What’s Your Preference?

AlieS · #1 (**permalink**) 06-10-2009, 11:49 AM

This is a picture that I took on a friends camera on New Years, she recently sent me the originals and even though it is a poor quality shot, I decided to try and have some fun with it!

Before

After

This was all done in PS Elements 7

The very first thing I did was remove her red eye and lightened the whites of her eyes (Using the dodge tool at a low exposure.)

Next I decided to work on her skin. For this I made an extra copy of my working layer.
In this copy I applied dust and scratches. (I had my radius set at '9' and my threshold at '0'.) And then I applied a gaussian blur at '2.4' to smooth everything out.

(Since I cannot create a layer mask this is how I get around that

)

Then I made my working layer visible again and proceeded to erase her exposed skin. Being careful to preserve her eyes, nose, and mouth.

After I was done with that a quick 'ctrl e' to merge the two together.

Her skin was looking a little too flat after I smoothed it out so I applied diffuse glow. I had this set at graininess '0' , glow amount '4', and clear amount '19'.

A quick touch up on her eyeliner using the burn tool set at a low exposure and then I was done with her face!

For the background I simply removed the model from the background, using the polygonal lasso tool. And copied my selection onto a new layer.

Then I did a layer fill of a dark lavender and then a transparent gradiant fill set at radial and scaled to 150%

I added a drop shadow the was similar to the shadow in the original, and then using the quick selection tool I selected her clothing and made that into a new layer.

I set the blending mode to 'overlay' and put the opacity around 40% to darken her jacket.

(Any ideas on how to create a realistic looking background would be appreciated!)

Thanks for reading
Alie