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Karl's Tutorials: Intro the the Patch Tool | Pop Art | Airbrushing | The Filter Gallery
Airbrushing: digital professional make up
Intro to Airbrushing
Have you ever tried to do a photo shoot using some of your friends? Have you found that even though the pics looked good, there was something lacking in your makeup. The skin didn't quite seem to look as good as in the picture of a famous model. Well, that's because of professional make up done before the actual photo, making the skin look soft and toned - and blended perfectly with the light.
But don't be too disappointed. With some good photography skills and a little digital editing, you can create great looking pictures on your own. In this tutorial we'll look at how you can fix your make up after the pictures are taken. This is called airbrushing in the digital editing world. We'll start with a picture of a girl, note that her face has some blemishes that we'll need to fix to make her skin smooth and silky.
Step One:
Open the picture that you wish to edit in Photoshop. Create a duplicate layer start working with that. Photoshop has a very useful tool which is called "spot healing tool" to remove spots from skin. Use it to remove any obvious spots. Don't worry if you couldn't remove all of them, we'll get to them a bit further down in this tutorial.
Step Two:
To achieve a soft skin look, we will use the filter Noise > Dust & Scratches, keep the radius just enough — making the skin look soft and graded, don't worry about the eyes.
Step Three:
Now we will do further removal by blurring the image. Use the Filter Blur > Gaussian Blur with a radius around 3 depending on the size your image. Tweak to find the right value.
Step Four
Also, make sure to add a natural look. To do this we'll put a uniform noise to the picture. This is achieved using Filter > Add Noise, use the settings below:
Step Five:
Our skin is ready. Now we need to graft it on the picture. Make sure you’re on the skin layer. Add a layer mask to it. Fill the mask with black color using the paint bucket. This will hide your skin layer and the original picture will appear. Select the brush tool and start painting over the skin with white color. Your new smoother skin will start appearing as you paint. Paint only the skin part leaving the eyes and the lips intact. To check out what you have painted, change the blend mode of your masked layer to 'difference' and the opacity to 75%. You can now clearly see what part has been painted and what haven't.
Step Six:
Once you are finished with painting the skin. Turn back the blend mode to normal and the opacity to 100%. Here's the results that you should see at this point:
Step Seven:
The skin has improved drastically without losing any detail on the places which matter — like eyes and lips. Here's the before and after picture, take a closer look at the details:
Karl's Tutorials: Intro the the Patch Tool | Pop Art | Airbrushing | The Filter Gallery
Free Photoshop Brushes
Visit our brushes page and get links to an amazing selection of brushes for Adobe Photoshop, including a preview of and links to Javier at Deviant Art. He has an enormous variety of brushes like Abstract, Fractals, Grunge, and many more. Another great source for brushes is psbrushes.net — they're billed as the largest resource for Photoshop brushes. And lest we forget, don't miss getbrushes.com — they are another source of an amazing number of free brushes for Photoshop.
Photoshop CS3 Resource Center
Download and purchase Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended from Adobe Labs and start enjoying the upgrades and enhancements of the program. For news, reviews, and articles on all things CS3, visit our Photoshop CS3 Resource Center, and for the latest CS3 tutorials, go to our CS3 Tutorials page.
Fluid Mask 2.0 — Special Offer — US$189
Order Fluid Mask through us and get a special discount — you pay only US$189 and you get 6 months of free upgrades. This offer is exclusive to photoshop-pro.com and to take advantage of it, visit our Fluid Mask Discount Page. To find out more about this software, what it does and how it does it, visit our Fluid Mask page.
As a short preview of this extraction tool (taken from their site), you might know that Fluid Mask is a highly advanced software tool designed to make life easier for everyone who creates cut outs. Built as a plug-in to Adobe Photoshop, Fluid Mask is the new next-generation cut-out tool. Behind the product is breakthrough technology that mimics the way the eye, optic-nerve and brain perform visual processing. It offers an intuitive, accurate and fast approach to cut outs. A key feature is the new Edge Overlay showing object edges within an image. Suddenly masking become a whole lot easier - it's now possible to select, group and mask objects in images to make great cut outs.
