Shutters Inc – episode 153

This week, on the eve of Shelton and company flying off to Noo Zooland,
we announce the winner of the Wacom competition,
Richard Annable explains how not only lenses see things differently, but cameras do too,
can you trust your on-camera LCD?,
Jason Paige gave us some info about the RAW linear/logarithmic question from last episode (from the book Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS5 by Bruce Frasier and Jeff Schewe),
and Greg Anderson sent us a wrap up of what he experienced at last month’s NAB trade show in Las Vegas.

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Size: 103541352 bytes
Duration: 1:04:40

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Erin King’s winning entry…

Erin’s retouch notes:
“Hi guys, here’s my entry. All worked with the mouse!

What I did to get the result…

1 – Got rid of the purple aberration in the eyes because it offended me.

2 – Copied the image onto a new layer and performed some serious
anti-wrinkle/shadows/pore reduction skin surgery using a mixture of the
healing and patch tools and the cloning tool. I liked the laugh lines
around her eyes so didn’t play with those much at all. I called this my
surgery layer.

3 – On a new layer I selected a colour that was close to the median skin
tone and, on a very low opacity/flow, painted over the T-zone areas on
her forehead with the brush tool just to dull the shine a bit and then
merged that with my surgery layer.

I thought she looked pretty good after that. Could have left it there
but didn’t (because I am the PS junkie). I wanted to even out her skin
tone a bit more so…

4 – I selected her skin by going to Select – Select Colour and used the
plus (+) eyedropper tool on different parts of her face until just about
all of her skin was selected (ie, white).

5 – I copied this selection onto a new layer and then deleted all the
unnecessary parts like her arms, her sons (?) face, her eyes and
eyebrows, hair, etc, until just the mask of her face was on the layer.
I then duplicated this layer and hid the duplication for the time being.

6 – I then blurred the first skin layer using the Surface Blur filter,
boosting the blur settings until the skin tone was fairly even across
the face. I hit ok with that filter and then pulled the opacity down on
that blurred layer so it wasn’t so extreme.

7 – With the duplicated skin layer, I ran the High Pass filter to bring
back some of the contrast, pores and natural shadows to the face. I set
this layer to Soft Light blend mode and then I played with the opacity
until it wasn’t as extreme and the skin texture was even (to my eye).

8 – I duplicated the surgery layer and merged that with the soften and
highpass layers so it was all the same layer.

So by this stage I had three layers; the original untouched layer, my
surgery layer and my soften/highpass layer. Could have left it there
but considering the model is a mature-aged woman, and I’d virtually
wiped out all signs of life experience from her face, I decided to pull
the effect back a fair bit. Had she been much younger, I would have
called it finished at this point and moved onto the general image
retouching…

9 – I pulled the opacity of the soften/highpass layer down to about 70%
and disabled the surgery layer altogether.

As a result, the wrinkles and shadows have been significantly softened
but not erased completely, the skin texture still exists and she looks
like the lovely mature woman that she is without looking “aged” and
haggard (by comparision with the original photo).

The last few effects I added was boosting overall colour and lightness,
sharpness and definition and adding the dreaded vignette.

Not sure if you needed all that but thought I’d include it anyway.
Happy to send the PSD files if you’re curious.

Cheers,
Erin”

and Jason Paige’s infamous effort…

Jason’s retouch notes:
“I have been trying to master the art of retouching for a few years now. I have been contemplating buying one of these tablets hoping that it will help with the results.
You will see from my submission that my retouching needs as much help as I can possibly get.
The more I seem to retouch things the worse they seem to become.
However I do think this makes for a great family photo.
Jason Paige”

See these, along with the rest of the submissions here.

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