Digital Imaging & Graphic Design

Retouching

Picture re-touching is a valuable tool in your arsenal as a graphic designer. Typical salaries of GOOD re-touchers working a salaried position can expect to pull down between $50,000-$75,000 a year. In this set of tutorials I'll ask you to teach yourself a variety of techniques in which you can retouch an individual to reduce 'undesirable' elements from the photograph. Note, after you can do this, clients can be family members as well friends/strangers paying you real wages for re-touching.

Retouching often involves:

changing/enhancing eye colour
applying/thickening/altering/natural features (eyelashes, hair etc...)
removing things (like blemishes, tattoos, unwanted hair)
shaping body parts to fit a criterion

Activity (DON'T submit this)

A) Tinting eyes

Turn this:

into this:

Step 1

First of all, open up the image at left (click through to google drive and download the picture by clicking the download arrow).

You can also try this model (click through to download)

And/or this one (click through to download)

Step 2

Now we want to make a selection of the eye itself. To do this we will just use the elliptical Marquee tool(M). When the tool is selected, drag an ellipse around the iris, like so:

Step 3

We need to be careful with the selection of the eye, because in its current state, when we want to colourize, the eye-lid will also be coloured. Therefore we need to de-select the area where the eyelid and hair has been selected. To do this we will simple use the polygonal lasso tool(L), or regular lasso tool (While holding the ALT button on your keyboard, left click and paint around the area of the eye-lid to UNINCLUDE it from the selection :

Step 4

Now onto the fun part, deciding what colour you would like to make your eye! Up top, choose Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Color Balance

This makes an adjustment layer that has a little balance symbol and a black thumbnail. Except if you look closely the black thumbnail has a white dot in it. That's the selection we just made - which is a little hole in our mask.

When we adjust the colour settings to 0 cyan/red, +72 magenta/green and 0 yellow/blue we get a decent colour of green for the eye.

Notice the problem with our selection if it's not perfect though? The beauty of working with masks as we saw before is that we can alter them. Using a BRUSH, either paint in BLACK OR WHITE on the MASK and you'll get more or less of the eye in green as you need.

Step 5

Now that is colouring at its most basic level, if you use some initiative, you might thing... well that doesn't really blend in well...For that reason, I'm going to ask you to change two things. First, click on the black thumbnail. Change the feather option to about 5. This softens the edges of our selection. We want our colours to come though, so we're going to change our blend mode (explained in this great article) to COLOUR. This "punches" the green colour but keeps blacks and whites ok.

Set the opacity of this layer to 50%.

Step 6

We want to apply this effect to the other eye now. Simply, we just SELECT THE MASK ON THE COLOUR BALANCE LAYER, select the default brush (B), zoom in on the other eye and WITH A WHITE BRUSH SELECTED brush the other eye. Voila, it's green now as well.

Step 7

Now, notice the blacks of the pupil don't come out all that well though? One trick is to duplicate your adjustment layer (hold alt down and drag the hue/saturation layer up above the current layer and change this new (top one) layer from Colour blend mode to Overlay - this will ignore light colours but multiply darks. We will change the opacity of the Overlay layer (top layer) to 50% and keep the Colour layer (the middle layer) to 50%

Voila, we're done!!!

Thickening eyelashes and fixing hair

Transform this photo:

Into this one:

Step 1

Keep working on your file from part A

So make 2 new layers (CTRL + Shift + N) and name them "upperlashes" and "lowerlashes".

To start: click on your brush tool. Set it to size 3 (by hitting [ and ] you can decrease and increase the size of the brush - try a brush size of 1 pixel). Change the colour of the brush to match her hair (#171815) (you get this by clicking on the foreground colour in the bottom of the tool panel).

Step 2

Click on the brush panel icon (#1 in the picture below). Notice your brush by default is a round brush (probably). It gives the profile you can see in #2. Instead, we want something that will look a bit more like a lash - so click on the #2. It opens the picture you'll see below right. Click on the advanced selection (gear icon). Turn on SHOW BRUSH TIP. Then click on LEGACY BRUSHES (and when the popup asks to append hit ok)

Open brush settings

Open advanced brush settings

Now go to legacy brushes, open the Default Brushes and choose the Round Point Stiff brush.

