Lesson 7 painting and retouching

Deke the dude is good, I really like about the paint brush, prior to this class, never really used brush, well except in Illustrator. Illustrator and Photoshop (not the writing part) are fun, if life only comprises of them, not CSS, PHP/mySQ or myopiaL, life will be pretty good.



I really like the paint brush with "hue" blending method, you paint new hue values without changing luminosity and saturation. Fixing the cracks are piece of cake with CS4's healing brush and patch tool. I also used the clone tool. Too much to write, just go with the feeling. I wiped out the blue tint of the beard and the background using the paint brush. For the mustash, I chose a skin tone color and set the opacity of the brush to 50%, the brushing (under "hue" bledning mode) generated very realistic color correction. I also use the same brush effect to brush away the light blue tint near the edge of his left cheek.



Well Deke the dude is not God, I did not like his way of doing red eyes, I think photoshop's red eye removal tool usually generate very unrealistic pupils. I like this way:
1. select the red pupil region (oval marquee usually is good in this case), sometime you expand 1-2 pixels, then do a 1-2 pixel feather.
2. Use the adjustment--hue/saturation--red, decrease the red saturation down to almost 0, then reduce the "darkness" in the Hannah case I think I reduced to 60. (I wish PS can save these values, I think CS10 will be able to do it).
3. Zoom to pixel level use clone stamp to do some fine touch on the edge of the pupil --reduce the size of the pupil. When flash is used during photography one's pupils got dilated, so the red-eye removed pupil is very large, this is not the way when photoed in natural light -- one's pupils are significantly smaller. This is the scientific detail most of the Photoshop retouch book never mentioned.

Here is after the red-eye removal using my technique. Large pupils due to flash during phtography, if you only correct the color, that is not enough.


The following is zoom to 400% screnshot of the eyes, blueish grey with significantly smaller the pupil. The size of the glint is also reduced. I think this is the most important step in retouching red-eye, of course this takes much more effort. You need to be really good at cloneing stamp like I am :-)

I do not like Deke the dude's way of doing teeth, I generally do not like dodge burn or sponge, it is really hard to control the brush, you need to really get lots of experience before you can use them for serious image retouch. I tried his way using burn, the area around the gum got effected, ideally, you need to change to a very small size brush tool around the edge, and it is hard to remember where you painted as the brush taking on the compound effect. This is I do white teeth similar to red eye, instead of reducing "red" in hue and saturation, I reduced Yellow, and increase the lightness.