Digital Photography Tips

Here is a quick Photoshop tutorial on how to make bad skin look great. Retouching skin is not a simple task. You can easily overdo it and make the skin look unnaturally airbrushed and almost cartoonish. That being said, with some care and a few practice runs you’ll be touching up skin in your photographs with Photoshop in no time.

Step 1: Open your photograph in Photoshop

Step 2: right click on your background image in you layers window and click “duplicate layer”. You’ll now have a clone of your background. This is important for both masking your image and adding the right skin texture later on.

Step 3: This is where you make most of the changes to your subjects skin. Make sure your second layer is active and go to your “filters’ button at the top of the Photoshop window. Click “filters — Blur — Surface Blur”. Ensure that “preview” function is activated so you can see the changes that you’re making to the skin tone immediately. There are no ideal settings for this filter. simply play around until you feel comfortable with having cleaned up any sking blemishes in your subjects face or body.

Step 4: You will have lost some detail in important areas such as the eyes of your subject as well as any areas with hair. This is easily fixable by ensuring your second layer is active and clicking on “layer — layer mask — reveal all” (found at the top of the Photoshop window). You need to use this mask to expose the textures in the eyes and the hair. To do this simply choose black as your foreground color and paint with the “brush tool” over the objects eyes and hair. The original texture of the image will become visible.

Step 5: However, you’ll probably notice that your image has a slightly plasticized look to the skin. Although the skin blemishes are fixed, the image now looks unnatural. In order to fix this you need to expose some of the background skin texture. To do this simply ensure your second layer is active and then use the “opacity” level in the layers window to expose some of the original skin texture. Usually a setting above 50% is desirable because it allows you to maintain the effects of the cleaned up skin while at the same time making the photograph look natural.

How to edit colors in photoshop. coming soon.

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If you’re relatively new to photography you have undoubtedly had difficulties properly framing a photograph. This is not something that only happens to amateur photographers, it is a problem that all photographers face no matter of their experience levels. However, some elements of photographic framing become second nature to you after a while. Meaning as time goes on, framing your pictures properly becomes more and more easy.

The biggest mistake that first time photographers make is that they pay too much attention to the main subject of interest with little or no regard for the objects surrounding the primary object of focus. Photographers forget that photography is about story telling. It’s a visual language that should communicate ideas to people. This means, that like painters, photographers need to put great thought into composition and framing. However, unlike painters, photographers don’t have an endless amount of time to make decisions. As the direction and intensity of light changes, as people move, and expression change, so will your photograph. You need to think quickly and frame your photograph even quicker.

The two best tips to give amateur photographers is to firstly, pay special attention to all of the elements which make it into the 4 walls of your photograph and pay extra attention to the area around the 4 walls of your photograph. “Amputating” parts of objects with one of the walls of your photograph is a dead give away that you were not paying attention. Either an object makes it into your photograph or your reposition yourself to get rid of the object. Secondly, you need to find a way to place emphasis on your main object. However, this is much more complex than it sounds. Too many people just place their main object dead center and click. However, your main object doesn’t have to be center, or the biggest element in the photograph. You can use lines, shapes, colors, or contrast to draw attention to your main area of interest (All of these concepts are discussed more in our online photography school), but for now just practice using the rule of thirds and proper object organization to help better your photography framing.

Proper photography framing is not easy task. You can spend a lifetime experimenting with different framing techniques. Just enjoy yourself and have fun along the way.