Alien Skin — 10% to 20% Discounts
Our special partners agreement with Alien Skin allows us to offer their software at some very nice discounts. Go to this Special Discounts Page to take advantage of excellent savings on a most excellent software. This offer excludes Eye Candy Bundle, which is already discounted at US$199.
Our exclusive offer includes Eye Candy: Textures | Eye Candy: Nature | Eye Candy: Impact | Exposure | and their latest — Blow Up
- Blow Up (regularly US$199) — Our price: US$179
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- Eye Candy 5: Nature (regularly US$99) — Our price: US$79
- Eye Candy 5: Impact (regularly US$99) — Our price: US$79
- Eye Candy 5: Textures (regularly US$99) — Our price: US$79
SiteGrinder: designing websites with Photoshop
You don't need to know any code (e.g. HTML, CSS) or learn a new development application to make a great-looking website. With SiteGrinder, you use your Photoshop design skills and the site is automatically created for you.
In Photoshop, you do all the designing while adding relevant names to your layers. You then open SiteGrinder from the Automate menu in Photoshop, and build your site. SiteGrinder incorporates full functionality in the ability to create buttons, rollovers, multiple pages, email forms, menus, and more. What's nice about this product is that you can stick to all the creative stuff and let SiteGrinder grind out all the tedious code.
Free Photoshop Plugins
This one of our most popular pages. Go to our free plugins page to find links to the latest Photoshop plugins, information, and resources. You'll also find links to commercial plugins like Alien Skin, Extensis, Auto FX software, Xaos Tools, Photozoom, Photomatix, and many more.
Free Photoshop Actions
Check out our free Photoshop actions page to find links to the latest and greatest actions from sources like Adobe Studio Exchange, the Adobe Evangelists, Action Central, Action FX, and PicsToBits Actions.
You'll also find news about actions and an introduction to actions with links to excellent tutorials.
Recover Your Photos
Catastrophic disc failures are just waiting to happen. If you're not prepared, you may lose an entire life's work, but not now. Visit our Recover Your Photos page and discover a wealth of resources and links to immediately recover digital photo files from a catastrophic hard drive failure or a corrupted media card. For total hard drive crashes, check out DriveSavers. They specialize in providing expert recovery from HD failure. Also, get information on and links to PhotoRescue which is an extremely popular solution for recovering photos.
Can't Get Enough Fonts
Let's face it — you can never have enough fonts. Searching for good fonts is a past time of ours and we believe we've found some excellent ones.
Visit our free fonts page for an extensive list of links to font resources. We also have some links here to commercial font sites if you want to buy some.
Free Stock Photos
Contrary to popular belief, there are many places on the internet which offer free stock photos. If you are in the middle of a project where you need some, visit the page below for all the links.
If you're looking for stock images for free, visit our free stock photos page.
Header photo credit
This is the hull of a sailing vessel in dry dock taken by Christopher Swift of Swift Images.
The Search
Photomatix
Create amazing high dynamic range images using Photomatix Pro software. View some examples of the kind of images which Photomatix can produce.
SiteGrinder
Create websites from Photoshop with Site Grinder software. You do the creative part, it does the coding.
Videos
For those who learn best by visual means, we have an excellent selection of video tutorials from Christopher Swift.
Alien Skin
Add some zest to your Photoshop work with plugins by world renowned Alien Skin, featuring Snap Art, Eye Candy, and Exposure.
Fluid Mask
Extract images from their backgrounds with uncanny precision using Fluid Mask. Take a tour of Fluid Mask and find out how amazing it is.
Special discount price when ordering Fluid Mask through us!
Photozoom
Enlarge your images to enormous proportions with virtually no loss in sharpness or detail with Ben Vista software — Photozoom Pro 2.
Books
Photoshop LAB Color
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Classroom in a Book
The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book
CS3 Resources
Auto FX
Stunning effects with Auto FX software for Photoshop:
Resources
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- Lightroom Tutorials
- Lightroom Books
- Video Tutorials
- Free Actions
- Data Recovery
- Free Plugins
- Free Brushes
- Free Fonts
- Stock Photos
Wacom
From graphic design to photo touch ups, Wacom pen tablets make life easier: Wacom Pen Tablets
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