Airbrushing and Retouching Part Two

This will only be a fairly short post, as what I’ve done to the image is fairly simple and perhaps difficult to notice. Fortunately for myself, the brown facial marks on the girl in the portrait are quite easy to notice and even easier to remove.

I’d like to show you the beauty of Adobe Camera Raw and its Heal tool as well as the Clone tool. A combination of these tools can allow any blemishes or unwanted marks upon an image to be quickly and easily removed. Simply choose an area that you’d like to replace and move the green circle over something similar.

The size of the area to be healed or cloned can be altered using the mouse. It’s best when these tools are used in combination and I’d at least try and find a similar area of skin in terms of color, tone, texture and such to replace it.

Notice the marks on her face, some on her chin & around her nose.

As this was mostly a rushed job, I haven’t tackled all of the spots and such upon her skin; it was late and I was simply playing about with possibilities after reading a few tutorials online. However, I don’t think that Adobe Camera Raw should be underestimated. To use this:

• Open Adobe Bridge
• Find the image you’d like to edit.
• Double Click (or right-click & choose “Open in Adobe Camera Raw”) on PC
• From there, once you’ve finished playing with the image, you can move onto Photoshop.

I must point out that the alterations you make to your image in Camera Raw are not actually applied to the image itself. It appears that they are stored either as a set of instructions within the program or a seperate file that Photoshop and other programs can then read and act upon.

Quite useful. Extremely simple. Powerful. I’ll post a color-corrected (I know the colors are off) version of the completed image when I move onto the next stage, in which I plan to manipulate this image further.

Airbrushing and Retouching Part One

Using photo-editing software is rather relaxing and passes the time when I should be writing. However, it can be quite useful and I’d love to learn as much as I can about altering photographs, from simple color changes to altering the shape of the subject’s body. Expect more, hence “Part One”.

My First Attempt:

I found the original photograph whilst browsing sxc.hu and chose it to be retouched because it appeared quite ‘cool’ in terms of coloring; I altered the CMYK colors to match a ratio of C10 – M30 – Y32 (not actual numbers) and then altered her lip-stick:

• Added an adjustment layer.
• Played with curves in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key – Black) to add warmth.
• Created another Layer.
• Selected her lips somewhat clumsily.
• Feathered selection with 10px.
• Changed the ‘Saturation’ to +65.
• Played with lip-stick opacity.

First five-minute attempt at retouching a photograph (taken from sxc.hu)

I know it’s simple, so I’m not looking for feedback but instead leaving this as a milestone of sorts; I intend to continue to work with the original image in order to add certain other features, edit out blemishes, perhaps alter just her skin-tone rather than the colors of the entire image and even accentuate her eye-lashes and perform other tasks people undertake in order to make real women into fake and flawless dolls.

There may be copyright issues surrounding this image and therefore I will take it down and remove it if asked. Please do not copy it, either.

Travel Bites – Canary Islands

Airport lounges are all the same. You can tell who’s been where, or where they’re going, just by looking at them.

There’s the four person family; cheap package deal, self-catering, going to or coming from one of the islands of Gran Canaria. Probably Tenerife.

The Canary Islands are barren and unsightly. I’ve walked on almost all of them. There isn’t a desert, there’s no woodland to speak of, they’re simply bubbles of dried volcanic rock. Unfortunately, the tourists arrived before nature had the opportunity to make these places lush and verdant on their own. I wonder what would’ve become of them had they remained untouched.

Were you to go there, you’d understand that they’re consumer vaccuums running on capitalism: tourists arrive, pay for a square metre of space on one of the island’s many beaches, bake themselves for a while in the hot sun, then they get up and walk around. The shops are like an unending airport duty free section, with greasy Spanish men pushing cameras into unwilling hands, charged with the task of selling these already-obsolete goods.

I say drop the camera that’s pushed into your hand. Drop the whole island into the sea. Let its inhabitants sink to the bottom of the Atlantic, but compliment them for their dilligent attempts at cockroaching through existence all of this time.

If you look up, there’ll be an almost endless series of hotels perched upon dubious foundations around every mountain in sight. Roads snake around them and slowly upwards, straining tour buses. Were there anything else to see, perhaps I’d take issue with it. But, there isn’t anything else to see. No ancient civilisations. Very little history. Just sun, audibly crackling tourists and inhabitants whose skin has leathered, tough and brown.

The beer is cheap. The cheap beer is bad. The best beer is imported, but still bad. The restaurants try to be exotic, perhaps to make up for the lack of natural scenery, putting all kinds of strange seafood dishes on the menu; buttered baby squid, swordfish. You’d just like a steak, not a meatless rabbit.

Sewers are open in places; a sharp contrast to the beautiful and long, loose dresses of the darkening tourists that pass them, their hands covering their wrinkled noses. I’d rather keep my sacred pale skin; an umbrella perhaps, but that would defeat the point of coming here.

Here, where there is only sun, sand and a cosmopolitan mixture of “home”.

Cicadas shake marraccas at night. Hotel pools are still. The noise of the filter, coupled with the cicadas, makes it peaceful.

Climb a mountain and escape the din of the city and its night-life. Look behind where the hotels are. There’s nothing. Not even desert. An endless quarry of hard volcano, unfinished roads and unfinished hotels. People live around the coasts; sand is a luxury that you can charge money for. A handful of Euros per square metre. Sell the beach. Sell the sea. Sell the herd of dolphins beneath the waves. Grow crops indoors, plant vines in potholes and wish you lived anywhere else.

Anywhere that has something more…