Taking photos is just 1/3rd of the work that goes into delivering a finished product. I’m going to walk you through my workflow for editing an image in photoshop but before I do, I’ll tell you there are many ways to get from point A to point B. The takeaway is there’s no right or wrong way. In the end, it’s your artistic vision and whatever looks good to you is what matters. That being said… you don’t know, what you don’t, know so my intent here is to show you my way of doing things and maybe you’ll learn something new.
Here’s an image I took early last year for a Winnetonka High School senior. It’s straight out of the camera and there have been no alterations of any sort. Before we begin we need to prepare our desktop so let’s first press the “F” key to place the image on a neutral grey background. This eliminates my distracting desktop background and the million files I have scattered all over it. Also, by having the grey background, it allows our eyes to focus on the colors of the image instead of whatever is on your desktop. At first glance you might be thinking the image looks great, and while it does, I’m going to point out some areas that will make you reform your opinion. Without a shadow of a doubt, her youth has granted her great skin tone and complexion, but no matter who you are, or how many thousands of dollars you’ve spent taking care of your skin, when we start to pixel peep (zooming in 100 – 400%) nobody has perfectly complected skin. Trust me when I say the 27″ monitor I edit with does not lie!
Step 1 – Color Correction
When I look at this image I see either a blue/cyan color cast. Color casts can be caused by many different variables from clothing to reflected light. In addition, each camera sensor handles color a little differently. For example, my Nikon D700 creates a red color cast on practically every image, albeit not this one, figures. Being aware of your surroundings, knowing your equipment and having great color vision will improve your images. Since the image is a portrait and she is the primary subject, I want to correct her skin tones so they are as natural looking; not overly tan and not pale. When I correct color, I think back to what each person looked like in person and try to replicate it as accurately as possible. First, press the “I” key to select the eyedropper tool from the tool panel. I also want to make sure the eyedropper is set to anything but “single point”. For this image I chose 11 x 11 average which gives me the average color across a 121 pixel area. Next, open the info palette from the palette toolbar. This allows me to evaluate the color from the selection I’m about to make. I want to sample the colors of her skin from an area where there’s a muted highlight. Normally these areas are the forehead and the chin. I don’t want to use the cheeks because these areas are usually where the majority of makeup is applied. I chose the chin. Now press and hold “SHIFT” and click on the chin. As you can see below, this places a bullseye and number “1″ on the area you clicked. You will also notice that after you clicked, it placed some percentages in your info palette. The values are shown as Red Green and Blue (R, G, B) values, but I want to evaluate the skin in Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key (CMYK) mode. To do this, right click to the left of the values and select CMYK Color, also shown below.
In CMYK mode, the values for this image are C=10%, M=29%, Y=12% and K=0%. From here forward, forget about the K value. It’s supposed to be 0, and will never change. I can tell from looking at these figures that there is in fact a blue color cast. How? I’ll explain. The CMYK “formula” for caucasian skin should result in values where C is 1/3 to 1/5 that of M and Y. Where this image has a C value of 10%, that means that the M and Y values should be between 30% – 50%. With C=10%, M is balanced but Y is not. When we boost the Y channel, we decrease the blue in the image, hence getting rid of the blue color cast I suspected. If I’ve just lost you, maybe take a minute and google RGB and CMYK. Simply put, in the CMYK mode, C is the opposite of Red, M is the opposite of Green and Y is the opposite of Blue.
To correct these figures I create an adjustment layer. At the bottom of the layers palette click the black and white circle, and select “Curves”, as shown below.
Above your layers palette, is your curves adjustment box. Since I’ve determined I need to correct the Y value in the image, I select the Blue channel from the drop down box, shown below. Next to the drop down box, click the hand icon and then click inside the bullseye on the chin. This places an adjustment marker on the blue channel which allows me to specifically target the blue color cast in the skin tone. Now press the down key until the value of the Y is closer to the M value. Really, what I’m doing here is altering the blue channel until it looks good. The “formula” above, is simply a starting point, don’t worry about being exact. If the image you’re working on requires additional changes to the other channels, you go about it the same way. Simply select the channel you want to correct (Red Green or Blue), click the hand, click inside the target on the chin, and press up or down to make the correction.
