This is an example of a portrait enhancement that I once did, along with some simple tips. For a detailed tutorial on skin smoothing for portraits like this in Photoshop, please visit my post on Making Skin Smooth and Beautiful in Photoshop.

This photo was taken by a friend of the bride, not a professional photographer. Overall, It is a beautiful picture. The problem: It was obviously shot in early to mid afternoon, when the sun was high and shining directly down on the bride; casting dramatic shadows over her face and hiding her beautiful blue eyes.

The details of what I corrected included lots of detail work around the eyes, lightening shadows on the neck and chest, adding shiny highlights to each jewel on the tiara and each pearl, and a bunch of dodging and burning on the lace of the dress to bring out the details.

Because there were both extreme shadows and highlights on her face and chest, It took some serious work to come up with the nice, smooth skin you see in the finished image.
Here are some tips to get rid of unwanted shadows based on the steps I took using Adobe Photoshop Elements after I had regained some of the details around her eyes:

1. Select all of the skin on your photo subject's neck and right click on it, choosing "Layer via copy".

2. Use the eraser tool with a soft brush and 10% pressure; making sure that I was working on the copied layer, and run the eraser over major facial features: eyes, outline of the nose and nostrils, mouth, jawline, and any major lines and dimples.

3. Go to Filters> Noise> Median. Increase the median until the skin looks overly smooth, to where the face appears more like a blurry painting than a photo.

4. Turn the Opacity of the copied layer down to 30-50%. This should create a much nicer, smoother skin and less extreme shadows to work with.

5. Choose a few places that still have shadows and highlights which need to be smoothed. Select and use the Gaussian Blur filter on the copied layer to smooth each one individually.

6. Now that you have smooth skin to work with, you m may still have tons of shadows to get rid of. If you do, go to into "Enhance", "Adjust Lighting", and then chose "Shadows/Highlights" I ran the "Lighten Shadows" bar as far as possible, to 100. I did this several times over until I was satisfied with the result.

7. After this it was mostly small detail work. I repeated a similar process on the lips and chest. I whitened her teeth, and did a bit more detail work on her eyes, dress, pearls, and tiara.

If you enjoyed this post, please

Subscribe in a reader or Subscribe by Email

Del.icio.us -- Digg -- Technorati -- Furl -- Stumbleupon

Traffic Rush - Learn How to Drive a Rush of Traffic to Your Site with Stumbleupon!