Digital Photography Tips

Removing gray hair using Photoshop is a great way to give yourself a digital hair dye. As with most Photoshop techniques, the trick is to make your changes without making the photograph appear unnatural. In the above photograph notice how I removed most of the gray hair from the man’s head but there are still small highlights of grey hair. This ensures that the photograph remains realistic looking.

1. To do this yourself you simply need to click on the “burn” tool

2. Now ensure your “range” is set to “midtones” (since gray hair is a midtone) and set your exposure to about “20%”. This ensures your changes to the hair color look natural. If you set your exposure higher the changes will be much more dramatic. In the end it’s up to your artistic preference. If you set it to 20% you can do multiple brush overs to get the desired color.

That’s how you get rid of gray hair in Photoshop.

Removing wrinkles from a person in a photograph is a fairly easy process. There are different ways of getting rid of wrinkles in a photograph but the best way (and the easiest way) I’ve found is to use the “spot healing brush tool” (see below). Other ways leave noticeable blur marks and are more time consuming and less accurate.

Follow these steps to get started with removing wrinkles from your subjects face or body in your photographs.

1. Open Photoshop and open the image you want to edit

2. Right click on the background under the layers window and click “duplicate layer”. You now have two layers.

3. Ensure your second layer is the active layer and click on “spot healing brush tool” in the sidebar.

4. Find an area of skin close the wrinkles that shares the same color and light attributes. Click “alt + left click” now move the spot healing brush tool over the wrinkles and either drag it along in the direction of the wrinkles or just “dab” it on the wrinkles one click at a time. If you make a mistake simply just click the “undo” button under “edit – undo”.

During this stage it’s important to ensure you’ve selected the right brush size. If the brush is too large, it may create noticeable marks on your photograph. For the image above I used a brush size of 7 (you can change this in the upper left hand corner of Photoshop).

It’s important to enlarge the photograph so you can see the small details of the wrinkles. It’s easy work, but to get it done perfectly you must spend some time trying different approaches and brush strokes to removing the wrinkles.

In the image above (top of blog post) I removed the majority of the wrinkles in the man’s face, especially around his eyes. Notice the changes are subtle as to make the photograph still appear natural. You can’t remove all of the wrinkles from the body or face of a 40 or 50 year old without the image looking unnatural.

Good luck with you photo re-touching!

Cleaning up small and large skin blemishes in Photoshop is an incredibly easy process. It’s actually quite fun to do as well because you have complete control over how much you clean up the skin in the photograph. Unlike retouching the entire area of skin, cleaning up blemishes requires no Photoshop filters or layer masks. There is a great tool in Photoshop called the “spot healing brush” and it looks like this.

All you need to do is select this tool and use the “alt” key to select a sample of good skin. Ensure your brush size is set to just larger than the size of the blemishes. You can change your brush size by clicking on the drop down button in the upper left side of the screen.

Once you are ready to get rid of the small and large blemishes in the skin, simply start clicking away. The spot healing brush is great because unlike the stamp tool is blends in both the texture and color in a seamless fashion leaving virtually no sign of the blemishes in the first place.

Look at the image at the top of this blog post to see both the before and after pictures of the skin with blemishes and then without blemishes.

Understanding “latitude” is such an important part of digital camera conversations. As both a filmmaker and photographer I hear the topic of dynamic range and latitude come up more amongst filmmakers than I do amongst photographers. I think part of the reason is that many filmmakers feel that the digital look is inferior to the classic look of film and they strive to replicate the look of film in their digital videos.

However, I feel that digital photographers don’t feel the same type of inferiority to film as their filmmaker friends do. In fact, digital photographers tend to celebrate the technology as almost superior to film (especially since the invention of digital SLR). That being said, one of the main criticisms about shooting digital on either video or sill cameras is that the CCD chips in these devices do not handle dynamic range (latitude) as well as film. So what does this mean?

Technically the definition goes something like this: Dynamic range is a term used frequently in numerous fields to describe the ratio between the smallest and largest possible values of a changeable quantity (such as light).

In other words latitude (used interchangeably with dynamic range) is the ability of the camera to capture details in the pixels in the lowest end of the tonal spectrum (i.e. dark shadows) while at the same time capturing pixels in the highest and brightest end of the tonal spectrum (i.e. a bright sky).

Both film video cameras and still cameras have always fared easier in this field than their digital counterparts. Photographing a subject in front of a window on a sunny day once with a film camera and once with a digital camera will make the technical limitations of the digital camera much more apparent.

Most often the victims of a low dynamic range are exposed lighting sources and the sky in the bright end of the spectrum, and darker shadows in the low end of the spectrum. The result is an “underexposing” of the shadows and a “blown out” look to the light areas. Look at the photograph at the top of this blog post again. Notice the texture of the wall around the florescent lighting is gone. It’s completely overexposed. It’s just a blob of white. Photographers and filmmakers call this either “burnt out” or “blown out”.

It’s the compromise your digital camera makes to expose the majority of the pixels in your photograph at a good level. However, latitude is getting much better in digital cameras. The larger the megapixel count in a digital camera the better it is for the dynamic range. However, it’s also important to remember to use your menu settings to ensure you’re shooting with the highest resolution to take advantage of this feature.

If your camera has good latitude you’ll be well on your way to taking pictures that stand out due simply to the fact that it handles lighting extremes well. A feature too few digital cameras can boast about.