How to make your own graduation picture (see the before and after)

[jgomez65]

My son graduated from HS this year, so I jumped at the opportunity of taking some shots for his graduation picture. Here is the before and after and how I did it.

Original picture



And the final results:


The shot was taken using a single light source (soft box) and I used Photoshop as the editing software.

Once in the computer, I increased the size of the picture to make his face larger and cropped the part I didn't want.
I then used a PS Plug in called Portraiture to smooth the skin (if you don't have the plug in, you can still do it with some other tricks. Here is a link to a tutorial that shows you how Superb Skin
Airbrush Technique | Photoshop Tutorials

The next step was to find an appropiate texture for the background. There are plenty of those in Flickr (here is a link to a Flickr Texture Group with over 14,000 free textures)

I brought the texture into Photoshop, in a new layer. Then I removed the background (wall) on the original picture by selecting it and deleting it. The final steps were to arrage and merge the layers and play a little bit with the colors and saturation.