Photo Retouch

[Mad-Man]

Originally Posted by edbayani

iboy, i selected the bright spot on the collar but i selected a bit longer towards the bottom. and with the eyedropper selected the color of the collar and filled the selection, deselected and fine tuned with the clone tool to smoothen the edges,
made a new blank layer and again with the eyedropper tool, selected the skin tone nearest the bright spot and with a small soft brush, opacity set at 10%, brushed on the new layer to cover the brightspot. fine tune with dodge and burn at low opacity. add a little bit of noise so that the painted areas are not so smooth. merge.

Very nice... I completly forgot all about that method...

[Mad-Man]

Originally Posted by winterangel

How did you do the smoothing and brightening the iris? I am just starting to learn photoshop elements so the post production is a bit tricky for me as of now... Nice job on the pproduction.

Smoothing out the skin there are many methods to do this. Just bluring the image is one quick way but you tend lose a lot of detail in the skin, which isnt always the best look.
The way I did it in this photo is:
Soften Skin, duplicate your background layer.name it soft. Invert the layer, then turn it to a smart object. Go to blend mode (vivid light) then go to high pass and change pixels to about 16. This will change with each photo. But you are looking for your image to have no pours, a smooth look. Then go to gaussian blur and do 2 to 4 pixels to get pours back. This helps to make smoother looking skin without losing details.
Create a mask to get rid of the blur over the eyes and hair. I would just click on ALT then mask this will fill it black. Use white at 35% opacity over face.

As for the eyes, I just did a quick mask over the eyes and created a new layer and changed the HUE. When you create the new layer with the qucik mask make sure to highlight the new layer and ctrl click the layer then go to create new hue saturation layer and that way you can change the eye color whenever you want.

I hope that helps WinterAngel....