Lessons

Lesson Info

Creative Skin Effects

so I'm gonna bounce around with lots of miscellaneous cool techniques. So you guys stop me if you have any questions. Um, yesterday, based on the questions that I had received from different people, I picked a couple photos from kind of my archive to answer some of these questions. Um, the first thing that I did want to start with Oh, is really cool and fun and funky, and we're gonna pick an image from an editorial I shot recently and let's see. Okay, So here's the raw image. I am not offended. How many people think that this is a good photo, as is probably not, right? I mean, it's not really lit that well, and her face looks kind of greasy, and it's, I mean, it's not a great photo is a stand alone because it wasn't shot to look like this. It was shot for an effect that I'm going to do in post some issue a little bit of how I would tweak this. All right, so I'm going to convert her to gray scale or two black and white. All right, so I'm thinking that I need to play with something that'...

s going to be really, really high contrast How I let her was I put kind of highlights on her face. I put just vasselin If you look at my my website portfolio, you'll see more extreme examples of this. The ones that show it best are all nude and I wasn't allowed to use them. So if you want to see what they look like, you can see some of those shots up on my site. All right, so I'm looking here, and I know that I want major contrast because I want the highlights in this headpiece to pop and then also the detail in the jewelry so I could do this either in a tone curve which is here. And right now I'm just an adobe camera raw, or I could do it right in, you know, my normal adjustments. So I pop up my exposure and dragged down by blacks. You know, I'm starting to get something a little more dramatic. I can pump up my highlights. Come pump up my whites. So what I'm doing is I'm reducing the image basically to just highlights and shadows. Another thing that I want to do is okay. I really want her arm to be darker. I just really want you to see the highlights kind of her profile, the shape of her body, and that's about it. So if I flip over to gray scale again, remember how I said originally, you can change how each color is converted into black and white. So if you have a light blue sky wins converted to black and white, you can drag the blue. So left it would become a dark blue sky. Well, in this example, I know that skin tones are made up of yellow, orange and red. So if I drag skin tones so left dragged the reds the left, we'll get the totally different image going a totally different direction that I'm coming away with. And I need to crap away that top because it's not what I'm looking for. His crop that away. And so what I did for this entire editorial was more or less ah, version of this. Something with really, really, really dark skin, bright highlights on the skin and then jewelry popping. It's if you want to set a better example again, check out my sight. But I knew when I was shooting it how it was going to play in post, and this took me about four shoots to figure out how to d'oh. I did tests of people off of model mayhem. I did test with agency models to figure out how you need the light. And when you look at the other examples, what you'll see is when their bodies covered in gels, usually hassling you, get long, beautiful highlights. So even though they're in silhouette, you still get a idea of the shape and form based on those highlights. And then the jewelry pops out because it's she's led by two soft boxes, and so the jewelry is illuminated. So this is doing an entire shoot completely based off of how it's going to be finished up in post. And I did a few more things. Where did another conversion, where I brought out some of the hair in the vest that she had there, but it makes for a very interesting kind of high patent, high impact image, as you can see in this example something like that. So that's how it plays a role in my oven guard fashion photography and this This image hasn't entered Photoshopped yet 100% in camera raw, and it already looks like it's had a lot of retouching done to it. Okay, so I'm gonna do another example. A couple other things that I wanted to demo. All right, so another editorial that I did recently, and I just I just thought this would be a good way to break up the intense compositing and do some fun. Other examples? All right, so looking at this photo, looking at her face, you know that it needs retouching, and it doesn't look necessarily high fashion enough yet. And if you're going to go funky with the gel and cool jewelry and weird hair, um, and maybe the lighting or the retouching could take it another step in that direction. So the theme for the shoe was futuristic and some thinking, how can I make this look futuristic? And what I can do is I could make her kind of like a cyborg. So we're gonna play with that real quick, and we shoot most of what I can do. I can do right here in camera, raw, and then do a few tweaks over in photo shop. So going back to the same thing at the time and time again. People want to know how I get that pale skin effect. If I go to my saturation, it's over in the hue saturation, luminous channel on this adobe Kamerad and light room, it's you go down. It's where you change things. The black and whites, one of the panels. She switched hue, saturation, lieutenants, then quick on saturation. And I can pull out kind of the oranges, reds and yellows. But if you look at her face here now, it's really kind of dark and grey. So that's when I could go. Instead of saturation, I can go toe luminous, which means I can go back to those reds, yellows and oranges and make them brighter so I can go ahead and brighten up the reds, yellows and oranges so kind of flipping on and off. You're starting to look a little bit more like a cyborg, right? A little more, uh, smooth skin. I know that I want to increase. My whites want that's cool, but it kind of really pretty shiny. So if you have C s six, you'll be familiar with these changes. Have exposure, contrast and then the new things are now, Instead of having fill light and recovery, you now have highlights and shadows and whites that you can play with. It's gonna pump up my highlights a little bit, maybe to their only See what your screen looks like. It was something like that. So right now everything I've done in camera robbed at a little bit of clarity don't go back to the very original, the very