Retouching a portrait - Part 3: Eyes and final touch

The second part of this series can be found here.
This time we will be fokusing on the eyes. On a portrait they are always the eyecatcher hence we should deal carefully with them and try to get the best out of them. Since we already created the appropriate layers we just have got to apply some filters color corrections and set the proper layer mode. At the end we will be applying some extra sharpening to the edges and add some general color adjustments.
This is what we got for now:

Set the layer mode of "Eyes #1" and "Eyes #2" to screen and you will see that the eyes will get brightened as hell. It is a bit to much but first we want to sharpen the eyes a bit. To do that we make a selection around the eyes so that we dont have got to wait that long for the filters to be applied:

Now we apply th following filter to "Eyes #1": "Filters" -> "Enhance" -> "Unsharp Mask" with the following settings:

Select the other eyes-layer and apply this "Unsharp Mask":

You can leave the opacity of the "Eyes #1" layer as it is and decrease the other eye layer's to about 50%-60%. It is a matter of taste and you should try it out on your own. So we are finished with the eyes. Again: this is the very basic stuff you can do. There are A LOT of further possibilities to tweak a face even further! Maybe I will pick up some special aspects in later articles.
This is what we got so far:

Now we right click on the top layer and select "New from visible". Now clear our selection and duplicate this new layer and invert its colors. Apply to both layers the following filter "Filters" -> "Edge-Detect" -> "Neon":

Now set the top layer's mode to "Addition" and again rightclick on the top layer and select "New from Visible" and then delete the two layers we used to create the third one. Desaturate this new layer (lightness) and blur it with the Gaussian Blur Filter with radius of 25px. What we have now should look like something like this:

Make this layer invisible and again create a new layer from visible. We now want to sharpen this layer and apply our blured layer that is invisible as layer mask. First we use the Unsharp Mask as follows:

Now add a layer mask to this layer and copy the b-w layer that contains the edges into the layermask via first right klicking onto the sharpened layer and selecting "Add Layer Mask" and clicking add second selecting our blurred edge layer and pressing "Ctrl" + "A", "Ctrl" + "C" selecting the layermask and pressing "Ctrl" + "V" third rightclicking onto the floating selection and choosing "Anchor Layer". You can adjust the amount of sharpening with the opacity of the layer that contains the sharpened image. If you want you can now create another layer that contains the whole image and apply some color corrections. But I am rather satisfied with my example image. So I will skip this step.
For now we are finished with our little workthrough in photo retouching. I will be covering some special parts in later tutorials. So stay tuned!

Retouching a portrait - Part 2: Skin

The first part of this series can be found here.

The most important part of a portrait is the skin. Our next goal is to achieve a very smooth and perfect look that still does not look articial. Therefore we need the two skin layers with those fancy masks we created in the first part.

We created two different layers for the skin to vary the intesity of the bluring we are going to apply now. Select the "Skin #1" layer and apply a gaussian blur with 15px radius. Select the "Skin #2" layer and apply the gaussian blur with about 25px radius. You might find that especially the left edge of the nose is a bit to blurry so select both layer masks and paint them on this line black with a fuzzy brush. The sharp edge should reemerge. Do so for any other area you might find being blurred to much or being unneccessarily blurred at all. Afterwards you might have a result similiar to this:


As you can see there are some light spots that are a bit distracting. We can get rid of them by applying the curves tool to the "Skin #2" layer with the following settings:


This step makes the skin a bit paler but that should be okay since lighter skin looks a bit cleaner. But it is a matter of taste. You can also leave out the last step if you don't like the result. Next step will be to add a little color to the cheeks. To do that create a quick selection:


Go to "Select" -> "Toggle Quick Mask" or simply hit Shift + Q. We are going to blur the selection very much. I would recommend about 250px with the gaussian blur filter. The selection might have gotten a bit to small. But we can increase its size with the curves tool and the following setting:


