Photoshopping People

I've been working on learning to photoshop people, particularly people.

One notable example is some photoshopping i did of a friend, for fun. She asked me to send a few examples to her.

I think I understand the relationship girls have with makeup now. It's a pain, but once you start, you don't want to stop, and you're never satisfied. No matter how beautiful someone is at point A, you always want to move further and further past point B; sometimes you even do more harm than good...

The most important tools for working with skin are:

• dropper+brush, for smoothing
• clone stamp, for replacing hard-to-brush-over areas
• patch tool, to replace funny shaped areas
• and making a new layer+coloring it+lowering opacity for lipstick, eyes, highlights and shadows, and other coloration changes.

I won't post exact pictures, but I will give another big piece of advice: isolate individual parts, so you can play with H/S/L and Brightness/Contrast and Levels.

If you do that with hair, you can pick whatever natural hair color you want. or something else...

An Apple A Day...

Today I made an apple in Photoshop. It looks delicious.
I learned how to do it through PhotoshopRoadmap.com's tutorial directory.

It uses a sphere for most of the tutorial, and then warps it at the end. It taught me to use path stroking for the stem, a very powerful technique.

It's not perfect, but the things I learned I wouldn't trade for anything.

I'll probably work on it more in the future, and try to make variations of it. The tutorial actually made a green one.

It took a few hours to do, but I was talking to friends on FaceBook for the first half of the job. I also stopped to eat something.

The background was nothing
complicated. Many of the elements were simple.

I learned a very important concept, though- if you make an abstract black or white shape and use a Gaussian blur on it, and then lower its layer opacity, it makes a shadow or highlight.

You can see the tutorial HERE, if you want.