First Portrait touchup attempt

After going through many a Photoshop video tutorial on how to make any woman look like Aishwarya Rai, decided to use those techniques to make my Angels look their best.

Wishing one and all a belated Tamil New Years day!

We had some nice food today (all done by San with no help from me) and after going through what has been a series of unfortunate events between the little one's cold and fever and my intestinal infection, went for Yoga after almost two weeks!

Was very weak but still managed to stay put the 90 minutes and do all the poses and came home to eat some good food without having to think of side effects or consequences. It has been a curd rice, bread, milk and gatorade routine for two weeks. Now that is behind us.. back to photoshop!

Here is the yummy vadai that San made in all its glory!

The girls were dressed up today to celebrate New year and clicked a snap. Then decided to play with it for more than an hour..

Raw Image from Camera..

After almost an hour of playing with it..

remove dark circles under eyes - Check
smooth skin tones - Check
whiten teeth - check
sharpen eyes - check
make jewels sparkle - check
eyebrows - check
hair lighting - check
background - double check!

Needless to say, more practice is required to perfect portrait touching up. For a first attempt happy to just be able to transform images without making it look way too artificial.

The Tamil New year in this house has started on a good note.. Wishing everyone good health and prosperity in the year ahead

இனிய தமிழ் புத்தாண்டு நல் வாழ்த்துக்கள்!

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Waterfalls

Another shot with the clouds coming out and the water showing all the detail..

Before PS

After PS

Portraits are not so easy to adjust unless the original lighting setup was perfect. Having a busy week with a stomach bug, a conference and an irritated family thanks to the little one refusing food...

Portraits will have to wait till the weekend!

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More from the tide pools..

Double processed to bring out the glow!

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Progression..

First two days of playing with Landscapes... clouds, sky, mountains, water etc..

Then on the way to preparing for Portraits a brief stop with some flora and fauna.

Presenting, the dragonfly!

Feedback to improve these photos are welcome.

Have now learned to write "actions" which are Photoshop Macros and the process is definitely speeding up.

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If you are convinced..

Here is where you start..

Will write a detailed post with a little Primer of sorts on the Double Processing RAW Image editing to get both sky and foreground to have details.

Short summary :

1- Shoot in RAW format instead of JPG. Here is the gotcha. When you do this and shoot in RAW, the instant display on your camera will look great but when you download the pictures at home it will not look that great.. Why? because the instant picture on your viewfinder is a JPG done by the Camera's default software to accentuate color tones and sharpness using a set of built in corrections for that sensor!

That means you have to work (hard) to make the RAW image look exactly like it did to your eyes after downloading the picture by modifying it after download to get your own JPG!

2- remember what the actual place looked like. that helps get the correct colors

3- get adobe Photoshop CS5. A friend who works there got it for me for a great discount.

(That means step 2.5 - get a friend who works at Adobe?!)

4- There is a book/video by Scott Kelby called 7-Point System for Camera Raw which goes through a lot of detail on basic editing with Camera RAW. It is a non destructive way to play with the photograph where you can test things. (Yes.. Yes.. I know.. We can save the image as a copy and keep doing Undo and that is non destructive as well, but that is way too time consuming. You will know what I am talking about when you do the edits)

5- Learn this technique called Double Processing where you make two copies of your image.

- in one image focus on the sky (ie, bring out details in the washed out over exposed areas of the original image

- in the second copy ignore the sky (it will practically be white) and instead bring out details in the foreground

- composite the two images by selectively replacing the sky in the washed out white region with the sky from the first copy

It took me a few hours to practice, but it works very well. Have not seen any free tutorials on this that are as good as the one in the DVD which by the way seems to be expensive as well at 69.99 and again step 2.5 helps!

Will do a short screen shot by screen shot primer over the next few weeks to describe this process!

In the mean time we have to appreciate the human eye for its amazing ability to see these scenes in their entire contrast range instantly and the image processor in our brain that can do all this instantaneously.

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