Now we blur again with the gaussian blur with about 150px radius. Hit Shift + Q again, create a new transparent layer, rename it to "cheeks", place it at the top of our layer stack and select the "Color Picker Tool". Now select the "Skin #2" layer and pick a color that lies in our selection and modify it as follows:


Select the "cheeks" layer again and fill the selection with the "Bucket Fill Tool". You might realize that this is far from being optimal. You can use the following "tools" to improve the result:
-change the opacity of the layer
-play around with "Color" -> "Hue-Saturation"
-play around with "Color" -> "Curves" while modifying the alpha channel
This is what I can come up with:


I just lowered the opacity to 65% and boosted the saturation a bit. Now we need to apply some structure to the skin. Therefore we need to duplicate our "Skin #1" layer, move it on top of our stack and fill the whole layer with plain white. Then we blur the layermask a bit let's say with about 40px radius. Now select the layer and apply a noise via: "Filters" -> "Noise" -> "HSV Noise" with these settings:


Now your image should look something like this:


We should duplicate the "Skin #3" layer. Now apply the gaussian blur to the "Skin #4" layer with about 2px radius. Now we need to apply the Embos filter to this new layer which can be found at "Filters" -> "Distorts" -> "Emboss..." with the following settings:


Since the image looks rather messed up by now we need to change the layer modes and opacities of the two new layers. I put the two setting together in one screenshot:


That's about it for now. You can see that there are still many rough edges all over the pic which just can be removed with a lot of manual work and fiddling around which I just left out for times and spaces sake. To be continued...
The third part of this series can be found here.

Desaturating properly

This guide will explain how to achieve a good grayscale version of a colored image. Since the normal "Desaturation" option that can be found in Gimp via "Colors" -> "Desaturate" isn't that sophisticated and customizeable we will be using the Channel-Mixer instead. This one can be found at "Colors" -> "Components" -> "Channel Mixer". But first things first.
We need a image that we want to desaturate. I will first go into detail with the first image to state an example and show some further results with other pictures. So open up an image like this one for example:



Now go to "Colors" -> "Components" -> "Channel Mixer" and check the box that says "Monochrome".
(It might come handy if you also activate "Preserve luminosity" to avoid over exposed spots in the pic)



Now you can convert the three color channels into greyscale an the values will be added which will be representing the brightness of a pixel. The cool thing is that the Channel-Mixer also accepts negative values for the channels which will result in a substraction of brightness. What is important while looking for the right settings is that different colors in the pic will be represented by different grey-values to maintain the difference in color in the desaturated image. Let me show you an easy example what I mean:




The three different colors are made to the exact same grey since in the HSV color profile they have got the same V-Value which stands for the brightness and this value is simply taken for they greyscale which let's one asume that it also has been the same colour as before.
I fiddled a bit around with the channelmixer and this is what I can come up with concerning my example picture:


(Original, Desaturate, Channel-Mixer - from left)

As you can see the difference in this pic isn't _that_ huge but let's check out what we can do with the following pics:


(Original, Desaturate, Channel-Mixer - from left)

(Original, Desaturate, Channel-Mixer - from top)

Especially the last example shows the advantages in some cases. The conventionally desaturated image does barely show the clouds. But the image achieved with the Channel-Mixer preserves a certain contrast in the important parts of the image (i.e. sky). But still it massively depends on your source image which method results in better greyscales. You need to find it out via trial and error and much experience.

Retouching a portrait - Part 1: preparing the image

One of the most demanding jobs is to retouch portrait pictures to put them on the cover of some magazines or into them. In this series I will explain you my for sure not perfect or special way of retouching an image. Most of my knowledge is selfdeveloped and some parts are taken from various and uncountable tutorials. I will show you the whole production from the start to the end and try to leave nothing unclear.

At first need an image with a satisfying resolution. It should be sharp and bright enough to have some room for adjustments. If it is to dark you might get some color artifacts while editing some parts of the image. The following one could be an example. I will use this pic during the whole series.



