Tutorial 4: Basic Photo Editing (Portrait)

Welcome to Tutorial 4!

If this is your first time, please go onto the side panel and click on the link to tutorial 1!

It's been a while since my last tutorial and a lot has definitely changed. When I started out the tutorial, I was still tutoring (lol) English & English Cultures to would-be contact center agents and now I am a full-fledged graphic designer (please visit my website and LIKE my facebook page!). This also means that I now have full control of my time and I can blog anytime I like.

So! As promised in Tutorial 3 (ages ago), I will teach you some basic photo editing.

Now that you know how to put together a digital scrapbook, I know you also want to make your photos look well with the rest of the elements in the digi-scrap.

If you don’t own a DSLR camera, sometimes the pictures are too dark or too hazy and the contrast is a bit off. Don’t worry about it, that’s what this tutorial will be all about! Trust me! I put up with a point-and-shoot camera for over a year. That dilemma forced me to learn Photoshop so I could achieve the photo composition that I like.

Today, we will start with a basic portrait. This is my photo, you can download and practice on it too, just don’t make me look funny! (lol) Or you can open your own photo and follow these procedures.

STEP 1: BRIGHTENING & INCREASING CONTRAST

Open the photo in Photoshop. As you noticed, the photo is a bit dark and the colors are a bit muted. 

So what you do is, click on IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > Brightness/Contrast. A pop up will open where you can toggle to adjust the brightness and contrast.

If you’re using Photoshop CS2, the difference of each level of brightness is huge, so when you toggle the brightness to +15 you might get a brighter result than the same number in CS3 or CS5.

So now it really depends on your eyes!

Now that you’ve made the image brighter, sometimes it makes the image hazy and the colors are too light. So you’d also wish to adjust the Contrast to make the colors come out. So toggle to the contrast that you like.

Once you’ve achieved the desired brightness and contrast hit ENTER or OK on the pop-up box.

STEP 2: BLEMISH REMOVAL

Now that your photo is brighter and the contrast is higher, a new problem arises. Your freckles are more defined and every rash (even the tiniest) is obvious! The main reason that people use Photoshop is because of its blemish-removal tool which isn’t as expensive as Proactiv but is just as effective!

What tool is it? WRONG! The question should be –Which tools are it?!

You have four main blemish-removal tools which will be found on the left tool panel. If you right click on the band-aid button you’ll see them. See screenshot

a.      Spot Healing Brush Tool

b.      Healing Brush Tool

c.      Patch Tool

d.      Red Eye Tool

Now what do these tools do?

SPOT HEALING BRUSH TOOL – is the basic anti-blemish tool. It will automatically erase dark spots on your face. If you click on the tool you can adjust the size of the brush by right-clicking and toggling on the pop up box. This is important since you’d like enough coverage on the spot you’d like to remove. See screenshot below.

When you right-click and the pop up box opens you’ll see three basic options to adjust the Spot Healing Brush tool: Diameter -adjusts the size of the brush; Hardness –adjusts the edges of the brush, always make sure it’s low enough to make the brush blend in easily; Spacing –which also determines the efficiency of the tool, always set it at 25-50% to make sure the brush blends in easily.

You may copy the settings on the screenshot and start clicking on the spots you see on the picture and see a miracle unfold! See the difference.

HEALING BRUSH TOOL – is an even more amazing tool. Sometimes the blemish is bigger than a spot, then this tool will do it for you! The adjustments of this tool are similar to Spot Healing tool. What this does is, it copies a spot on the face to the blemished spot, to cover it with the desired tone or color.

What you do is hold down ALT and click on the spot you desire to cover a certain blemish. And then click on the blemish you’d like concealed.

Now, on my picture you’ll see a mark from a nose piercing I got in college and I’d like that to be gone. So I click on a portion of my skin that’s clean and then I put that on the mark. And voila it’s gone!

See the difference. Cool isn’t it?

PATCH TOOL –is for larger spots but you really wouldn’t use this if you’re working on a portrait.

RED-EYE TOOL –is another miracle tool that removes the red-eye caused by strong flash photography. This has a tendency to darken eye color, so be warned. I suggest that you prevent “red-eye” by adjusting your camera flash to “slow synch” to delay the flash when the shutter closes, if you’re using a DSLR camera, then get a flash diffuser.

STEP 3: ENHANCING THE COLORS

Now that your photo is brighter and blemish-free, sometimes the colors are inadequate and you’d like to make the photo pop some more. The tool for the trick is HUE/SATURATION. Click on IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > Hue/Saturation.

A pop-up box will then appear. You’ll see three choices: Hue –which adjusts the most predominant color, if you’d like to look like the Navi in Avatar then you can toggle to make the dominant color blue, if you also want to look like Fiona or Shrek then make green as a predominant color, but if you want to look normal, I suggest you leave it at zero! See first screenshot below;  Saturation –adjusts the strength of all the colors, now this is the right tool to toggle!; Lightness –is the opposite of the Saturation tool, this also works like the brightness tool used in Step 1.

Now that you’ve toggled on the color saturation, see the difference!

That concludes today’s tutorial on basic photo-editing.

Feel free to comment if you have questions. And please rate this tutorial, if you think it's interesting, difficult, useful or fun! (see buttons below)

A LOOK INTO WHAT'S NEXT: We're not done with photo-editing, there are a few more tricks, so keep your scappin' happy fingers ready!