original. She had that kind of red skin. So I've made a really, really big difference so far. What's cool is well, I know that I have that purple I had Ah, how it's lit was a beauty dish to this sign and then a silver reflector with, um, a pink and purple gel on the other side. So if I want to change that pink and purple gel, I can go back to Hugh in the hue, saturation ruminants and change the color. So I went down to my purples and I could make it pink if I want or I can make it more blue or whatever I feel is appropriate. Space him back. I'm gonna click Okay, click open and let me just show you again. What the original started as so If you're looking at the original, you know, it's much more of a fashion retouch. And everything has just been how a post process, that pulling out color of the skin, brightening up the highlights. Maybe if I were doing a portrait, I don't want to blow out the highlights. I don't want the skin to to go to light. It's not a portrait. I could do that. So it's a very different approach. If you download the checklist that I have, it is very different. If I do often guard it, What am I trying to say? What am I communicating from communicating? It's that she's a cyborg. I want no color and no skin detail, so it's completely different than if I'm doing a portrait. So if I come in here and zoom in, I just duplicated my background there and zoom into her face. No, normally you say Okay, you want to keep the skin detail. I don't really need to keep much in detail, so I want it to be perfect, so I will grab my spot healing rush and kind of clean everything up here. Not too much blemishes to get rid of. I can grab my clone stamp on lighten and maybe kind of light enough, this texture. But this is when I grab my portraiture and I overuse it on purpose. Okay? And we tried to do this a little bit yesterday, so we're goingto grab it again. And so notice just cleaning up on portraiture are on. Ah, clone stamp with Leighton. So if I duplicate my layer, go to filter image gnomic portraiture except and I zoom in now if I zoom win and I select her skin nothing happens because when you have your mask on portraiture is looking for skin tones. This is not a skin tone. So if you go, you guys go ahead and you're like, Oh, I want to try Lindsay's skin smoothing technique and you pull out the color before you retouch it. You'll have a problem with portraiture. It it doesn't know how to grab that color. So you have to actually turn your color selection off and to see now if you turn it kind of a foreign after it's working. So I want a little bit of fine detail, something like that gonna hit Okay, I'm going to put a mask on this, and I can paint back in that really perfectly smooth cyborg skin. And I'm just painting with white, painting it back in, campaigning on the hands. And so if you see the difference between this and the original, this face and this skin looks much more like a fashion magazine versus Let me just quickly open up the other shot before the retouching so I can put them side by side open. And I was going to drag this as a bottom layer so you guys can see before and after this. Okay? All right. So if you want to see before and after here, you know, it makes a drastic difference. Wouldn't be appropriate for a portrait, but it is for fashion. So I want to make sure included that to address that question. One of the easy ways to make a photo look more fashion than otherwise is to decrease vibrance and increase contrast. Pale skin and kind of porcelain with very little vibrance in the shot is very common in vogue. And if you go ahead and you look at an Annie Liebowitz shop, well, Hollywood's foot on how it's been retouched if you look. The colors often aren't saturated, they're much more muted. But they had to be had. Increase the contrast. So there is still a black point, so it didn't look mute. Look muddied. So it's decreased. Vibrance increase contrast. And then she often does a little bit of split toning. So she's adding some kind of warmer Hughes into the shadows of her photographs. And there's this other retouching things she does as well but kind of fashion retouching, a question from Via Rela. And I think we saw this yesterday, too. But could you just Are there any other things that make a retouch a fashion versus a classic regular portrait? Retouch So, which is a fashion retouch? Make it a fashion retouch instead of a regular portrait? Rita. So for fashion he touches. You're getting rid of any blemishes or anything that identifies that person as an individual. If that makes sense of moles or scars or really anything, unless you're photographing a supermodel where you still want to keep whatever they're identifying features or a celebrity. But for portrait or for ah ah, non portrait fashion, then you want to perfect the skin. If it's Caucasian skin, you usually want it to be less saturated. Um, it totally depends on the photographer and on the shoot. But if you look through a lot of magazines, you seldom have. I mean, I don't think in any fashion shoots I can think of in most of magazines that I publish in that it's the true skin tone. It's either darker lit with a gel. It's lighter toned. It's lower contrast. It's higher contrast. There's never any that look like a well lit, correctly color balanced portrait ever. I mean, if you look through and the reason is for fashion is that what we're doing is we're fighting for eyes. What were your flipping through a magazine? There are hundreds and thousands of images that people are seeing every day, So if I go ahead and do a traditionally lip portrait with traditional retouching, it blends into the background. You've seen it 1,000,000 times before, so we're all fighting for you guys to stop and take a look and pay attention. Now, of course, since I'm describing fashion is having a specific look, then you're also falling into the trap of looking like all the other fashion images. But at least you're saying, Well, I'm in this realm of fashions. You recognize what's trying to be achieved, So I guess that might answer aging forest question, he says. In what situations would you over process images for a fashion that I interpret that mean almost always over processing? It depends on your style, but I'm thinking most of the kind of creative fashion magazine issue for its never correct retouching. There's some beauty shoots that air the makeup. Maybe it's just really off guard, and the skin is more correctly processed. But even then, if it's if it's Caucasian skin, they