When it comes to portraits, everyone wants to look their best. But with today’s high-resolution SLRs, every spot, blemish and flaw can appear in startling detail. There are of course a few shooting techniques you can use to minimise these, such as bouncing light with reflectors to avoid strong shadows, and using off-camera flash to control the direction of the light to complement the model. However, you don’t need to get bogged down with different techniques and equipment to get great portraits, because Elements has a range of tools specially designed for seamless Photoshop retouching.
In this Photoshop tutorial we’ll show you how to retouch photos like a pro in 10 steps, using Free Transform and Liquify. We also show you how to clean up skin using the Healing Brush and Clone Stamp, how to smooth skin with Gaussian Blur and lighten it using Curves, as well as how to remove unwanted colour using Selective Color
Adobe Camera Raw has long included a Clarity slider, which gives a dark outline to edges to make an image really jump off the screen. In the latest incarnations of Camera Raw, the Clarity slider can actually be dragged left, to negative settings, to add a soft-focus effect.
It works very well for smoothing out skin tones, without affecting underlying detail in the way that, say, a Gaussian Blur might do. Applying it to the entire image, however, doesn’t look that great; we need a way of focusing it on just the skin areas.
How to repair a burnt out sky: use Layer masks to perfect your landscape photos Photoshop tutorial: A dramatic sky brings a landscape photograph to life, and although the colour-filled skies of dawn and dusk are perfect for awe-inspiring landscape shots, fluffy clouds and deep blue skies of midday can produce equally striking scenes. The [...]
Learn to retouch portraits using Photoshop Elements to whiten teeth, improve skin tones and improve contrast. Digital Camera’s 10-part series ‘Teach Yourself Photoshop’ builds into a complete video reference library. These easy-to-follow video guides will take you on a start-to-finish journey through perfecting your photos in the digital darkroom. In this video you’ll find out [...]
How to remove distracting backgrounds from your photos while keeping important foreground detail Digital Camera’s 10-part series ‘Teach Yourself Photoshop’ builds into a complete video reference library. These easy-to-follow video guides will take you on a start-to-finish journey through perfecting your photos in the digital darkroom. In this video you’ll find out how to remove [...]
How to retouch skin to improve your portraits in Adobe CameraRaw and Photoshop Elements Digital Camera’s 10-part series ‘Teach Yourself Photoshop’ builds into a complete video reference library. These easy-to-follow video guides will take you on a start-to-finish journey through perfecting your photos in the digital darkroom. In this video you’ll discover how to retouch [...]
Photoshop Guide 3.3: Improve skintones in Photoshop Elements using Levels Digital Camera’s 10-part series ‘Teach Yourself Photoshop’ builds into a complete video reference library. These easy-to-follow video guides will take you on a start-to-finish journey through perfecting your photos in the digital darkroom. In this video you’ll learn how to enhance the skin tones in [...]
Dust on your D-SLR’s sensor can ruin your image. Watch this video to find out how to use Photoshop’s dust removal tools to get blemish free shots. No matter how careful you are, dust always seems to end up in the inner workings of your D-SLR. This is most problematic in landscape photography as shooting [...]
No matter how bad the damage to a negative is, scan it and you can carry out a perfect edit in Photoshop Elements. Most modern desktop scanners have the capability to scan negatives without any major issues. Here, we show you how to take those scans and improve them dramatically.
