Because photographs of people are so common whether done as portraits or candid shots, for advertisements, or one of the many other uses, the ability to neutralize problems due to bad lighting, skin flaws or other problems is necessary. One needs to have skills to retouch images. Photoshop CS3 Portrait Retouching Essentials gives you hands-on instruction on all aspects of the correction techniques that are used by the pros.
Your trainer for this library is Chris Orwig, a faculty member of the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara. He has an infectious teaching method that works well to get the point across. This library is divided into 15 lessons and runs 10.25 hours.
The introduction starts off by showing you how to use this training video, a sneak peek at the art of retouching, how to use a Wacom tablet, and how to use the exercise files. Lesson 1, "Retouching Road Map" provides an outline of what you need to consider when getting ready to retouch an image. You really need to plan what you are going to do and to this end you need to put together a plan.
Lesson 2, "Correcting Color and Tone" is the first step in retouching. Here you will see how to work with white balance, brighten dark tones, darken bright tones, and color correct skin tones. Lesson 3, "Cleaning Up Images in Camera Raw" will show you how to perform healing, cloning, and dust removal while in Adobe Camera Raw.
Lesson 4, "Cleaning Up Images in Photoshop" focuses on removing background distractions, simplifying backgrounds, improving studio backdrops, cleaning up flyaway hairs, and in general cleaning up the image. Lesson 5, "Structural Image Enhancement" is all about making enhancements to the physical body structure. This will have you fixing the jaw line, changing the shapes of ears, eyes, noses, and faces. You will tailor a wedding dress, reduce the stomach size, thin the waist and legs, as well as combine multiple images.
Lesson 6, "Reducing and Removing Winkles" gives you techniques for removing wrinkles from both faces and clothing. Lesson 7, "Enhancing Eyes" is all about the eyes. Here you will change color, brighten, add catch light, sharpen, increase size, darken the edges, and whiten the eyes.
Lesson 8, "Enhancing Eyelashes and Eyebrows" shows you how to clean up eyebrows, increase eyelash density, and add eyelashes. Lesson 9, "Improving Hair" describes how to patch a gap in the hair, improve the tone, darken roots, remove stray hairs, and remove flyaway hairs over a background.
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