Hello everyone, if you have read my posts and blogs, you might notice that I am a photo-enthusiast. I specially love to take nature's texture and sunsets. But portrait photography is something I want to ponder. When it comes to portraiture, I see a lot of good outputs and good thing about photographers nowadays they show their before and after products. So here's my take on trying portrait photo enhancement. Take note, I am not a pro editor or even a photographer so I appreciate your comments and suggestions
MY PORTRAIT
Here's the raw photograph of my face. I used Canon 1200D and a prime lens. It's hard to find a nice view and this is one of the pleasing pose, I think. :)
I removed the blemishes and pimple marks on my skin using healing brush tool:
| BEFORE | AFTER |
|---|---|
I hope you can see the difference. I personally don't want to remove the scars on my eyelids because for me, it is one of my trademark.
I adjusted the brightness and contrast to see what else to improve on the photo:
I used dodge tool to highlight the eyes and eyebrows.
This looks like a digitally drawn now, too much contrast and pitchy details, but we will fix that later. The black is saturated near red level.
Then, I blur some parts of the skin to make me look smooth. I duplicated the main layer, and blur it using Gaussian filter.
I masked the blurred layer and remove the part that is covering the eyes and other prominent features. As you can see, I did not manage to clean y skin, but I think it will be fine to look more natural ~
Now it's time to correct the colors. There are a lot of redness on the parts that are supposed to be black due to over dodging.
| Hue/Saturation Correction | Color Lookup Application |
|---|---|
Well, I guess this is done?
I will use this photo as a reference for my next painting