Post Production

For our final images we had to do some amount of post production whilst still making the photos look as if they have had nothing done to them. I wanted to use a bit of smoothing and i also wanted to find out how to remove under eye bags on photoshop however we were not taught how do do this in our post production lessons, so I had to use my own skills on photoshop to try and edit my pictures. 

I pretty much applied the same concept of editing to all of my pictures which I will detail below.

• This is my image that I have chosen to retouch
• I started by creating a new adjustment layer and made a layer to change the brightness and contrast of the image.
• I turned the brightness up to 25 for my high key photos and about 15 for my low key photos, but this sometimes varied, but never went over 25.
• I then changed the contrast to 11, this was the same for all of my photos as it was subtle.
• if my image was in black and white I would have created a new adjustment layer and selected black and white and then merged the layers down, I did try changing up the levels of colour within the black and white but I found that it looked better just adjusting the brightness and contrast.

• This is what my image looks like after doing these two steps, as you can see the photo looks more vibrant but isn't too different from the original image, I like the warm glow that this effect gives to the skin.
• The final thing I wanted to do was just to bring out the highlights and shadows a bit more so I used the dodge and burn tool.
• Lightly I used the burn tool through the eyebrows to fill in sparse hairs and along the lash line and eyelashes to emphasise them.
• I also used the dodge tool to emphasise the highlights.
• When doing this I always use a brush that has a 0% hardness so it blends nicely.

The Pictures below show my step by step for post production, as you can see the burning and dodging is very subtle, but it just brings out the highlight and brows and eyelashes a little bit and brings the photo together. 

To make these pictures better i would have liked to know how to use the clone stamp tool to cover some of the imperfections like cuts and bruises on the skin and also on closer inspection you can see slight fallout under the eyes from the mascara which I could not correct and I would have liked to smooth the skin just a little bit but unfortunately we were not taught these skills.