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.
