Glamour edit of manish's image. I've been wanting to try a full-on glamour edit, and this was a great photo to try it. Here's the original...
Disclaimer - This is not an example of what necessarily should be done to every portrait, but is an example of what can be done. :)
Here's a rough overview of my steps. The editing was done in PaintShopPro, but the same steps can be done in PS...
- Basic levels fix to darken the shadows.
- Colour balance to boost the greens and a little red. I'm really picky about getting the colour balance just right for good skin tones.
- Makeover tool to clone out skin blemishes.
- Liquify brush to open her left eye a little more. Copied pupil from her right eye to get a little more colour into the shadowed eye.
- Dodge eyes a little to bring them out. I use a dodge layer, paint the eyes totally spooky white, and then drop the opacity back to around 10% until it looks right.
- Liquify/Warp brush to reshape face, lift cheeks and define cheekbones, thicken lips and to add just a little smile. Also reshaped hair to give it more curves and sit nicely around her head. (This liquefy step is the reason for my disclaimer at the start. It is something that I would not do so severely for normal portraits, but as I was playing around, I decided to do it all, including a little plastic surgery.)
- Dodge and burn (using D&B layers) using a coppery coloured brush to get a rich copper shine to the highlights on her hair.
- Clone out some wispy hairs
- Duplicate and gaussian blur, then mask only her skin at low opacity. This is done to smooth the overall skin.
- Select her lips and colour adjust to add saturation and darken.
- Overall light dodging on the face to bring it out a little.
- Added some eye-shadow to her right eye to match the other.
- USM sharpening to the hair, eyes, nose and mouth.
- Duplicate and gauss blur 16 pixels at low opacity in darken mode, masked off the sharpened areas. Duplicate again and gauss blur 16 pixels at low opacity in soft-light mode. These two steps just add a slight 'glow' to the portrait, and also help to saturate the colours.
- Finally, a vignette is added by painting black in a multiply layer.
Along the way, I considered changing the colour of her shirt, but in the end, I think the blue works really well against the skin and hair tones.
I was also intending to rotate the image by a couple of degrees anticlockwise, but I forgot, and I can't be bothered redoing it now. :)
My other critique is that the skin tones are slightly too orange in the end, due to the action of the soft-light layer. I will have to address this better next time.
But overall, I'm pretty happy with my first glamour edit.
Very good post processing! You really brought out the best of the model without making it appear like "glamour" processing. A deft hand with the tools. I especially like the "duplicate and gauss blur at low opacity in darken mode" - that creates a very lovely backlit studio glow. Would never have guessed that's how you achieved it.
NICE work! She's gorgeous in this image! I like the skin tones, the eyes, the lighting. Even the hair manipulations are well thought out. Impressive work!
Great makeover David, it look wonderful now. I am amazed how much an image can change by the right techniques of post processing. Surely a great learning exercise. Thanks for your effort.
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