Methods of Madness

Many people have expressed interest in how, exactly, I manipulate images in Photoshop to get the results I do. This post, as an answer to that interest, is the first time I've ever laid out my methods publicly. I hope you enjoy it.


This is the before-and-after comparison of the project I'm going to demonstrate to you.


Here is the original photo taken of my friend Michal. This picture is a good Photoshop "candidate" because, among other things, the lighting is generally very even -- especially on Michal's skin (which is very important).


Michal, however, liked her facial expression better in this photo (taken just moments prior). The lighting and framing of this shot isn't as good, but the face is usable -- so that is the first step.


I selected around her face and copied it onto the photo I'm working with (darkened for emphasis). Then I enlarged the cut-out face slightly to match the shape of the underlying one and lightened it to match the surrounding skin tone as closely as possible. The right-hand image is the finished new face.


The next step is to look over the entire skin surface of the subject for any marks or blemishes that can be removed. Photoshop's Healing Brush is what I use for cleaning most imperfections. The beauty of the Healing Brush is that it can leave texture on a person's skin while still removing the blemishes and matching the original colors. I also slightly sharpened her eyes.

Skin clean up is one point that I sometimes have conflicting thoughts about. Is it really ethical to remove all of someone's blemishes and present a person who is unnaturally perfect? I tend to feel that as long as everyone knows it's an idealized image, it's alright. This world has enough fallen imperfections in it -- I like to be able to fix some of them. Another question I have is more of a stylistic one: Does the picture lose believability because it looks too perfect? Maybe -- but I like things as perfect as possible, so that's the way I work.

This image shows a close-up of Michal's face before and after the clean up. Michal is blessed with particularly clear skin, so I didn't have much work to do in this case.


One thing that bothered me, even after the clean up, was that her cheeks were just a bit too red. To remedy this I employed a sort of digital "makeup" technique. After sampling the color from Michal's forehead, I painted a new layer over all of her major skin areas (that way all of her skin would have the same even coloration). The left-hand image shows the new layer (again, darkened for emphasis). After painting the areas, I blurred them to soften the edges and then reduced the opacity to 33%. That seemed to be enough to even out the color without looking "painted" on.


Here is a close-up to show the change. As I had hoped, no more red -- just nice, even coloration.


The next step is to use the Shadow/Highlight filter on the entire image to lighten the dark areas. The effect can be seen most on Michal's hair and jeans. This makes the photo seem to have a slight grayish cast, but that will be taken care of in the next step.


Now I will give the image more visual "punch" by adjusting the Levels of the image. The quick explanation is that Leveling makes dark areas blacker and light areas whiter, thus making the image more crisp and dynamic (in a sense).

The combination of Shadow/Highlights and Leveling can, at times, over saturate parts of the image. So, in this case, I desaturated Michal's skin tone slightly so it would look a bit more natural.


When I adjusted the Levels to the points I wanted for Michal's face and body, her jeans, which are substantially darker than the rest of the picture, started to go completely black. To fix that, I chose, in this case, to cut out the jeans, level them separately, and paste them back on. This close-up shows the difference that makes.


Here, after all of that adjustment, is the finished picture.
I really like how well this one turned out!

So that's how this stuff is done. Questions? Feel free to post them as comments or email me.