New to Portrait Post Processing

[Majora26]

Hi! So I'm new to the world of post processing. I've been following a couple of tutorials and I'm ready to share one of the images I've worked on.

Lets see... I'm using GIMP and my process was to duplicate the base layer, then adjust levels to get some contrast/brighten things up. Then I duplicated that layer, desaturated the new layer and applied a Gaussian blur. Then I changed the blending mode to soft light and dropped the opacity to get a bit more contrast and softness.

I think I might've blasted the white background a bit much, and I want to lighten the shadows below his eyes, but I don't really know how to go about doing that.

What do you guys think?

[faeriegodess612]

I have Gimp as well. But to be honest with you, I hardly ever use it. I usually use Picasa, which if you dont already have it, its a free download like Gimp from Google. You can find it by searching Picasa 3. It does minor PP and is also like an organizer.

I think the first photo is fine,...but the second is WAY over done. Its too dark. I think just a tad of PP on it should do the trick. Hope you dont mind I copied your photo to show you what I mean. All I did was bring it up in Picasa and adjust the color temperature as far as it would go. It got rid of the slight blue-ness of the light reflection on the side of his face and kinda tones down the white wall a lil. Then used Gimp and used the healing tool until I got the shadows under his eyes to look the way I wanted.
Heres the order: Original> Picasa Edit> Gimp Edit.







I didnt spend a WHOLE lot of time on this,...but I think your over-complicating it. Just make a few minor adjustments, and your golden.

[compleks]

I think the first image was the edited one and the dark image was the original.

Sorry, I've never worked with portraits before so I'm not much good here. I definitely think it was a huge improvement though!

[Aleix]

To lighten the skin under the eyes you can also use a tool which in Photoshop is called "dodge". I'm not aware of the name in GIMP, but I'm quite sure there should be an equivalent there...

Greetings

[RLucas]

Here is what I did with your image in GIMP.
Opened, and duplicated layer.
Colors>Desaturate using luminosity option. This will usually keep the dark areas dark, and the light areas light.
Then I went to Colors>invert. Looks like a negative now, but what it does is inverts the lightness/darkness value. Shadows become highlights, and highlights become shadows.
Then I did a Gaussian blur at about 30pix. You just want to blur enough to get rid of detail.
Then I changed the blend mode to Overlay. This got rid of most of the darkness under the eyes, and spread the contrast out through the whole image.
I then went to Colors>Hue/Saturation, selected the Master, and turned the saturation down just enough to get rid of the strong orange tint in his skin.
I then used the clone tool (looks like a stamp), and turned down the opacity to about 10%.
I then selected and area just below where the darkest areas under his eyes start. I used that area as a base to paint over the dark areas with and give it a nice blended look.
Finally, I did a selective sharpen on the eyes only. I oversharpened so I could finally run wavelet denoise, and save. (BTW, I usually do a denoise first, but since this image had already been processes, I thought it would be more viable to do last.)
It seems like a lot of work, but it only took a could of minutes. I hope you like it.