I always start with some roughly done skin clean ups. So we use the heal-tool to remove some dots on the skin without leaving any noticeable traces. I recommend to do this step very accurate since we want to achieve a very smooth impression on the skin. The heal-tool is rather easy to use. Klick onto a clean spot on the skin while holding down Ctrl and then simply click on the dots.



The heal tool always gathers information around the brush how the color of the image is there and averages them where you paint. So if you want to overpaint a dot that is located near a border to a very dark part of the image you might paint much darker than the skin should be at this spot. If this occurs just use the stamp tool in this case. So i rename the "Background" layer to "Original" and get started. After the clean up of the skin it should look similar to this:



Now you should magnify the view and redo the step before with some smaller spots. afterswards you should have a much smoother impression of the skin. Now we will start to divide the pic up into different parts. We will create two layers that contain the skin. Two for idfferent parts of the eyes and some more. Let's start with the skin. In this pic I would recommend to use the "Fuzzy Selection Tool" to make a selection that contains the skin. If you are finished it should like similar to this:



Go to "Select" -> "Save to channel" to store the selection. Maybe we will be needing it again. Now duplicate the "Original" Layer and rename it to "Skin #1" and add a layermask from the selection to it. Do this via "Layer" -> "Mask" -> "Add Layer Mask". There you should select "Selection" and "Add". Make the "Original" Layer invisible to get a clue what we actully have in our "Skin" layer. Moreover I marked some critical spots which might be needing some manual work:



Select the layermask we just created, and the two colors we need now are black and white to edit the layermask. Most important issue is the hair. You should avaiod that the skin-layer contains any hair. or you just overpaint the hair it contains. We are going to blur the skin layers very much and blurred hair looks like crap. Then you should take care of some holes in the mask for example below the eyes and above the right eye brow. The face should be fine when the skin layer contains the following parts of the image:



The part near the throat with the scattered hair will need some tricks to get rid of it. We will duplicate the "Original" layer and desaturate it via: "Colors" -> "Desaturate" -> "Luminosity". Now we create a rough selection with the "Free Select Tool":



What we need to get now is that in this part of the image we make all the scattered hair black and all the rest white since we want to integrate this into our layermask later on. The curves tool might be a great help in this case. But first feather the selection at about 10px via: "Select" -> "Feather..." and apply the "Unsharp Mask" filter to our selection that can be found at: "Filters" -> "Enhance". Use some similar settings to those:



Now open up the curves dialog via: "Colors" -> "Curves". You need to fiddle around a bit with them but I could come up with the following:



Still we have got to overpaint the rough parts of the skin to make them pure white:



Now press Ctrl + C, select the layermask of the skin, paste it into this and make our greyscale layer invisible. Now press Ctrl + H to merga the pasted layer and the layermask. Now we need to repeat this procedure with the following section:



You might need some different settings for the steps to end up in a good result but I will leave this up to you. Our skin-layer might look something like this:



Duplicate the skin layer and blur this layermask with gaussian blur about 90 pixels. To watch your result rightklick on the layer in the layer list and select "Show Layer Mask":
Use the Curves Tool to edit the mask as follows:



Now blur the Mask again but just with 30px radius.
Now we can treat the parts at the edges of the skin differently than the rest. We will need that later on.

The next steps will be rather easy. We are going to make some sepperate layers for the eyes, the mouth and the hair. This can easily done by duplicating the "Original" layer, giving it a meaningful name and then painting manually into the layermask. The method fits for the mouth and the rough layer for the eyes. After you have done this your layers could look like this:



What might come helpful as a trick is when you paint the layermask you should first create a black one then invert the colors of the actual layer, then switch back to the layermask and paint with white or gray and you will se clearly where your layermask is white while you can still look at the image and see where you paint.
Now we are finished with the first part. Try to get really into it and try to understand it completely until we hit the next chapter.