Transforming a mediocre self portrait into an ICE PRINCESS

[Teewinot]

...or at least that's what people are telling me on Flickr.

This afternoon I felt a strong urge to take a self portrait. But then I discovered that my remote battery was dead (and if you’ve ever taken regular self portraits, you’ll know how important remotes are!). Despite the lack of a remote, I still retained the desire to take a self portrait. So I put my 50mm on my 40D and did a few arm’s length shots.



Above you will see one of my takes…needless to say, I was pretty disappointed. But a mediocre shot can be saved in post processing—sometimes. I decided to give it a go and here’s what I ended up with after about an hour of tinkering:



Here’s what I did to get this result:

In Canon Digital Photo Professional (RAW):
-Brightened
-Minor WB adjustment

In Paint Shop Pro Photo X2:
1. First I cropped. I wanted to emphasize the left half of the face, especially my eye. I decided to go with the square crop, since it seemed to fit the composition well.
2. Next I focused on brightening the eye, since as you can see in the original, it was exposed quite dark. I did a sequence of dodging and burning, following a recent DPS blog tutorial. I also sharpened a bit.
3. Now I'm not one to wear makeup. But I wanted to experiment putting a little digital makeup around my eye. I took a regular black paintbrush and with opacity at about 30%, I painted a little eye makeup underneath the eye.
4. After finishing the work on the eye, I turned to overall light adjustments, like curves and shadows/highlights. I tried to tone down the shadows a little, but still keep some around the eye for emphasis.
5. Next I worked on color. After a lot of experimenting, I ultimately decided to go monochrome. Later on, when I went with the ‘ice’ theme, I added in the blue tint.
6. I don’t have too much experience in editing skin, so I decided to practice. My skin is pretty porous and certainly not devoid of blemishes, and I wanted to see if I could achieve some smooth skin like models on magazine covers. I’m sure I really didn’t do it the right way, but what I did worked for the most part. PSP has a tool called the Smudge Tool. I used that at a low opacity to literally ‘smudge’ out the blemishes and pores on my face, ultimately making my skin pretty smooth. Too smooth in fact. So to compensate, I added some noise.
7. I still felt the skin was sort of ‘fake smooth’ so I decided to search around for some possible textures to add to the shot. When I saw one of my ice textures, I was sold. I pasted the texture as a new layer on to my original shot. Then I made it into a mask layer so I could selectively erase the parts I didn’t want. I also blended the ice layer in Overlay mode at 100% opacity.

It’s far from perfect, but I thought the transformation was worth sharing!! Comments and critiques appreciated!

[Nicole]

Soooo cool. Thanks for posting! I was so glad when you told me you had written up your steps. Bookmarked for my future reference cause I really love how you did this picture.

[suzib]

That is really great!! Where did you get the texture?

[AnnetteJ]

That's amazing! Really clever and works so well! Very cooool

[photomom2008]

I am new to this site, photography and post processing. I opened this up to check it out and all I can say is...WOW!!!! That is amazing. I did not know you could do these sorts of things with post processing. Excellent!!! I love it. Thanks for sharing!

[Teewinot]

Originally Posted by Nicole

Soooo cool. Thanks for posting! I was so glad when you told me you had written up your steps. Bookmarked for my future reference cause I really love how you did this picture.

Great! If you end up tinkering with a shot of your own, post it here!

Originally Posted by suzib

That is really great!! Where did you get the texture?

Thank you. I shot the texture myself. It's a shot of frost crystal formations on a window. Actually, I recently wrote a 'How I Took It' about shooting frost if you are interested.

Originally Posted by AnnetteJ

That's amazing! Really clever and works so well! Very cooool

Thank you so much.

Originally Posted by photomom2008

I am new to this site, photography and post processing. I opened this up to check it out and all I can say is...WOW!!!! That is amazing. I did not know you could do these sorts of things with post processing. Excellent!!! I love it. Thanks for sharing!

Post processing can be so much fun--my encouragement to you is to just practice, practice, practice! Like shooting over and over is a great way to improve your photography, tinkering over and over in photo editing is an excellent way to improve post processing skills. And if you don't have Photoshop, no worries, I did this in Paint Shop Pro.

[justlearning]

I love it! I really wish I could do post processing like this!

[photomom2008]

Originally Posted by Teewinot

Great! If you end up tinkering with a shot of your own, post it here!



Thank you. I shot the texture myself. It's a shot of frost crystal formations on a window. Actually, I recently wrote a 'How I Took It' about shooting frost if you are interested.



Thank you so much.




Post processing can be so much fun--my encouragement to you is to just practice, practice, practice! Like shooting over and over is a great way to improve your photography, tinkering over and over in photo editing is an excellent way to improve post processing skills. And if you don't have Photoshop, no worries, I did this in Paint Shop Pro.

Thank you, I just got photoshop elements 7 this weekend. I played around with it yesterday and posted a pic in the critique/photoshop page. It was ok, but needed cropped a little more. Thanks for your help. I love your picture, didn't mean to turn the tables on you and ask you a question. I am not sure if I was supposed to do that or not. But anyway thanks for the info!

[Teewinot]

Originally Posted by justlearning

I love it! I really wish I could do post processing like this!

Thanks! I couldn't do this sort of thing AT ALL when I first joined DPS back in April of 2007. Stick around, learn, practice, and you'll be great at PP!

Originally Posted by photomom2008

Thank you, I just got photoshop elements 7 this weekend. I played around with it yesterday and posted a pic in the critique/photoshop page. It was ok, but needed cropped a little more. Thanks for your help. I love your picture, didn't mean to turn the tables on you and ask you a question. I am not sure if I was supposed to do that or not. But anyway thanks for the info!

Photoshop Elements should be a wonderful start. Just keep playing. I still haven't learned all there is to know with my editing program (Paint Shop Pro Photo X2) and I hear Photoshop CS3 is even more complicated. The best we can do to get familiar with a software program is to use it regularly and continue to practice.

This IS a place for questions! No tables were turned.

[kelleyrie]

this is really cool. Love that you posted all the steps.