Practicing new techniques on an old portrait

[zenali]

I'm only new to this forum, and am really only just beginning to explore what Photoshop can do. I've found many of the tips, tricks, and tutorials on this site to be fantastic, and I have been keen to try them out on my own photos.

Here is a shot I took a couple of years ago on a holiday.



After reading things on this site I decided to see what a difference I could make to the shot.

The first thing I did was play with the contrast by following this tutorial. I wasn't going for anything extreme, just a bit of a boost.

The next thing I did was some skin smoothing. I couldn't find the tutorial that I'd read, but I vaguely remembered the steps. First up, I used the heal tool for any obvious blemishes. Then I made a duplicate layer and applied a median noise filter followed by a gausian blur. I made a layer mask so that only the skin on the face showed through (nothing fancy - I just used quick mask and painted over the face) and reduced the opacity to something like 30%. I wasn't going for a heavily airbrushed look - just something a little smoother.

I made a new duplicate layer beneath the smooth skin layer (probably should have done this first, but I didn't think of it) and used dodge and burn to emphasise the eyes. I used the burn tool around the outer edge of the irises and over the pupil, and the dodge tool around the inner edge of the irises. Then for good measure I used the burn tool over the eye-lashes. I reduced the opacity of this layer as well, again somewhere around 30 - 35%.

Once I was more or less happy I flattened the image, bumped up the saturation just a little, and ran an unsharp mask filter over the result. Then a bit of vignetting using the distort -> lens correction filter, and I was done.

The end result looks like this:



I'd be interested to hear thoughts or suggestions about how I could have (should have?) approached this image. I'm quite happy to give it another go, as it is all a learning experience for me.

[castman]

I have nothing to add you did a very nice job. Welcome to DPS!