H.P. & K.H. - Portrait Retouching and Airbrushing

Over the past week our roles have shifted a little in our post production work. Freya has now taken over the majority of the editing, with Kurtis assisting regularly, while I focus on the VFX work. In addition to this, Kurtis and I have taken charge of the print work, again with Freya assisting when able.

A major part of our print work this week has been making visual adjustments to our portrait images. We'd like to make clear at the start of this post that we are incredibly pleased with the base images we captured with Eleanor. Our intentions in this process were to push these images even further using industry techniques in order to create inviting and compelling portraits that hopefully look as professional as possible. We have so far completed this process for two different images, we will be showing our process on one of these images.

All processes took place in Adobe Photoshop CS3 & CC. The screenshots are from Adobe Photoshop CC.

• Starting with the base image that we picked out from our shoot, we loaded this into Photoshop.

• We duplicated this image (ctrl+j) and renamed the new layer 'Blemishes'. On this layer we used the Spot Healing tool to paint over and remove any eye wrinkles, freckles or skin blemishes, natural features of everyone's faces. In order to achieve an industry standard look we had to complete this task, despite there being no actual obvious flaws on our actor's face.
• On this layer we also used the Clone Stamp tool to remove the chipped areas on Eleanor's painted nails.

• We converted these layers into a Smart Object so that they were flattened into one layer, but could also be opened and adjusted later.
• Next we duplicated the smart object and renamed it Smoothness. We applied a Surface blur effect and adjusted the parameters so that the details of the image were blurred but the facial features were still distinguishable.
• Then we applied a High Pass effect to bring back some of the skin details so that the smoothness did not look like plastic.
• We grouped these layers together in a group called Airbrushing. To this group we applied a layer mask which we then inverted by pressing Alt+I. We selected the Paint Brush tool, reduced the Hardness to 0 and then opacity to 50%. We then proceeded to paint over the areas that we wanted to apply the airbrushing effect to. This meant that the smoothing layers in the group were only visible where we painted the brush, allowing us to choose the areas that needed smoothing rather than apply the effect to the whole image.

• After this we used the Eyedropper to select a skin colour from Eleanor's face that we wanted to try and adjust the rest of the skin tones on her face to look like. We created a Solid Colour object with this colour, inverted the clipping mask again and changed the Blending Mode to Color. We then painted over the areas of her face that we wanted to adjust the colour of to give her face a more even tone, similar to applying makeup just digitally rather than physically.
• We repeated this procedure with a slightly different skin tone for her hands and fingers, as the ends of her fingers were a little red due to the coldness of the room we shot in.

• After this we created a 50% grey Solid Colour layer, changed the Blending Mode to Soft Light and renamed it Dodging and Burning. As the name suggests, on this layer we Dodged the areas we wanted to be brighter, such as her eyes and cheeks, and Burned the areas we wanted to be darker, such as her jaw and eyelashes.

• Finally we created a blue solid circle over each of her eyes, used the rubber tool to adjust the shapes to the coloured areas of her eyes only, and changed the Blending Modes to Overlay. This gave her eyes a brighter and more uniform blue colour.

• At the end we used a Curves layer and a Brightness/Adjustment layer to alter the colours of the image as a whole, making it brighter and warmer.