T i f f a n y H s u

I am seriously obsessed with photo editing tutorials.  I can waste a good part of my day watching tutorials and trying what I learned on photos.  I've even started to take bad photos online and trying to "fix" them based on what I learned.  Since those photos are not my property and I have no right to edit them, I won't post them here, but I will post this one from my own photo collection.

This was taken on a backwater cruise in Kerala.  I originally just increased contrast and saturation, which ended up with a photo that "popped" but mainly because the shadows were flooded with black.



The after is the result of curves, levels, gradient masks, and a little bit of added light, wow, what a difference!  This was the "pop" I was looking for without muddying up the photo with black contrast.

Back from Alaska and, wow, what a beautiful state.  I couldn't get over all clean and blue everything is, plus I LOVED the ease of driving Alaska's very well maintained highway system.  I braved myself for traffic caused by construction, but wow, what Alaska calls traffic isn't even close to the congestion of Bay Area traffic during the down times!

I'm still going over the photos from the trip, but here are a few taken at Prince William Sound for now.  I'll also be updating with the final itinerary we decided on, along with how I'd do the trip differently.  Overall, I can't emphasis how easy it is to travel in Alaska, there really is absolutely no reason to go through an organized tour or limit yourself to traveling by cruise ship.  With only two months to plan a trip to Alaska during high season, I really don't understand why it's advised to plan up to a year in advance!  Yes, we probably could have found a better deal and lower prices had we planned the trip long in advance, but that's just not how my family does things!








After looking at photos of the Eiffel Tower with a water reflection, I decided to show my dad how easy it is to create the effect on Photoshop.  With some general idea of what needed to be done, I took a photo of my mom in front of the Eiffel Tower and made my first attempt.

Before:


 After:

There's probably a step I'm missing to make it look a little more realistic, but it's fun to piece together the things I've learned already to try and make an effect without following a tutorial. 

Although there is still A LOT more to learn, I'm really enjoy learning about photo editing and retouching.  Two resources that have been invaluable are Retouching Academy - for serious education from experts in the field - and Phlearn - not so serious, but just as informative. 

Here is one more photo that I worked on that really shows how much a little editing can transform a photo. I choose a photo I took of the Himalayas from my seat on a flight to Nepal.  I was an idiot and saved over the original photo, but here is a similar photo taken a second after the one I edited. 

Before:

After:

Serously, what a difference!
It's been a while since my last haircut and for some reason my hair was really bothering me today.  I just wanted to give my hair a slight trim and to take away some bulk from my overly thick hair.  I've never been happy with getting my hair trimmed, I always end up with hair shorter than I wanted, so I figured I'd just cut it myself.  It's not my first time cutting my own hair, but it's probably my favorite result.

I didn't take a before photo, but I liked the results so much I took an after photo and decided to take the opportunity to practice some retouching.  I wanted to keep things as natural looking as possible.  Meaning I wanted to look like myself, just slightly more polished.  I'm not wearing makeup in the before photo, so I also decided to add some subtle color.

Untouched SOOC:

While editing I noticed the catch light in my eyes were reflecting the two windows that acted as my direct light source.  The more I looked at it the more it bugged me, so that had to go as well. That one change probably made the biggest difference in the before and after photo.

Retouched:


Getting rid of one set of catch lights in my eyes made them eyes look slightly flatter than I would have liked, so that's something I'll need to work on, but overall I'm happy with the result!  I brightened the overall picture up and decided to blur up the background a little bit via Lightroom.  Not sure which version I like better.


Last but not least, a few more dramatic edits.  I'm still trying to keep it natural looking.  Here I added more noticeable eyeliner, a light touch of eye shadow,  cropped the image, and added a touch of light coming from the left.  I also increased the luminance of my reds to keep my face from being washed out and flattened by the "light".  Oh, and I reduced the dryness that lined the outside of my lower lip by blending the color of the fuller part of my lips outwards.  I kept a slight color variation to keep the lips from looking retouched.

Viola!

Since I did composting for a levitation/jump photo, I thought it would be fun to put together an underwater composite.

Here's my first try.  I realized after the fact how ironic it was that I chose to use a photo of Athens to put under water considering Greece's current financial troubles.

Here's the before photo that I started with:
View Of Acropolis From A For Athen's Hotel Breakfast Lounge

This weekend I decided to try making a levitation photo with Daniele.  At first we were going to do the classic laying down photos that you see around, but we decided to do things a little different. Below is my first attempt merging double exposure to create a levitation/jumping photo.

My word these last few weeks have been nonstop!  I've had guest from out of the country visit and then immediately after my two favorite kids in the whole world were in town for a week.  Of course I took the opportunity to get as many photos of them as possible.  Just in time to go with my Photoshop lessons!

Here are two that I made while practicing with clipping masks.  I thought it would be fun to make postcard like photos.


I've seen a good handful of techniques for airbrushing skin in Photoshop, usually using Gaussian Blur  or Surface Blur and a clipping mask.  Some even use a blend of toning layers to even out skin tone, but usually that gave the whole image a peachy tone, which didn't create such a bad photo mood, but yesterday I found out about using frequency separation for photo retouching and ever since then those other methods can't even compete with ease and effectiveness.

Frequency separation essentially separates the tone and color from the texture of the object in the photo.  This way color corrections and texture correction is looked at independently.  So if a spot needs some color correction it can be fixed without ruining the texture above it.  The opposite works as well, if there is texture that needs correcting, it can be fixed without having to change the color.  Absolutely brilliant!

Here's an old photo of myself that I used as guinea pig.  Since it was my first time using frequency separation I may have gone a bit overboard with smoothing out the texture, but overall it still looks much more natural than the other techniques I've seen.

Before

 After using frequency separation and playing with the color balance.

 This version has minimal texture editing - so it's not overly smooth- and color balance with left alone.

I've been switching off between learning about landscape editing and portrait editing.  I'm not sure which one I prefer, they are both a lot of fun.  I am giving a break to all that crazy photo manipulation.  Puppet warp will be there when I'm ready to go down that road again. 
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