tip 5: Portraits (intermediate)
Now we have mastered some photoshop basics, lets move on to something more advanced, editting portraits. As a woman I like pictures of me online to look as good as possible, as Im sure any other woman does. Lets start with a stock photo, here I have used one from Deviantart.
http://dust-stock.deviantart.com/art/window2-62902157
begin by duplicating the background layer. We will start by using clone stamp tool or healing brush tool (for newer versions of photoshop) to edit out the spots on her face. Select clone stamp, select an area of the girls face close to where the spot is, hold down alt to select the patch of skin to clone from, release alt and clone away. Make sure your paintbrush is a small size. Ctrl + or - zooms in and out of your image. Here is mine:
I also added a sharpening layer (see previous tip) using the high pass filter set to 5. Press ctrl+alt+shift+e to duplicate the sharpened layer.
Blur this layer and set it to soft light as per tip 2. If you find the shadows too harsh select the eraser tool and erase away. Since I like the keep the eyes sharp I often erase the blurred/soft light eyes layer. Following that make a new layer to dodge and burn as you like, I dodged some of the harsh shadows on the girls face and pasted some white into her irises.
Looking better but still not ok (to me). I dont like how her eyes are quite blurry so to fix this (my lazy way) save the whole thing as a jpg and open it again in photoshop as a new image. Now lets try another PS sharpening technique, go to filter>other>custom and select the settings there. Everything will probably be too sharp but I like how the eyes are now so I erase what I dont want sharp, or you can simply lower the opacity of the whole layer until you get something you like. Play around until you get something you like, remembering the basics from before. I added a light blur layer to her face as well as dodged her irises just a little again until I got something like this
For a final bit of zing I created a channel mixer layer, set it to overlay, and reduced the opacity to 70%, see the final version here http://atre.deviantart.com/art/Tutorial-63299831
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