Beauty by Layers

This Saturday I'll be teaching a workshop on retouching for the APA Chapter in Denver, Colorado.

Beauty Retouching with Dennis Dunbar

May 14, 2011
Beauty by Layers with Dennis Dunbar

Join us on Saturday, May 14th when Dennis Dunbar will be teaching a workshop on High End Beauty Retouching. In this workshop Dennis will cover his Beauty Retouching Workflow, and will go into detail describing his techniques for getting perfect skin, as well as Color Correcting, and Sharpening. He’ll also discuss working on hair, enhancing makeup, adding a “Healthy Skin Glow” and using Adjustment Layers to augment the lighting.

Users of all levels are welcome as this workshop promises to be an informative and interesting event where Dennis will share tips and tricks that will help both the beginner as well as the advanced user.

APA Member $25

Non members $50

9:30 Doors Open

10am-2pm Presentation

lunch included

at Denver Pro Photo

235 S Cherokee St
Denver CO 80223

Door Prizes and Sponsored by:

Beauty Retouching with Dennis Dunbar

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Los Angeles American Photographic Artists March 26th: Beauty Retouching APA LA Upcoming Event Schedule

Photo by Jeremy Cowart March 26th High End Beauty Retouching with Dennis Dunbar Join us on Saturday, March 26th when Dennis Dunbar will be teaching a workshop on High End Beauty Retouching. In this workshop Dennis will cover his Beauty Retouching Workflow, and will go into detail describing his techniques for getting perfect skin, Color Correcting, and Sharpening. He’ll also discuss working on hair, enhancing makeup, adding a “Healthy Skin Glow” and using Adjustment Layers to enhance the lighting. Users of all levels are welcome as this workshop promises to be an informative and interesting event where Dennis will share tips and tricks that will help both the beginner as well as the advanced user. For more information or to register click here Dennis Dunbar is a Digital Artist with extensive experience in digital issues. He began compositing images in the darkroom under the tutelage of William Warren, a noted Stock Shooter. After seeing the advantages of working digitally Dennis jumped in with both feet, setting up his own studio in 1991 and soon was working extensively creating finished artwork for movie posters as well as commercial ads. Dennis’ drive to stay on top of the various issues involved in the digital imaging world led him to also focus on Color Management and to offer consulting services to his clients in this area as well. In the summer of 2002 Dennis was named to the Board of Directors for the Los Angeles Chapter of the Advertising Photographers of America where he serves as head of the Digital Committee. His work with the APA led him to concentrate on working with groups that are focused in the area of creating standards for the Digital Imaging.

Jeremy Cowart and Taylor Swift

As a digital artist/retoucher I love collaborating with photographers producing beautiful images like this one of Taylor Swift, shot by Jeremy Cowart. This image called for careful retouching and subtle techniques to enhance her natural beauty.



In working on Beauty shots like this one my standard workflow is to first go through the image cleaning up any out of place bits, then I carefully worked on her skin using a combination of the Heal Brush, the Clone Tool and a little paint here and there balancing just the right amount of texture with an overall smoothness to make sure her skin looked perfect. Then I removed the stray hairs that always seem to show up in closely cropped shots like this.

After the basic cleanup was done I then focused on bringing just the right sense of light to her eye with a gentle Curves adjustment. Keeping in mind that the viewer's eye tends to go to the sharpest part of the image I always like add just a little more sharpness in the eyes. For this part I usually make use of the HiPass sharpening technique combined with a layer mask to limit the effect to just the eyes.

After applying the sharpening to her eyes I then added a subtle Glow to her skin by manipulating a copy of the Blue Channel to create a selection I could add the Glow through. The next step was to add a couple of "Bling" highlights on her earrings. And finally the lighting was enhanced with a Curves Adjustment Layer that added just the right sense of drama.

Here's a closer look:

After Effects Animations

Over the last year I've been working on adding some After Effects skills to my capabilities. It's been a pretty natural transition as the basic concepts are very similar to what I've been doing in Photoshop for the last 20 years.

Recently I was called on by the talented team of Tom and Miriam Gundred at Soular Creative to help create some graphics animations for a project they were working on. This particular project involved creating two graphics animations that were to be part of a presentation highlighting some innovative technology one of their clients provided for their trade show clients.

In working on this they provided me with the Illustrator files and some directions indicating what they were looking for. After breaking out the various parts of the files that needed to move I then worked on creating the animations. This one in particular was designed to highlight how the client's technology allowed a presenter to control who could view the presentation.

Double-Click on the image below to see the final animated piece.

