Serious photoshop make-over

[Starstorm]

Started off by masking her away from the background and then duplicating that layer.

Using the clone brush and heal brush in turn I removed wrinkles, blemishes and shadows.

Zoom in and with the colour selector tool start repainting by hand those cloned areas to look more natural.

Duplicate layer again and using the liquify tool slim down her arms and neck.

Once you are satisfied with this save and then delete the previous layer.

Reclone areas of the background to cover up where she used to be.

Select the upper portion of her face (mainly eyes) Resize a bit. Repaint to lighten.
Erase unwanted areas and merge down.

Mask her skin and lighten with Exposure tool and Levels. Apply surface blur.

Duplicate background and merge down.

Final exposure/levels adjustments to make sure image balances out.

[windrider86]

Such subtle changes make such a huge impact.
I dont use Photoshop which is what I am assuming you are using. PSP doesnt have anyting called a surface blur. May I ask what that does??

[Starstorm]

With Surface Blur, your software just blurs out areas of low contrast to give it a smooth gradient between one tone and another. But it does not blur edges and areas of high contrast.

Normally I would Also run a high pass filter over this as well on a second layer set to overlay so that it keeps the sharpness and doesnt' seem too blurry but I skipped it on this image.

[KathrynWilson]

Very nice - great touches and not too overdone.

[Glayva]

Welcome to the site. I love to see excellent work like this. Very subtle use of PS. Too often it's over done. Very well done

[littleny]

very nice enhancement. not over done

[Starstorm]

Thank you Glayva. I'll be posting more now that I have some free time.

[areeffbee]

LOVE it. It's awesome! So the pro model stuff.

[photoguyphotography]

Starstorm... may I ask what version of Photoshop you are using? CS4? And may I ask how long approx it took you to make these edits? Your work is very impressive. My compliments.

[Starstorm]

Thanks Photoguy!

I was using cs3 at the time, but since then I've switched to cs4. This picture took approximetely 20 minutes to edit from the point I took it into lightroom and came out with the finished product.