After I made the curves adjustment, I felt it still had a bit too much yellow which I couldn’t correct in the previous step. To fine tune the color correction I’m going to make another adjustment layer, this time I’m going to use a Hue/Saturation layer. To create the layer click on the black and white circle below the layers panel, and select “Hue/Saturation”, shown below. In the Hue/Saturation adjustment box, I’m going to select the yellow channel and reduce the saturation slider until it looks good. For this image, I chose a value of -15. I also changed the Hue slider slightly to a value of -12. Feel free to explore the sliders a bit but remember that you want to make small changes whenever possible, nothing too drastic or your finished product is going to look like a hot mess. As with the curves layer, you could also make changes to the other color channels if necessary. At this point, the image has been color corrected. I usually create a new group on my layers panel by clicking the folder icon and rename it “color correction”.
Step 2 – Skin Cleanup
Here’s where the fun begins. The skin cleanup is the most tedious part of this entire process. This is where I will remove stray hairs, fine lines, wrinkles (to an extent), dark circles or bags under the eyes, acne scars, or any other skin imperfection. My goal here is not to make her a porcelain doll, I want to preserve her character while making a few enhancements. To be most effective during this stage, you really need to take breaks from your image every once in a while, refresh your eyes and reevaluate the image. First, let’s get the tools set up properly. Create a new blank layer, from our layers panel, circled below. From the tools palette, select the clone stamp tool, set the mode to “Lighten”, opacity at 100% , flow at 20% and check the box to sample this layer and layers below. The key here is setting the mode to “Lighten” or “Darken” (depending on the correction we’re making). Look at the image below and notice the stray hairs in the top right. By setting the mode to lighten, what the clone stamp tool is doing is replacing any pixels which are lighter than the source point, with darker pixels. The exact opposite happens if you have the mode set to “Darken.” Remember to set a source point when using the clone stamp tool. On a Mac, hold down Command and click on a clean patch of skin in close proximity to the area you are going to correct.
For this image, I’ve used the clone stamp tool around on the areas shown below. You might think that these are such minor changes but many small changes will make a difference as you will see shortly. Be sure to zoom in as much as possible during this step.
Here’s the image after I’ve made the corrections.
Next I’m going to dodge and burn. Back in the day, the dodging and burning was done in the photo lab, to the actual negatives, but nowadays we photographers end up doing this ourselves. If you’re new to dodging and burning, let me briefly explain. Dodging is where we will lighten the shadows, and burning is where we will darken the highlights. The goal here is to balance the skin tones and get rid of any excessively dark areas (blemishes) or for that matter, light areas, which could also be blemishes or scar tissue or harsh spectral highlights. So let’s create 2 new curves adjustment layers, you should remember how to do this. Decide which one will be your dodge layer and rename it. Now click in the center of the curve dialog box, and drag the curve up just a little bit. This action will lighten your photo a bit, but don’t worry, we’re going to fix that. Press “X” to set your background to black and press Command + Del on a mac to fill the layer mask with black. The last thing I do is change the mode of the layer to lighten. I make the burn curves adjustment layer in the same fashion, but instead of dragging the curve up, I’m going to drag it down slightly, as shown below. With the burn layer, I’m going to change the mode of the layer to darken. Repeat the steps to rename this layer and make the layer mask black. Now press “B” to select the brush tool, ensure the mode is set to normal, the opacity set to 100% and flow to 30%. The last thing I’m going to do is create a black and white adjustment layer. Click on the black and white circle at the bottom of the layers palette and select “Black and White.” In the Black and White dialog box, drag the red slider down about -25 which is going to make the blemishes and areas to dodge, more prominent.
Going back to the dodge layer, I’m going to click on the areas of the skin which are darker. Think lots of clicking! I benefit from turning the layer off and on every few minutes so I can see the overall changes. I also occasionally turn the Black and White adjustment layer off so I can see the changes I’ve made in color. Below you’ll see some areas where you can use the dodge layer to improve the skin tone.
