I don't take a lot of pictures of people. I'd like to learn how eventually, but in the meantime it's good to learn what to do with portraits. This one was a pretty big challenge for me, obviously, as it's taken me two weeks to post it. Even with the constant nagging of my sister, who berated me for making an Easter Bunny egg cozy rather than posting the picture she sent me. I have been trying, but just couldn't figure out what to do to make this picture look better. Well, I finally decided to just do a little touching up, and then add a tiny bit of a glow. So here is what I did:
It's a nice photo to start with, so you can understand my dilemma, right? I decided to concentrate my efforts on the eyes, and referred to my handy dandy Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers, by Scott Kelby. I have to say, his Photoshop books are very helpful. There's not a lot of technical babble, he just takes a single technique, and walks you through it, step-by-step. So, if you don't know what Curves are, no big deal, you don't have to, he'll just show you how to adjust the Curves to get the effect you want. So I would recommend checking out his book for whatever version of Photoshop you're using.
First I decided to make the whites of her eyes a little brighter. I used the Polygonal Lasso tool to select one section of white, and then held down the shift key while selecting the other sections. Next I went to the selection menu and clicked Feather, and adjusted the feather amount to 3. Then I opened the Hue/Saturation menu (Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation). If the subject has a lot of red in their eyes, you can first select Reds from the edit menu, and then slide down the Saturation level. Switch back to the Master edit menu, and to make the whites brighter, slide up the Lightness level. Watch the preview while you do this, because you want to keep it subtle, and it can turn into freaky alien eyes really quickly. Click Okay and deselect, and there you have it, whiter whites. If only it were as easy with my laundry.
Next I wanted to add a little sparkle to her eyes. I'm going to list this part step-by-step, because there are quite a few steps, but they're not hard, just follow along:
1. First I added an Unsharp Mask by going to Filters > Sharpen > Unsharp mask. You can play around with the settings a little. I used the following: Amount 150%, Radius 1, Threshold 10.
2. Reapply the Unsharp mask several times by pressing Control-F (PC), or Command-F (Mac), until the eyes start to look really crisp. At this point there will be some funny stuff going on with the rest of the picture, but don't worry about that, we'll get rid of it. I did it quite a few times, maybe 8 or so, but you may need as little as 4. You don't want to do so many that your history list only shows Unsharp mask, make sure you can still go back to the step before you started applying it.
3. Now, in the History list, click the last step you completed before you applied the first Unsharp mask.
4. Still in the History list, click the box to the left of the very last Unsharp mask you applied. This will give you the History brush, which you can use to repaint all those Unsharp masks only in the areas you want. Make sure it's a soft brush, and adjust it to about the same size as the iris, and just click once over each iris. Voila! A little extra sparkle!
The very last thing I did, which is super easy, and give photographs a nice dreamy glow, was to apply a blur layer. Just drag the background layer to the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Make sure your new layer is at the top of your layers, if you have more than just a background layer. With that layer selected, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Adjust the blur as much as you like. I think I set this particular picture to 25 pixels on the blur menu. Now adjust the Opacity of the layer and the Layer type from the drop-down menu next to the Opacity slider. In this case, I took the opacity down to about 25%, and used the Overlay layer. And finally, after all that, here's what I ended up with:
It's a pretty subtle difference, but I think it looks nice. If I were to start doing a lot of portrait photography, I would probably invest in some actions, like these. Touching up portraits can really take a lot of time, and they make it quick and easy to make the subjects of your portraits look fantastic. Seriously, click on that link and see what an action or two can do for a photo.
So, let's compare the before and after side-by-side, shall we?

Coming up this week: another photographer interview, this time with my friend Yvonne, who takes magical pictures of her beautiful home, and I'll explain how I edited the photo in this post.