Digital Photography Club

What makes that 'perfect' model look in magazine photos? The answer is: a) beautiful models with good skin; b) good makeup and c) professional lighting. But very often the final step - retouching and 'digital makeup' done in Photoshop is the most important one. We will take a very common photo. Not a model. No professional makeup. No professional lighting. And we will try to make it more 'perfect' using simple and powerful Photoshop technique that makes skin look soft and nice.

This is the photo to be restored. It is slightly damaged; the contrast is very poor. In fact, there is a sunny day - but you can hardly guess it looking at the unretouched photo. I tried to keep old photo look and therefore decided not to remove all the scratches and imperfections. Besides, I added a little color to increase the effect.

It is more than just black and white. Use this photo retouching technique to fully reveal potential of your images by boosting contrast, fixing skin problems and adding nice glamour look.

We will take a photo of a nice sweet little kitten and convert it into MONSTER KILLER CAT in 5 easy steps.

This part of the tutorial will include extensive use of layer masks.The mask defines visibility of the parts of the layer: areas where the mask is black are completely invisible, and areas where the mask is white are fully visible. The areas where the mask is gray are semi-transparent. Drawing over the mask allows to reveal or to hide the parts of the layer, and it doesn't destoy the contents of the layer - that's why the masks are so popular! Important: before continuing, make sure that 'Photocopy' layer is visible.

There are several Photoshop filters that may help to create an outline: find edges filter glowing edges filter smart blur filter in the 'edge only' mode photocopy filter. There is no 'right' or 'wrong' filter; the result of using this or that technique depends on the image very much. We will experiment with these 4 filters to find one that suits our image best.

The goal of this tutorial is to create a digital sketch effect that would be as close to real sketch look as possible. That's why I call it a 'natural sketch technique'. We will try to do a little research into several possible Photoshop techniques to find out the most effective ones. Before continuing with this tutorial look at the Introduction to find out the basic sketch features we are going to reproduce digitally. You may also want to read the "Classical" Photoshop sketch effect tutorial to learn easy and effective way to turn your photo into a 'sketch' in ...

I got an idea for this tutorial on one of the photography forums, where I found a topic "Sin City Challenge" (or something like that, I don't remember exactly). I liked idea of the challenge: take a common photo and try to recreate atmosphere of the "Sin City" movie and posters.

Let’s have a look at some real sketches (portraits this time) to find out what we are going to reproduce and what will make our photos look like a pencil drawing. All drawings used in this tutorial have been made by Andrew Loomis.