Photo Restoration Blog

Posts Tagged ‘retouching eyes’

5 popular and useful posts.

My photo restoration blog is growing all the time and sometimes too much to read all at once, for convenience I have collated 5 popular and useful posts.

1: In digital photo restoration there are many tools an artist can use to help with their craft. Restoring a digital photo is sometimes very challenging but restoring an original is something else altogether, read here Can you restore an original?

2: One of the most exciting aspects of photo restoration is surprise. You are never sure what you are going to restore next and this photo of a  1900,s Unicycle record is one which ill never forget and had a great story to go with it too!

3: Sometimes images come nearly as long as i am tall! These are normally panorama images, for some examples check out the post Can panorama images be restored?

4: Everyone likes to wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed but what if your eye photos did not turn out as you wanted them, you could try the retouching eyes post.

5: If all of this sounds like something you could do, you could find out how to get started in photo restoration by reading how to start in photo restoration

Retouching eyes is a way to improve a portrait. This is a technique I picked up along the photo restoration and retouching road.

Above are some eyes from a portrait from Michael Herb at 204Studios. They have a round studio flash reflected in them. Some say this is attractive and softens the eyes but this is a matter of opinion. Maybe you want to add your own reflection in the eye that suits your style? I have included a layers snap shot of a process to change them.

The bottom layer has the reflection removed. The layer above “whites”, is a soft white brush sprayed in the whites of the eye and then reduced in opacity and masked. this softens the whites.

The “reflection” layer is a single dab of white masked to make a triangular shaped reflection.

Above that is a small white dot, which simulates the main point of light.

Next up is a colour layer to add more of a warm hue to eyes with the centre pupil masked out.

Finally a splash of red also reduced on opacity in the corners of the eyes to remove the grey look and warm up the eyes some more.

The very top layer is just the original so we can refer back to it to see the changes we made.

You then set about retouching the face and skin in your usual way. I hope this retouching eyes article helped you.

Neil

Photo retouching and Instant makeovers, years taken off, digital plastic surgery, its all possible but just how far do you go?

Facial restorations involving removing wrinkles, reducing pores, retouching eyes, removing blemishes etc. should be done with discretion. Its very tempting to attack the image with gusto sweeping away all evidence of anything natural and end up with a porcelain skin that looks a little too much like a wax work that a persons face.

Start by reducing the shadows, cleaning away any blemishes that would not be natural, perhaps reducing fine lines around the eyes but not completely removing them. Even out the skin tone next with an overlay filter on a separate layer. Perhaps you might use the patch tool if you have some good texture to sample, to smooth out the tones. Brighten up the eyes and remove the shine from the skin. Sometimes you may have to redraw the catch-lights in the eyes but make sure they look natural, not just blobs of white, shape them a little and add some transparency. Reduce pores by either another layer set Gaussian Blur or targeting the larger ones individually, if you have a large tablet you can actually work quite quickly reducing them with a dab of the pen set up correctly, this way no detail is lost on the face at all.

Above all else don’t over do it. In previous posts I have mentioned before, it must look like nothing has changed, nothing at all. If it looks like it has been restored, you haven’t done it well enough. This industry is plentiful with wannabe retouchers, but to stay up the top there must be no evidence of cloning or restoring anywhere. If you keep everything on separate layers you can always change the opacity to vary the intensity of each step to keep a natural look.

Retouching skin on a man

Good luck and take it slow and steady and keep it natural

Neil

Providing quality photo retouching