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.

Blog Material Sources

I’m particularly awful when it comes to consistently creating original content that follows a specific topic or category and therefore posted this in the “Random” category, but I hope to use this as something of an extension to Twitter, which I discovered fairly recently and took to like a duck to water! The limited number of characters leaves no room for the pointlessly verbose and rambling language I am famous for amongst my lecturers and peers – I write for fun and occasionally offer pieces for people to read, who mostly say the same thing: you’re too verbose.

Here’s a list of the various social-networking sites that I’m a part of. I’m not actually a part of any online communities just yet, but I shall be soon, I hope.

• Facebook was what I tried to get into first, after being persuaded to sign up by a close personal friend, but it simply lacks organization and order. Finding friends is difficult because there’s no back-and-forth: I can’t see what someone else is like before it’s too late.

• Twitter doesn’t have the problems of Facebook, despite people pretending to be celebrities that they aren’t – Kanye West recently painted the internet in capitals with his anger towards someone who’d created an account with Twitter and pretended to be Kanye West, becoming very popular. Aside from those issues, I’ve found this to be the most effective and simple way to meet fascinatingly wonderful people online: the API allows one to create applications that make use of Twitter in any language you’d like – as long as you can access the internets – and search for topics, words, phrases and the like.

• Digg has just come into my life to provide potential content to comment upon in this blog, along with…

• Glue, an extension for my web browser: I can visit a site with media content, such as Amazon, NetFlix or even Wikipedia and find people who are interested in what I’m looking at, like or dislike it and perhaps even commented upon it (gave it their “2 Cents”). I can, in turn, make comments about the items and perhaps find new friendships with other people through our common interests and passions.

• Reddit is similar to Digg and may, hopefully, provide some interesting stuff to write about. I enjoy using these simple sites and their Firefox add-ons in order to keep myself updated with both international & national news. The local news is something I’ll have to work on, as buying newspapers doesn’t really factor into my budget, but I think I can get it somehow…

• RSS Feeds are extremely useful too, but I’ve yet to actually manage to get into them seriously. My iGoogle page has news items and feeds on it. I rarely visit there. I look for bizarre stories; I have an interest in the bizarre. I buy a copy of th magazine with that exact title each month, though I’m somewhat disappointed because I’ve yet to have found a “Do-It-Yourself” guide to scarification, piercing or branding within their pages. Luckily, or unluckily if I end up an amputee due to infection, there’s Youtube, which is host to many videos of people practicing their favourite form of body-modification.

• Youtube is another social-network, amusing and entertaining, though I’ve rarely found anything worth writing several pages about on there.

To conclude, I’ve all of the resources out there to both create stunning content whilst also keeping up-to-date with popular stuff, like the news… or what scientists are going to try to pyrolyse next in order to create oil to keep us going.