“You’re a regulation hottie!”
Making people look beautiful in a photograph takes a lot of expertise…much of it on the computer. This short article is going to show a couple of those tricks that photographers use in Photoshop to make their subjects glow!
1. Skin Smoothing: of course just about every photographer has the expertise to get rid of some of those blemishes that we all have in our skin, but some even go further and completely make the skin flawless. Here are the steps: Select/Color Range/Click on the skin tone to select that color. Then choose Filter/Blur/and you have many choices of blurs (if you want to go over the top, choose gaussian blur). Play with the numbers until you get what you like. I typically like to turn the opacity of the layer down so that you can see some pores and skin tones through the blur so that it looks somewhat natural!
2. Eyes: the eyes are the most effective thing to tweak to make a huge difference in how your subject looks in the photo. Even the most beautiful eyes can look dull in a photograph. The first thing to do is to whiten up the whites of the eyes. You can do this by using a white paintbrush with soft edges on a low opacity (probably about 8%). You’ll see a huge difference in the eyes of your subject just by doing this. You can also take that same white brush and make small dots over the iris of the eye and this will help the color pop. There are many other more detailed ways of making the eyes stand out but this is by far the most simple and makes a big difference. Be careful not to add too much because it can be a bit overpowering to the overall photograph.
Happy Shooting!
