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| - Step 4 |
| Eyes |
In my opinion eyes needs to have a big contrast between the white eyeball and the black lashes. In adition to adding some color to the iris, that's what we're going to make now.
Add a Adjustment layer for Levels. I used these setting:
Channel: RGB (Input levels: 0 / 0,62 / 173)
Channel: Red (Input levels: 61 / 1,18 / 255)
Set the layer opacity to 40%, then fill the mask with black and paint then eyes with white.
Add an Adjustment layer for Color Balance. I used these setting:
Shadows: Color levels (-17,+9,+11)
Midtones: Color levels (-13,+26,+44)
Highlights: Color levels (-8,+20,+29)
Set the layer opacity to 68% then fill the mask with black and paint the iris white.
Compare: (original to the left) |
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| - Step 5 |
| Cleaning the skin |
First we'll remove the biggest spots with the patch tool  set to source. Circle the spots and move the selection to a allready clean area nearby with the same skin tone. It's important not to go about it to harsh and risk loosing the important skin texture. It's skin, not plastic. The use the clone tool with a of hardness 0%. A brush size of 40 px works fine for this photo. We'll use this to soften, and remove some shadows. In this image that is mainly below the eyes and on each side of the nose.
Then use use the dodge tool  with low expusure to lighten some of the very hard shadows. Now use the lasso tool with a feather of 10-14 to select the forehead, chin and cheeks. Copy the selected areas to a new layer. Then run smart blur with these settings:
Radius: 3, Threshold: 25, Quality: High, Mode: Normal
Note that an alternate way to clean skin is found in my "Smooth skin" article. The method used here looks more like makeup. |
| Compare: (original to the left - click on the images for a bigger version) |
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| - Step 6 |
| Virtual surgery |
Now it's time for some surgery. Merge all layers. Bring up the Liquify dialog found in the Filter menu. Set brush pressure to 50. What I want to do now is to enlarge the eyes a bit in width. Select the hand  and drag the outsides of the eyes slighty away from the iris. Be sure not no affect the iris and pupil in any way. Then I shorten the chin and the forehead slightly. Just do this by carefully dragging the contours of the face with the cursor.
Now the lips, which are fine except from that they look a bit rough on the surface. For that I used the smudgetool with 10% strength and dragged from the top of the lower lip towards the bottom of it, then I used the brushtool with size 1 and very low opacity, then I drew some highlights. |
| Compare: (original to the left - click on the images for a bigger version) |
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| - Advertisement |
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| - Step 7 |
| Final touches |
Final touches
Add an Adjustment layer for Color balance. Then apply these settings:
Shadows: Color levels (+6,-9,+9)
Midtones: Color levels (-5,-1,+4)
Highlights: Color levels (+9,+4,-1)
Then fill the mask with black and paint the lips in white.
Add another Adjustment layer for Color balance and use these settings:
Shadows: Color levels (+6,+1,-9)
Midtones: Color levels (+8,-3,-5)
Highlights: Color levels (0,0,0)
Now merge all layers and goto the Filter menu, lookup Sharpen and select Unsharp mask. Use these settings:
Amount: 131%
Radius: 0,4 pixels
Threshold: 7 pixels
The last thing I'll do is to crop the image slightly. |
Compare the final version with the original one:
(original to the left - click on the images for a bigger version) |
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