Readjust the size of the brush to be size 1

Now we're going to brush on some eyelashes. Paint on a lash. Notice that it goes from thin to thick. So paint BACKWARDS. Start from the tip and paint back to the eye.

Repeat these steps over and over again (maybe 10 lashes) until you're REASONABLY happy with the overall result. Don't fret - we're not done yet - don't expect it to be realistic yet!!!!

Step 3

Now, because we stroke every eyelash with Brush tool we want to smooth a little bit edges of drawn eyelashes. So, click on upperlashes layer and go to the top menu and filter>blur>Gaussian Blur and set the values to about 1.5 pixels depending on what you've done. Notice the lashes are starting to look a lot more realistic.

Step 4

To add some variability and some "pointiness" to the lashes we're going to squish them around a bit. To do so we're going to grab the smudge tool

Grab the tips of the lashes and quickly pull up. This gives them a tip as they'd have in reality.

Lastly, drop the opacity of the layer down to about 50% or something that makes the lash noticeable, but not intrusive.

Last steps:

Try doing some of those steps on the other 2 models. You can also use the spot heal brush to do things like fix blemishes (the one model) or a color adjustment layer on the other model to brighten her teeth.

Studio Lighting

Before we start, you’ll need to do a few things in preparation:

Setup your studio strobe on its stand, set the key to 60 power and the fill to 40 power make sure they works.
Place your subject 5-10 feet away from the backdrop.
Choose a portrait style and place your lights accordingly
You should know how to connect your strobe to the camera and make it fire by way of remote trigger, pc sync cable, slaved to your on-camera flash, or by way of an in-camera system. Ask me if you don't remember how.
Settings: Set your camera to manual mode, and use the 16/160 rule. Your aperture (F-stop) to 16, shutter speed to 1/160th of a second and your ISO to 100.
Take a test shot and begin adjusting shutter speed and aperture accordingly (typically drop your f-stop a step or two, and possibly your shutter speed "up" a step or two to 1/180 or 1/200.

Assignment #4 - Retouching yourself or your partner

Find a portrait or magazine cover with a shot of a subject that you wish to recreate. You are to shoot yourself or your partner and adjust eye colour and/or eyelashes and/or lip tint or any other retouching needed to create a printable portrait of yourself in that style. Note: If you're referencing a magazine, you do not have to recreate the magazine cover per se (unless you want to), just the shot that is featured on it. The format is 8x10 220ppi for your Photoshop document. Once done save the PSD, and using File Save For Web create a 1.5 MB PNG. Submit both the PSD and the PNG into the Classroom please. If you'd like the recreate the entire magazine cover feel free, it would definitely be exceeding my expectations.

Designing for print:

Key differences in designing for print vs. designing for digital:

Changeability and Lifecycle - print is forever, you can't reprint for little changes. It requires PLANNING
Engagement - are people reading this in a magazine? Is it on a bus? Are they driving past it at 100km/h?
Senses - the type of paper you're using
Space and Layout - responsive layout (scaling) vs. static layout
Colour and Resolution - 72 ppi vs. 220-300 dpi. RGB vs. CMYK

Practical Assignment #5 - Sell that product!

You are creating an ad for a magazine. You will shoot all aspects of whatever it is you're planning on selling (make it realistic - i.e. you can't sell an elephant). The product does NOT have to be real, it can be imaginary. You can either create the product from scratch and make a little model, or photoshop it in separately. You can shoot people, products or both. You should use LITTLE TO NO STOCK IN THIS.

Your workup is going to be put on an 8"x10" 220 dpi (print quality) photo that you could use as a portfolio entry piece

Choose appropriate fonts and messaging to go on top of the piece. Please be mindful we're using only either things we've taken or stock work with clear free copyright!

I want a submission of your PSD and a 1200kB JPG for this assignment please.

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