Recreating the Hipstamatic Look in 6 Steps

Last summer I finally broke down and got an iPhone. Beyond all the cool phone stuff it does my favorite part has been playing with it's camera. Somehow the simplicity of the camera and the fact that it's always with me makes photography much more spontaneous and fun for me.

And of course I had to check out various photo apps as a way of making it easier to get cool looks from the photos. Pretty quickly the Hipstamatic app became one of my favorite photo apps for the iPhone. I really like the way it re-creates the plastic lens look that has become so popular these days. Here are a couple of shots I took while playing with this app when I was on a beach walk with my family over this past Christmas Holiday.



Of course it didn't take me long before the retoucher side of me wanted to figure out how to replicate this look with "Normal" shots. I love the spontaneity of these Hipstamatic iPhone shots, but also really like being able to use my Photoshop abilities to create just the look I want.

With that in mind I opened up a shot taken on one of these beach walks with my Canon DSLR and started to experiment until I felt I had successfully matched the look I was getting with my iPhone and the Hipstamatic app.

Here are the Before/After shots showing where the image started and where it wound up:




Now while it's fun showing you all some of my photos, the real fun lies in sharing just how I created this look and in seeing how it inspires others to play and create new images on their own. With that in mind here's a short tutorial on how to achieve this cool effect.

First let's take a moment to talk about what characterizes the look we're after. Looking at the beach shots above of my wife and daughter you can see there is some blurring, some color shifts and some vignetting all working together to create the look. With this in mind we can start to see what what steps will be necessary to re-create the look in Photoshop.

Step 1: open your "straight" image



Step 2: Copy the Background Layer so you have 2 copies of this layer, one on top of the other like below:




This layer will get a small amount of Gaussian Blur that we'll use to recreate the soft focus part of our look. The specific amount depends on the resolution of the image you're working with. For this image let's use an amount of 2 pixels.




Since we don't want the Blur over all of our image we'll use a Layer Mask to control where the blurred layer shows. To do this add a Layer Mask and then using a large Brush paint Black in the Layer Mask to hide the effect where you don't want it to show. (Hint: using the Scatter Settings in the Brush Controls can help give this a more organic transition.)

Here is a shot of the Layer Mask I used with my Blur Layer:



This should give you something that looks a bit like this:




Step 3: Add a Vignette effect to darken the edges of the image. To do this create a new Layer and name it "Vignette". When you create this layer set the Blending Mode to "Multiply". Then again using a Brush with the Scatter Settings turned on paint Black around the edges of the image taking care to allow for a soft transition where the Vignette effects the image.

Here's what the Vignette Layer I painted looks like:



And here's what the image looks like with the Vignette Layer added:




Step 4: Now comes the fun part, adjusting the color. Studying the look of the Hipstamatic images we're trying to replicate we can see that typically the color shifts more towards Cyan and Blue while the Blacks of the image get pushed darkening the shadows and the Whites get pushed just a little bit providing some punch to the image along with the Color shift.

To do this we're going to use a variation on my preferred Color Correction Technique. This technique involves using 2 Curves Adjustment Layers, one set to Luminosity Blending and one set to Color Blending. By separating the Luminosity adjustments from the Color adjustments we can more easily control the contrast and tonality of the image independently of the color. And using the Color Curves you'll find you can not only affect the overall color balance of the image but you can easily control the saturation of the image as well. It's a very powerful technique that let's you control so much so easily.

If you're interested in learning more about this technique please feel free to send me an email by going to the Contact Dennis page of this site. I'll be happy to send you an article I've written on this technique that explains it in more depth.

For now create 2 Adjustment Layers and set one to Luminosity Blending and the other to Color Blending. (It doesn't matter which one comes first.) To help you keep them straight name the one set to Luminosity Blending "Luminosity Curves" and the other "Color Curves". Now click on the Color Curves layer and bring up the Adjustments panel, then adjust the Curves in the dialogue so they look something like the adjustments shown below:



Looking at the panels above you can see the RGB, or Master Curve has been pulled up at a point just about 3/4 of the way where the highlights are. This tends to increase the saturation in the highlights just a touch.

Moving on you can see the Red Curve has been pulled down in more or less a straight line, the Green Curve has been left alone while the Blue Curve shows we've pulled a little more Blue out of the shadows than the highlights. (Of course you can adjust these settings to your own taste as needed.)

Here's our test image with these Color Curves:



Now this is starting to look pretty interesting but there are still a few more tweaks yet to do.

