Times New Roman, Hard Handwriting.

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