pulled out some of the the color, and they over retouched it so usually, And one other thing I would do to this image as well. A zay would liquefy it. Just, you know, I would pull in her waist here just a little bit, and it also probably pull out the side of the skirt. And I'd retouch out this leg because it's distracting me. I'd probably clone up Thea the Garter, the side a little bit, her ears. Okay, it's bordering on word. Shrink it because much you know it's bordering on where I might need to tuck it in just a little. Um, I could give her more to find jawline if I wanted something like that. And I think in the actual retouch, I made her hair bigger, so fun after something like that. I love watching you work, Lindsay. Thank you. We do have a couple of questions on black and white conversions, if that's all right. Yeah, actually, one was from Doug Be photo. Who said was referring actually to the end of the day yesterday. Andi says you're talking about adjusting the channels and converting gray scale. Does that option disappear when shooting monochrome in camera like you did yesterday? So splitting out RGB is that Does that disappear? If you shot monochrome and not in raw, you shot a J peg monochrome. You don't have the ability to convert after the fact using, you know we can change the Reds and because you threw out the color information so I never, ever shoot in black and white where it's a JPEG image. But actually, sometimes I will put the back of my camera into monochromatic mode when I'm shooting raw because how I shoot does change, for if I'm shooting black and white to color, it doesn't change with its I'm photographing more about the composition or about the impact, or about the highlights and shadows. Where is colored? Something totally different. So shoot raw and you have no problem, right? So essentially you're just seeing it. It's like the good old days where you would think differently when you're shooting in back exactly this color, because actually looking for different things. So, no, thank you. Um, Beauty The lake from St Pete, Florida Just to clarify, do you need to start with a color image and then convert to black and white? How else would you know what the skin tones are? Orange, yellow, etcetera. I mean, skin tones are always something red, orange and yellow. I mean, no matter what, like what race, what nationality? Where those colors are in there, it just depending on what race and nationality are. It's a different combination of those those colors in those tones and also depends on what light you were photographed under, because if it were photographed under a blue light in the blue gel, then it's going to kind of change. What you're going to need Thio be modifying so But yet you have to start with the color image You've gone over and just touch quickly on place. And so does the copy, verse and copy and cut and paste versus placement. Is that his place Improved the quality or better quality Or is there reason? Okay, good thing for places. Kind of like how you have with a smart object, right? When you change the size of something, you can always go back. How it works is if you go ahead and cut and paste into your composite and you shrink him down. You've thrown out that information from when when the person was larger, you shrunk him down. If you try to make a bigger again like you changed your mind, you don't have that information access when you place it you're pulling from, say, a 60 megabyte tiff or something else. So you have all that information to work with and then you can constantly update so placing. I mean, I could just do real quick what placing looks like, um, I don't know if you were, they can't tell the difference, but basically, I'm gonna hide the mic we have here. All right, let's minimize this. Okay, Someone hide, Mike. And now I'm going to go ahead and do file place. And I believe I saved two on my desktop. There's Mike over here. Gonna place him. All right, so hit. Enter. So now he is placed there. But before, if I wanted to make changes, I have to do it right on the cotton paste. However, now, if I go ahead, grab the psd of Mike and let's say that I do a hue saturation, and I changed. I don't know. It's trying to mess with something that you'll notice. Okay, let's say that I, like, make him greenish. Whatever. I closed that and save it. Should click. I have to You have to update it. Okay, So what I did is if you click here, I don't think I actually saved that. So that would make sense. Why? It's an update. Um, if you double click, see where it says where you see him, then it has, like, this little edit option, because I placed it on a double click on that. Okay, it opens up that original file. No, let's colorize them or something. all right, and I'm gonna click this. Save it. Hey, it was even makes a difference. Um, and so it did actually colorize him. And so it changed everything. So it's one of those things that I want to go back and change it. I can go ahead, double click it, opens it back up. I can turn it off, take him back to his original. I can liquefy in. You know, maybe I wanted to change and liquefy his shoulders instead of having to do that from the other image. Where? Let's say, maybe I needed to duplicate and liquefy and cut things together. I can do it, you know, kind of here hit, okay. And we'll update. Yes. Something a few folks are asking if you use smart objects. Um, so smart objects I tend not to use because I do a lot of changes that are destructive, no matter what I'd want. Like after I applied the changes, I'm retouching. I'm cloning out the skin. So the smart object isn't going to help me because I actually modified the pixels. So for this type of stuff, it's not super helpful. Um, sometimes the reason that I view smart objects is Is anyone here ever double process an image? So maybe the background. You opened up the raw once because you wanted the background to be darker. So you opened up that image underexposed. And then with a smart object, you opened up again in that same file. But you did one brighter, and you can kind of combine the two. So I've opened it up that way because then I could make the little tweaks and doom I'm asking. So okay, wanted background to go to a little darker. And I can go back to the original object, darken it down that foreground. It needs to go lighter. I could go back to the smart object, lighting it up, and then eventually can compress the two. So from my workflow, not usually unless I'm double double processing an image