3 Corrections To Great Portraits

The teeth, eyes, and neck are important areas when correcting a portrait with Adobe Photoshop. Do it right, and you can make the person look great. I am going to show you what can be done to fix them. By the taking the time to repair these areas, you can fix most portraits.

Overhead lighting can cause the eyes to fall into shadow. If the light is in front, the eyes will look the best. If the light comes from the side, the other eye will fall into darkness. Manually lightening the eyes is the answer, but don't do it too much. It needs to be subtle. Just try and make it look natural. Be careful not to over whiten, it's easy to go too far. Please watch the Photoshop CS5 Tutorial about Whitening Teeth. In the video, we will go into more details.

The area that makes a big difference is the teeth. Discolored and crooked teeth can really cause some issues. If someone drinks coffe or smokes, they will have a yellow tint to them. A color in the room can cause a reflection can also cause a strange color. The teeth may look pink as a reflection from the lips. Even worse, harsh light can cause strong darks between the teeth. What you need to do is to give the teeth a balance, that gives it a more natural, cooler look of white with a slight tint of blue. By cooling the color of the teeth, it will let them stand out, and give the lips a warmer look. Another thing that enhances the teeth will be a slight, to severe, dental correction of the teeth using various retouching techniques. Please watch a video tutorial of how we Whiten Teeth with Photoshop.

A most important area is going to be the person’s jowls, the area between their chin and their neck. People have a tendency to dip their head down, this can cause a shadow under the chin. With overhead lighting, this can often happen. Professional photographers will often have the person rotate their body to the left or right so that they will appear thinner in the waist and chest. That will further cause further ripples in the neck. This can often be some of the hardest retouching to do. If the subject were to stick their chin out and move their head forward they would get a better result. Since the picture is a flat plane, you would not see the person extending the head forward. You will however, see a decrease in shadow cast under the jowls of the chin, as well as loose some additional weight from the skin being stretched. The retouching under this area is exceeding complicated, because there is often a lighter and darker area that causes a gradient in the skin. A gradient just by default, is the hardest thing to mimic without completely recreating the entire gradient. When retouching under the chin, you’re trying to grab different parts and move the texture around, and that’s something that causes the retouching to look blotchy and fake. Sometimes you are moving up the collar, or lowering the head, or doing other excessive work. You can watch this video on how you Retouch the Neck to give you an idea of how to do it.

By: Bryan Qualle

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All Adobe Photoshop CS5 Video Tutorials mentioned in this article can be found at www.TheArtofRetouching.com where you can find tips and tricks to make you a better retoucher.