improving portraits with Photoshop
posted 2005.06.04
When I'm at loose ends, I often go on the hunt for Photoshop techniques sites, and try out tutorials. Tonight, I was trying out Black & white high key effects in Photoshop technique when I ran across a technique that blew my mind.
With four simple steps, I had taken a so-so portrait and turned it into something much, much better. I went back to Photoshop, discarded all the other techniques in the tutorial and practiced just those four simple steps over and over and proved to myself that most of the time, this really does work.
I find this technique works best with portraits, particularly closeups, and the color needs to be pretty accurate in the photo for this technique to work. If the skin tone is too red or yellow to begin with, you'll want to correct it before trying this little trick.
So, for this demo, I've used a photo from Morguefile:
Step 1: Choose Layer > Duplicate Layer.
Step 2: Change the duplicate layer's mode to Overlay.
Step 3: Choose Filter > Blur> Gaussian blur (Radius: 1.0 pixels).
Step 4: I back off the opacity of the Improver layer to between 35-65%, depending on taste. (I chose 40% for this demo.)
Suddenly this typical indoor flash shot photo has gone from drab to wow:
I realize this is a fairly simple technique, and I'm sure loads of people can do far better wizardry, but for me, this little trick will make the difference between boring snapshots of my friends and something that will really pop.
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Richard, thanks for your comments -- except that in this technique, I'm not suggesting Sharpening at all. The Gaussian Blur will give a slightly soft look, a bit of a glow, to the portrait which is the effect I'm trying to achieve.
(But yes, I'd agree that using the High Pass Filter can be an effective sharpening technique, just not necessarily *here*.)
Angie-
I use this technique all the time, and one step I sometimes add to make it even more effective is to erase out certain areas of the face on the blurred layer -- particularly the eyes and lips. I find that this gives the general soft feeling you're going for, but makes the eyes really pop, which I like. Here's an example where I did exactly this:
It's also effective to bump the brightness and contrast of the blurred layer by around 15% or so.
From what I've seen, this is usually called "Glamour Effect".
Thanks a lot!
I got lots of good skill.
Can you teach me more?
Hey, I've been using this technique since I worked at the Vancouver sun to saturate the colors/contrast -- it works great in print where colors typically get washed out to shite. In any case, I've added some refinements to the technique over the years, and one of the most useful and effective ones I've practiced is a combination of the overlay layer and a duplicate softlight layer. With the overlay layer I adjust the colors using curves to desatruate the shadows and darker colors so that the midtones and hilights are really the only thing that get affected noticeably. the soft light layer is great for harmonizing all the colors through the image. Play around some more, there's other great variations on this technique that can really bring photos to life.
I use a little bit of gaussian blur, yes.
But I also use Noise>median to give the pure skin look. (apply after the necessary touchups)
Great Tutorial
Thnx for the idea, I tried it, added something of my own, and portraits in our magazine look a lot better now. Great tip, thank you!
Use the Other-->HighPass filter (4.0 px or so works well w/ my 8MP images) instead of Blur for a great sharpening effect that is, IMHO, better than Unsharpen.