I have been doing a lot of reading and experimenting with Photoshop techniques — out of fear that other pixel manipulation products would take over my life. I have been making a great deal of use of LucisArt, Topaz Adjust, and Photomatix Pro — and wanted to get back to some of the “primitives” of Photoshop CS3 to build some nice images. Here is the original photo:
First observations: A great expression, but lack of dramatic punch — and several distractions in the background. Oh and there’s that nagging eyelash over the subject’s left eye. So I got out the clone stamp tool to remove the eyelash — no problem. I wanted to get rid of that pink area over the subject’s shoulder — so I matched the color of the surrounding background as the foreground color. I used the magic wand to select the pink area — then the “refine edge” capability to improve the selection. I picked up a soft-edge brush and started painting at low opacity — 20% — and increased until I was comfortable the area would match.
I also wanted to remove the upper right area reflection — and it started out pretty ugly. Here’s an interim version:
I continued to work on that area until it was properly brushed into irrelevance. It takes some experimenting to get it just right.
Next I went to the channels palette and selected the “blue” channel — it has nice contrast and detail in the beard and skin. I copied that channel, than returned to the layers palette and pasted that selection into a new layer. I changed the blend mode to “overlay,” and then applied the Sharpen / Unsharp Mask filter. Here’s the result, after selecting the “Soft Light” blend mode:
A bit stronger than I am looking for — so I pulled out the “Lorton” trick: take a copy of the original layer, place it on top of the layer stack, apply a heavy Gaussian blur, and apply the “multiply” blend mode. Add a curves adjustment layer (but don’t make any adjustment), apply the “Screen” blend mode. Adjust the opacity of each of these layers to your liking — I also added a “Hue / Saturation” adjustment layer to address the ‘cumulative saturation’ phenomenon of the activities so far.
Again: the final:
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