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Photoshop Portrait Tutorial

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Introduction

Whether you use a cheap compact camera or a top-of-the-range SLR, chances are you will have pictures of friends or family that could benefit from a little enhancement.

Of course, professional photographers spend huge amounts of money on specialist lights, lenses and filters to get the perfect portrait without the need for post-upload processing, but there are several tricks you can use to turn an amateur looking snap into an impressive portrait.

The above image was taken with a 10mp Fuji S1000 compact camera in a bar with poor lighting and all enhancements were performed using Adobe Photoshop CS3.

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Getting Started

As you can see, the original picture is far from outstanding and even an amateur could pick several faults with it. The skin-tone looks pale from the camera's flash, the background is cluttered and messy, every blemish shows up on the skin, etc, etc.

This is the sort of picture everybody has and it makes a great starting-point for the tutorial

Cropping

As it happens, I didn't need to perform any cropping on this picture but you may well have to if the subject is further away or part of a crowded scene.

The cropping tool on Adobe Photoshop CS3 is very simple to use. Simply select the tool and drag a rectangular section over the picture to highlight the area you want to keep. The area can be moved, reshaped and expanded during the cropping operation and the final cropping doesn't take place until you hit the ENTER key.

Remember: Cropping, like most operations can be undone by selecting Undo from the Edit menu.

More detailed instructions

Black And White

One easy way to enhance a photograph is to convert it to black and white. This will instantly bring out the emotion in the picture and it is an ideal way to hide chromatic abberations or small problems with focus.

Go to the Image menu and select Adjustments >> Black & White. This will open up the Black & White dialog box, in which you can make adjustments to the individual channels. The results will be different for each photograph so it is really down to trial-and-error to get the best results.

More detailed instructions

Contrast and Brightness

Once you have converted your image to black & white, it is often a good idea to increase the contrast, making the dark areas darker and the light areas lighter. This may require a change to the brightness to keep the image at the same overall level of lightness.

Depending on the setting of the picture, this will very often have the added bonus of equalising the skin-tone and darkening the unwanted background too.

Again, using the Image menu, select Adjustments >> Brightness/Contrast and adjust the values using the two sliders.

More detailed instructions

Background

This is the most difficult part of the operation and requires the use of the manual selection tools to isolate the subject.

Using the Polygon Lasso tool, draw a path around the subject, following the outline of their body, but around 5 - 10 pixels from their actual outline. This doesn't have to be spot-on and you don't need to trace round every hair.

Once you have made your selection, you need to take the hard edge off it. I do this by first inverting the selection - go to Selection >> Inverse, then expanding it - Selection >> Modify >> Expand (choose a value that is about 1% of the picture width), and then feathering it - Selection >> Modify >> Feather (choose a value that is about three quarters of the value you used in the Expand step).

Now invert the selection again - Selection >> Inverse - and copy and paste it on top of the existing image, creating a new layer for the selected portion.

You can now make changes to the background layer to reduce its brightness (or even replace it altogether like I have) and the subject will remain unchanged.

Don't forget to Flatten the image to merge the layers.

More detailed instructions

Blemishes

Spots and blemishes can be removed using the Spot Healing Brush Tool or the Clone Tool. This is much easier to do on a black & white image.

More detailed instructions

Soft focus

Finally you can apply a soft-focus look to your image. There are many ways to achieve this, here is my preference.

Duplicate the background layer so you have two identical layers. Select the foreground layer and go to Filter >> Blur >> Motion Blur. Select an angle of around 30 degrees and a value about 3% of the image width.

Now reduce the opacity of the foreground layer to around 20% and flatten the image.

More detailed instructions

End of article

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