Above, I have a photo of a model that I had taken in Amherst, MA. This shot is straight out of the camera and needs some work.
The first thing I’m going to do is go into the color balance to correct her skin color:
When the Color Balance dialog box opens up I’ll put in (-6, +2, +13) to take out some of the orange cast to her skin. Then I’ll click OK:
Now I’m going to zoom in close to her eyes. The first thing you look at, for most people, is a person’s eyes. I’ll brighten them up and make them stand out. I’ll brighten the eyes using the Dodge Tool:
I’ll pick a small soft brush and slowly dodge around the whites of her eyes at a low exposure of about 17%. I’ll set the range to Highlight:
See the difference between the left eye that was dodged and the right eye that wasn’t touched yet:
Now that the eyes are done, it’s time to make her lips a little redder so they stand out. For this step I’m going to pick a color that’s already her lip color. I’ll use the Eye Dropper Tool from the tools bar. I’ll click once on her lips to capture the color:
Here, I’ll use a soft brush, and it’s important to have the brush mode set to Color. I’ll use a 50% opacity:
I deepened the color of hers lips and dodged her teeth, and I also dodged the highlights in her lips:
Now it’s time to work on her hair. I’ll pick a bright highlight color from her hair the same way I picked a color for her lips, using the eyedropper tool. Here is the color I selected:
I want the color to be brighter than the color I selected, so I’ll double click on the color that’s in the foreground of the Color Picker box. This will bring up the Color Picker dialog box. There’s a white circle, which represents the color chosen. I’ll just drag it up a little to pick a color that’s brighter. Then I’ll click OK. I’ll adjust the opacity of the brush as I paint around her hair:
The next thing I’ll do is to brighten the image overall. To do this I’ll use the curves:
When the Curves dialog box opens, I’ll just grab the center of the line and drag it up just a little to brighten the image overall. Then I’ll click OK.
The last thing I’ll do is just run the history brush across her lips to make them darker and stand out. I’ll set the history brush one step before the curves in the history palette:
Here are the before and after shots. The fixes are subtle, but make a big difference:
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.