Photo Retouch of an Angel (Photoshop Retouching Tutorial)
One of the most challenging fields of graphic designs of any kind are beauty retouchings of faces especially cover shootings for magazines and journals. To achieve persuasive and believable retouch results a high amount of experience, expert knowledge, precision and a fine sense for esthetics and beauty necessary. For my personal opinion retouchings are acceptable when they are used to remove or improve unflattering details of an foto shoot. I am not a fan of retouches when you are not able to see that the person on the before and the person on the after image are the same.
How to make beautiful eyes
We have a saying in germany: "The eyes of a human being are mirrors of its soul." Unfortunately the eyes of most foto shootings are not reflecting anything. The eyes are the main focus of the viewer and belongs to the first sight. The eyes have a decisive responsibility for the mayor facial expression and emotions. Eyes have to catch the look of the viewer and drag its attention to the image. Most human eyes have an natural and outstanding beaty with can be enhanced and improved by using some color grading and correction techniques and sharpening adjustments. I am personally a big fan of photoshop adjustment layer system wich allows me to group several adjustment steps like level, curve, hue and saturation to layer groups.
Say Hello to the world with a smile
The second point a human viewer will look at an foto of a face is the mouth. The human mouth is one of our mayor indicators of our emotional situation. Happiness, serendipity, sorrow, anger, melancholy and an endless variety of moods are shown by a complex cooperation of many muscles. Very often a tiny correction or manipulation in photoshop is able to make a smile more brighter and confident. A complete convers change of the facial expression f. e. from sadness to happiness is extrem complikated and in some cases impossible caused by the fact that beliefable emotion are build with so many muscles. Our brain is able to process gestures very fast and accurate. This was very important during our evolution from primates to humans. The decision between attack and escape - and often between life and death - had to be made in miliseconds.
Smooth and healthy skin surface
The skin surface of the modern woman is caused by the wonders of our makeup and beauty industry kind of pre-retouched. This causes sometimes unrealistic and plastic skin surfaces without noticable pores and cellular structures. Cremes, powder, conciler and other magic wands of the cosmetic industry can result in a graphic (painted like) hull. Photoshop Retouching is able to remove and hide plains, blackhead and strands. Mor intersting is often the ability to bring back a natural and organic skin structure.
Everything around and angel
Very often background parts or clothings or props are fragmentary or incoplete. There is a spot on some textile or cloth. Some parts of the ligth equipment is visible in the foto. The fitting of the clothes was not so perfect as it seem to be. Small details on the hairs, posture and the posing such as background lights and scene setup can be adjusted during the final manipulation process.
Beauty Retouch Tutorial Background
Beauty retouches belong to the most sophisticated fields in graphic design. The goal of this tutorial was to show the basic fundamentals of retouchings of human portraits and photos. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me at any time.
