Retouching your Pictures with the Photoshop Tools at your Disposal

You no longer have to be totally photogenic to look great in pictures!  That is great news for those of us that may not like what shows up in photographs.  Surely you have photos from holidays past where folks have red eyes or that gothic building you were so in love with was obscured.  No need to fret.  You can recapture you memories by touching up your photos in Photoshop.

Photoshop has an abundance of tools for whatever picture ailments you may have.  To rework those eyes and get the red out, you will need to first calibrate your monitor.  Open up the image and go to “Image>Duplicate” to create a second image and close the original.  If you are using Photoshop 6 or an earlier version, click on View>New View.  If you are using Photoshop 7 got to Window>Documents>New Window and your image will appear in another window.  Focus in with zoom on one of the windows so that the eyes are as large as possible.  The other window should be set to 100%.  After you have created a new layer, choose the eyedropper and pick up the iris color.  On the new layer, paint over the iris of the eye without covering the eyelids.

Next, you need to choose Filters>Blur>Gaussian and use one pixel to soften the edges.  The layer blend mode needs to be moved to Saturation and the red will leave without taking out the highlights.  Sometimes the eyes will appear to be too gray and look empty.  If you run into this problem, create another saturation layer and switch the blend mode to Hue.  If Hue turns the color too dark, take the opacity level on the Hue layer down a bit.  Once you are satisfied with your corrections you can bring the other layers down.

If you are working on the pupil area of the eyes, it I best to use the burn tool.  A few clicks of the burn tools should take the pupil color down to the proper level.  Be sure to use the eraser tool to get rid of any over-spray there might be before you merge the layers.

Do you have a few blemish-plagued pictures that you like, except for the less than perfect facial blemishes?  Well, you no longer have to hide those photos when company comes over.  Fix them up with Photoshop and no on ever has to know that you kid had a little acne outbreak.  Or, maybe you did not get any sleep the night before your graduation.  You can fix your facial imperfections in a matter of minutes.