Step 5: As mentioned above part of achieving the look we're after calls for pushing the Black and White points of the image a bit to deepen the shadows and add some "pop" to the highlights. To do this click on the Luminosity Curves Adjustment layer to bring up the curves dialogue. Then pull the Black point over to the right and the White point over to the left as shown in the screen grab below:



And here is what the image looks like with both the Color Curves and the Luminosity Curves:




Step 6: This is looking very close now, but it still looks just a little too clean. The plastic lens look that characterizes the Hipstamatic photos has some out of focus scratches and textures that old lenses might impart to the images. To re-create that we'll use a texture placed on top of our image and use a Blending Mode that gives us a cool look, then use a Layer Mask to control just where we want this effect to show up.

Over the years I've built up quite a collection of textures I've shot and found on stock image sites that come in very handy for times like this. Here's one such texture I found on one of the sites where artists share various textures and brushes they've created for use in Photoshop:



To use this texture in our image we'll just drag a copy of it over our beach scene and make sure it's at the top of the layer stack in the Layers Palette. Then set the Blending Mode to Soft Light and slide the opacity down to around 50%. Finally create a Layer Mask for this layer and again using a Brush with the Scatter Settings turned on (to help give it an 'organic' look) paint Black in the Layer Mask to hide the texture where ever you don't want it to show. Here's what the Layer Mask I painted looks like:



With the Texture in place and the Layer Mask finished the image looks like this:



With all the flexibility Digital Photography provides we're freed up to play more with various color treatments and styles in an effort to express our artistic vision. Photoshop fits in very neatly into this equation as the more we play with shifting colors and adding textures etc the more control we have over the final appearance of our images.

A Few Thoughts on Banding in Images

The other day I was browsing through the APANet discussion list and came across a question from a photographer about banding issues they were seeing in the skies of some images. After responding there I thought this would be a great topic for a Blog post so here we are.



Here's a shot of the sky over Lake Powell in Arizona. Like most shots of skies this image shows a nice gradation over a large, fairly open area and is a good example of where you're most likely to run into banding issues. If you look closely there are subtle bands running in a rough diagonal direction following the gradation in the sky.

Upon first glance they don't look too bad, but as soon as we add a little drama to the sky they start to become more apparent. In the image below I darkened the upper part of the sky by adding a Curves Adjustment Layer along with a mask that has a gradation in it so the darkening eases in keeping the lower part of the sky the way it was.



Now sometimes the web isn't the best place to see these bands so here's an image with some red lines indicating where the bands are showing up.



Of course once we see the bands in the image we can see the problems they can present. We know scenes like this should have nice, smooth gradations so the steps of color we see (banding) become very distracting and threaten to ruin our image.

For the sake of our discussion let's take a look at another image. Like our sky the image below features a gradation (you'll only see banding in areas of gradation) but this time it's easier to see the banding.




The bands show up when the steps in between the colors in the gradation become visible. Basically if there are only 10 steps between the beginning and ending colors in the gradation it becomes pretty easy to see each step of the gradation if you look closely enough.

Sometimes the banding is naturally occurring in the image and sometimes the adjustments made to the image exaggerate the banding issues. For instance the Hue Saturation tool is known to exaggerate both banding and noise/grain in an image. Here is the same gradation with a Hue Saturation Adjustment Layer added to turn the grays into blues.



Here you can see that the Hue Saturation Adjustment Layer not only changed the colors, it made the banding worse! With over 24 million possible colors in a 24 bit image (8 bits/channel times 3 channels) you'd think there are more than enough to choose from.

But as we see with skies sometimes the colors the image HAS to be just don't allow for that much room. Right about here I can tell some folks are thinking "Ah, then the solution is to work in 48 bit depth!" (48 bit images have 16 bits per channel allowing for thousands of steps per channel not just the 256 found in 8 bit/channel images.)

But experience seems bound to defeat this easy solution. Every time I've tried to solve banding by working in this higher bit depth it's never made a difference. The reasons for this seem to be mired in the endless debates among computer engineers and geeks. The best explanation I've heard for this actually came from a computer engineer who used to work for one of the big software companies who told me the pipeline from the computer to the monitor was limited to 8 bits per channel.

Whatever the reason we're still left with apparent banding in our images and thus we need to figure out how to deal with it.

The first thing to look at is to see if any of your adjustments are creating the problem. The most common times this happens is when using several Adjustment Layers that push and pull the image leading to the posterization evident in the banding. Sometimes, as with the Hue Saturation example above, the tool we're using is the cause of the problem, I've also seen this happen with some Gradient Map layers as well. If that's the case then we need to find other ways of manipulating the image to get the result we want.

