Dan Dove Commercial

Hello,

I am sorry if some of you are expecting a more London-oriented posting, but I thought I’d show what I have been doing for the past week.  (If you are not interested, wait for the next post.) Since I am not working at the moment (how sad), I decided to improve my skills in other fields than architecture.  I have been doing some photography, but last week I wanted to recreate the Dove commercial process on one of the most handsome models I shot in the last month.  But seriously, I wanted to show how to tweak a bad picture.  ;)

Step one: Take a bad picture.

In that case, the shot was poorly lit and the model had bad skin.

Step two:  Make the ugly face symmetrical

I copied the left side over to have a perfect symmetry.  “Facial symmetry, is one of a number of aesthetic traits, including averageness and youthfulness, associated with health, physical attractiveness and beauty of a person [...]”

Step three: Colour correction

I decided to play around with the overall color of the picture. In the end, I went for a desaturated purple blueish colour tone.  It gives a clean, pure, sterile almost robotic look that I am quite happy about.

Step four: Eye correction

I bumped up the saturation in the eye to make them punch out a little.  I found the combination of the blue eyes accentuate the blueish color tone of the picture.

Step five: Blemishes

Here, I removed all natural blemished to even the skin. Birth marks, wrinkles, bags under the eyes, black heads were removed.

Step six: Smooth skin and final touch

Here, I evened out the skin tone to make it look even smoother.  I again increased the amount of white in the overall picture to finish the ethereal look. 

Summary

Before/After.

That’s it.  That’s what I do during my free time.  Quite fun actually.  So if you ever need tweaked photos, just let me know.  I won’t charge too much and maybe I can even make a living out of it? Yeah, if only... Check this video to see really good photo retouching.