Tight-Framed Portrait Retouching

[kewlpack]

Here's the original - needs some work to clean up the person's aging and some warming up...



Here's what I did in Photoshop to make this usable:

• Applied healing brush around eyes and forehead, and some subtle cloning to clean up wrinkles and blems.
• Used Curves & Hue/Sat to adjust warmth, saturation, and punch.
• Recrop slightly to tighten things up.
• KPT 6.0 Bounded Sharpen (using channel mask to control affected area) to bring some extra definition to the important edges (Picasa's resizing softened it a bit - grrrr).

... and here's what we get...



The client was very happy and she loved the print!

[lputman]

Great post work!

[corry]

great job on the pp. lovely photo with that red!

[kewlpack]

Thanks gang. I love this stuff!

[Loose_Canon]

Originally Posted by kewlpack

[*]KPT 6.0 Bounded Sharpen (using channel mask to control affected area) to bring some extra definition to the important edges (Picasa's resizing softened it a bit - grrrr).

My suggestion - Careful sharpening should be done AFTER any resizing to your final print or web size. And only sharpen ONCE - at the end.

Nice job - she should be happy.

[kewlpack]

O yeah - I know what you mean. I always sharpen as part of my final work flow (been doing graphics in general since '89).

In this case, the original is nice, big, and sharp - but when I upload images to Picasa, it resizes them (which loses a little sharpening detail). No biggie. These are just jpg's anyway. I don't need high-res final stuff to be out there.

Nevertheless, the tip is a good one, and always bears repeating!

[Loose_Canon]

Originally Posted by kewlpack

O yeah - I know what you mean. I always sharpen as part of my final work flow (been doing graphics in general since '89).

In this case, the original is nice, big, and sharp - but when I upload images to Picasa, it resizes them (which loses a little sharpening detail). No biggie. These are just jpg's anyway. I don't need high-res final stuff to be out there.

Nevertheless, the tip is a good one, and always bears repeating!

I see. You may want to poke around on Picasa's preferences - you may be able to control the automatic sharpening if it has it. My exposuremanager site has that.

[Father Bob]

Nice work.
Is it a good idea to sharpen when you're trying to make someone look younger. I usually put a slight blur onto the skin.

[SJH Foto]

good job. very subtle

[kewlpack]

Revised the images to comply with the 600px max width (and fixed the sharpening). Sorry for the error.