But luckily for the great majority of images the answer is pretty simple. If the cause of the banding is that we can see the borders between the distinct steps in the colors of the image we can usually solve the problem by breaking up those borders with a bit of Noise. Here is our same Blue Gradation image with 2% Noise added.



Here you can see how the Noise acts to dither, or break up the borders of the bands making them harder to see. The trick when adding Noise like this is to view your image in Photoshop at 100% while using the Add Noise filter. Look for the minimum amount that will break up the bands. Most often you'll find it just takes a very small amount to hide the bands and solve your problem. Checking the individual Channels in your Channels Palette can help make sure you've fixed the problem.

As a last note one of the most common ways high end retouchers like to add Noise to an image is to make a new Layer, fill it with 50% Gray and then set it's Blending Mode to Overlay and finally use the Add Noise filter on this layer. By doing it this way you can easily experiment with different amounts of Noise (just fill with 50% Gray and try again) and you can vary the opacity of the Layer, or hide parts of it with a Layer Mask etc etc.

Quick Tip: Burnin' and Dodgin' made easy

One of the more common techniques retouchers use is named for an old darkroom technique, Burning and Dodging. Back then we'd use our hands or some other device to either expose a part of an image longer (Burning) or to keep the light out of an area on the image (Dodging).

While it's been a long time since I was in a darkroom doing that kind of work I still use the same idea frequently in my retouching work. Since it can be so useful I wanted to take a moment to share one of the easier ways I've found to apply this technique.

Here is a close up crop of an image supplied to me by photographer Richard Radstone. Richard's a great photographer and a good friend, check out his website to see more of his work here.




So far so good, now while there are lots of ways to darken (Burn) and lighten (Dodge) an image in Photoshop as a retoucher I greatly favor methods that allow for greater flexibility. So while many folks might just jump right in with the Burn and Dodge tool and start working away I like to do my work on separate layers which makes it lots easier for me to go back and fine tune what I've done without worrying about harming the image itself.

With this in mind what I like to do is to create 2 new layers and use their Blending Modes to accomplish the effect I'm looking for. For Dodging I'll make a new layer and set it to "Overlay" blending. Here's where I depart from the many folks who would then automatically fill this layer with 50% gray (which is neutral, or invisible in this kind of layer), I've never found much reason to do so. Instead after making this layer and naming it something like "Overlay Lightening" (ALWAYS name your layers!) I'll just select white, or a very light color from the image and then take the brush tool and start painting.

Since Overlay layers are basically contrast adjusting layers light colors in the Overlay layer make the image lighter and dark colors make the image darker. The closer to White or Black the color is the stronger the effect shows up. Depending on how much control I need I'll often set the Brush Tool to a low opacity, maybe 30%, so I can slowly work the image until I get the result I'm looking for.

Here is a shot of the image with the Overlay Lightening applied.




Looking carefully you should be able to see the pupil of her eye has been lightened up a bit giving the eye a little more 'life', the white part of her eye has also been lightened up just a touch. Less obvious, but still there is the subtle dodging I did to the darker texture of her skin near the bottom of the image. While I tend to prefer other methods for cleaning up skin sometimes a little bit of careful lightening can help.

Now for the Burning part of this technique. For this part I like to use a second layer set to "Multiply" blending and then I'll name this layer something like "Multiply Darkening". Multiply Blending will darken an image based on how dark the color in the layer is. So White will have no effect, while Black will have the maximum effect. When using this technique to darken skin I'll sample a bit of darker, shadowed skin tone from the image. This tends to produce a much more natural result than just using Black. In this case I sampled a darker part of her eye lid and again painted using the Brush tool set to a low opacity, around 30%.

Here is a shot of the image with both the Dodging and Burning layers turned on.



The areas worked on here are the little shadowed area right above and to the left of her eye, (just a little), the edge of her pupil (to add definition), the edge of her lower eye lid (digital eyeliner) and her eyelashes (digital mascara).

To make it easier to see where I painted in the effects here is a shot where I filled the Overlay layer (lightening) with Green and the Multiply layer (darkening) with Blue.




The advantage with doing this on separate layers is that working this way gives me more control, (I can easily tweak just the highlighted areas) and it plays to each Blending Mode's strength. Overlay layers can work very well for lightening an image but can also tend to shift colors in an objectionable way when used to really darken an image. Whereas when we combine Multiply blending with a sampled shadow color we can get a very effective tool for darkening. Pretty cool, eh? (Just remember that subtlety is very important a good retoucher knows his work should never scream out at the viewer, but instead should compliment the photographers' vision.)

Finally here is a Before and After side by side.