Here’s what it looked like after I was finished dodging. Remember…little changes.
Below I’ve placed some circles around areas where I burned the image. I didn’t do a whole lot of burning with this image. I’ve circled the highlights of the skin and using the burn layer, I’ve just toned them down slightly. The overall effect of the dodge / burn has neutralized the contrast in the skin, making it appear smoother while preserving texture.
Here’s the after.
The next thing I’m going to do is use the spot heal brush to touch up a few areas which I didn’t address with the dodge/burn layers, those areas are circled below. From the tool panel, select the spot heal brush and set the brush to “content aware” which is only available in Adobe Photoshop CS5 (the most current version as of this post), as well as checking the box “sample all layers.” Create a new layer and get to work! What this is going to do is make the target area better match the areas surrounding it. For this image, I’m specifically targeting pores on her cheeks with this tool. Don’t overdo it though, remember, small changes. I’ve clicked many more times than circles below, but I think you get the idea.
Step 3 – Teeth
A great smile with plenty of teeth showing just begs for a little enhancing, but not too much. This particular image didn’t really need any adjustments but I wanted to show you how I edit teeth. If when you’re done editing teeth they scream “Joe Biden!”…slap yourself in the face and try again.
In the images current state, if we made changes it would affect the entire image but, we want to specifically target the teeth so we’re going to create a layer mask. First I’ll fill the layer with black by pressing “X” to select black and then Command + Del on a Mac to fill the layer with black. Now press “B” to select the brush and make sure the flow and opacity are set to 100%. Press “X” to select white as the foreground color and the “\” key to place the red cast over the image as shown below. Now simply paint the teeth with the brush until it looks like something below. If you make a mistake, press “X” to swap back to black and paint the area back in. Once I’ve got something like what’s shown below, I’ll press the “\” again to remove the red mask.
Now to your Selective Color adjustment panel. Teeth are primarily white, so I’ll start by select the white channel. Once selected, reduce the yellow slider until it looks good to you (this removes yellow from the white channel). Do the same for the black slider. You can see the specific adjustments I made for this image below. For more extreme cases where the teeth are more yellow, I would make heavier adjustments. In that case, I might explore removing the black and yellow from the yellow channel. Understand, each image will require something a little different. Once you’ve done enough, you’ll know what each image needs just by looking at it. Again, for extreme cases, you can also use a Saturation layer and desaturate the color in the teeth slightly. I will sometimes brighten a smile, but I didn’t feel this image needed it as her teeth had great color and brightness to begin with.
Step 4: Shadows / Highlights
There are a few shadows that I’d like to bring out and I’ve found a quick way to address them with a rather powerful tool available in photoshop. I start off by pressing Command + Control + Shift + E on a Mac to merge all layers onto a new layer. As shown below, go Image >Adjustments >Shadows/Highlights and select “show more options”. You’re going to see a lot of sliders here. My best advice is to play around with the sliders. Each one affects the image a little differently and no two images are going to require the same results. My shadow defaults are 35%, 20%, 93 px, and from there I’ll fine tune it. If you’re used to filling in shadows by curves or levels with a layer mask, I recommend giving this method a try.
The final step is image sharpening. There’s a million and one ways to do this from sharpening filters to high pass filtering to custom actions. For the majority of my work I use a simple Unsharp Mask. I’ve shown you where you can find this in the image below ( Filter >Sharpen >Unsharp Mask). I have my default set to 150%, radius of 1 and a threshold of 4. From there I evaluate the photo and make whatever changes are necessary until it looks good. Sharpening should not make a drastic change to your image. I usually zoom in to the eyes, lips and hair separately and turn the sharpen layer off and on a few times to make sure I didn’t overdo it.
I should also point out this level of editing is one of the many benefits of custom portrait photography. This is a service most independent photographers offer and something that will never be offered to you at Sears, JCPenny or Portrait Innovations.
As of this posting, I’m sitting in a hotel room, without photoshop or any of my files. I’m going to post a before / after shot similar to the one I did of Angela a few posts ago, once back to Kansas City so check back in a few days for the update to this post.
by geoff
no comments