photoshop tutorial . Adobe Photoshop CS3 . postprocessing images . photography .

Photoshop editing (or how not to get carried away)

-  p h o t o s h o p    t u t o r i a l s   a n d   r e l a t e d   s t o r i e s -

FOR QUESTIONS and COMMENTS visit my BLOG

         1st part .  What I started with and how many steps it took to get to the end result.

         2nd part .  How I did it in a video presentation and comments on my BLOG

  Story board (the steps) for this image

       First of all I'd like to say that Adelina and Robert are by far over the average (beauty-wise), as you may already very well know, and that was exactly my reason in choosing them for this photoshop editing tutorial.

      The image on Flickr has a title about love, because after the editing is done (in such a manner), the end result doesn’t give away much about the actual process that is needed to end up there. That's a good and bad thing at the same time. It's good when an image editor does something that isn’t really obvious, but it’s also bad, because it gives false impressions and it contributes to this "image" we have about how we all should look like.

      As you'll see in the video they don’t really need any editing in the fist place (Adelina for instance never has any problems with her skin or hardly anything else as most models generally do) and the shot was taken in the studio, so the photo wasn’t asking for any editing whatsoever.

      The original image was spot on sharp, WB-ed and well lit, so it made the perfect candidate to begin from and that was my other reason for choosing it as a starting image.

      This exercise is intended to demonstrate some Photoshop editing techniques that I normally employ, but only up to a point. Beyond this point lays that place where editors of gossip magazines usually go to feed us (meaning normal people, innocent enough never to suspect there is a difference between reality and the actually published photos) more and more reasons to believe that the stars and the celebrities are so much better looking then they really are... Just don’t get me started....

      I'm sure you already know that Photoshop can do wanders. This is not to show what Photoshop can do when Photoshop is really asked for (bad lighting or maybe gorgeous models having a bad day :) ). I only intend to demonstrate some techniques that I use (in part II) .  

      So here it is - the first part of this tutorial - that shows WHAT I did starting from that photo. I will soon post the second part about HOW I did it. ENJOY

      the steps

      Any image, no matter how good it is to begin with needs some editing. The way I do it is not necessarily the perfect way, is just my way. 

1^st step is cleaning up the dust and/or scratches if it is a film scan, correcting skin imperfections and removing any other things that don’t belong in the picture. 

  2^nd step is adding anything that might improve the picture, in this case some hair. Closing their eyes also gives it a nicer feeling.

3^rd step is sharpening (only) the important parts of the image. In this case the faces and some hair. (*Ah YES. I DO (and not just I) DO sharpening before curves but not before noise reduction when neededa... But that's another story all together for another time)

  4^th step is adding some contrast to the image and if the WB was not correct or corrected in the RAW format, then this is the time to do it.

  5^th & 6^th steps are about defining the interest zone with light and shadows in the right places. In this case the faces were brightened and the rest was darkened in 2 separate steps.

  7^th& 8^th: In this case I wanted some more colour on the lips so I played (in 2 steps) with the curves. This wasn’t really necessary, except maybe in the cropped version of the photo, where it does make a difference.

               After this, your editing will depend on what you want to end up with. If you sell the image as stock, this would be the end of the image editing. If it's an art piece, this would be just the beginning... One might continue with some vignetting, texturing, layer combinations... The sky is the limit.

*  IF you happen to find any misspellings, contextual errors or any other kind of text-related mistakes, you can blame MS Word or little green men from Mars, but not me. Because I don't make mistakes. Because I'm perfect. That's all.