My First Tutorial by HOA - Photo Touch-up and Enhancement Made Easy!
 

Photo enhancing can either be a serious pain in the ass or a fun project that you can do in very little time. In all my travels of Photoshop here is the easiest and one of the most effective way to enhance or clean up a photo.

Step 1. Get the original picture and open it in Photoshop.
http://www.hooklight.com/1.jpg


Step 2. Go to Filter > Blur > Smart Blur. A dialog box will open with options.
http://www.hooklight.com/2.jpg


Step3. I mess around with the options until I find something realistic to work with. You can make the girl look like a Barbie doll if you set the options too high. Try to retain as much detail as possible while removing blemishes and etc. Here I selected a Radius of 3 and a Threshold of 16.2 and kept the quality Low (which I don?t recommend but I?m too lazy at this point to take another screen shot). You can also select different modes and play around with them until you achieve your desired effect.
http://www.hooklight.com/3.jpg


Step 4. Now that you have exited your Smart Blue options, you should have something that looks reasonable but still has some serious pixilation if you zoom in. No problem?the next step will take care of that.
http://www.hooklight.com/4.jpg

Select your Blur Tool (keyboard R or the tool that looks like a teardrop). Zoom in so you can actually see the pixilation and use the blur tool to even them out. It will blend them in like magic!!! Adjust a brush size that you?re comfortable with and go at your own pace. Try not to blur visible lines or breaks in texture (it will look very obvious).



After you finish the blur you should have a finished product. Well almost a finished product depending on how anal you are.
http://www.hooklight.com/5.jpg


If you?re anal like me then you add make-up. Applying makeup literally takes minutes and what I love about it is that you can be as sloppy as you want to be and it will still look pimp as shit, yo!


http://www.hooklight.com/6.jpg
Viola?A finished product! I hope you all found this tutorial helpful. I have yet to find one on the internet that covers this topic and shows the ?easy? way of doing it.

Thanks to Emily Sweet for allowing me to use her picture. Be sure to check out her site!

Very nice tutorial

So many people complicate things, trying to look smarter. I think you are smarter for simplifing this. I could learn alot from teachings like this. Thanks for sharing. I saw you did her other pic in Coins Thread looked great.

Its great dude thanks. But for her, lets keep the freckles. I love em.

Thanks for the tutorial. This method seems to be quick and painless, though in my opinion it doesn't turn out as well as if you were to do it with a layer mask + median.

Are we allowed to use this if we give you full credit?

Tell us how to do that then killerkay.
:pimp

now i would blow a load on her :thumbsup

then take this image:
http://www.hooklight.com/6.jpg
adjust levels, sharpen, duplicate layer, gaussian blur layer, overlay, adj opacity... and get:
http://www.abyssent.com/abyss_al/6new.jpg

:pimp

Thanks for the Getto Tutorial. Take a pretty girl and okay photo and take away all her natural beauty with a blur instead of correcting some flaws and lighting issues. Can't wait for your next tutorial :)

very nice, thanks

Bookmarked. I don't have time to try and break out with some groundbreaking shit every day. Takes a load of work out of my day. Thanks! :thumbsup

the finished product looks like crap. smart blur is a nice tool but there's a whole lot more to taking an imperfect amateur photo and sprucing it up a little.

Very informative :thumbsup

I'm not talking about magazine quality images here. If you want to spend an hour on each photo then by all means, continue. This is a tutorial for a "quick" image correction or touch up.

This is a very informative thread, going to help alot when I do those thumbs for galleries. Thanks

Nice that someone makes an effort sharing some knowledge on this board :)

Regarding the method described - of course there are many more methods (using filters, layers blending modes and masks), more subtle but requiring lot of work. Everything depends what you want to achieve and how much time you want to spend on it.

BTW, for me there is nothing wrong with the original pic - just a nice amateur photo of a nice amateur girl :)

all examples here are crap.. Sorry to say.

Don't be lazy, do it right.

Because of the massive amounts of freckles and wrinkles on her smile lines it's nearly impossible to clean up her face without totally changing ehr apeparance. She's meant to have freckles so just clena up the flash glares and large freckles thenw ork on her arms, legs and color composition.

How many seconds did it take? maybe 10?

Doing it properly while still preserving a natural look only takes 20 seconds.

You're method may be good for thumbnails and for cartoons but for full sized images it totally destroyed her face and made it look like she was made of clay.

Nice try though and thanks for the helpful info. I never knew what that specific blur tool did until now. May come in handy for other things.

Keep plugging away at it.

Play with the brightness/contrast, grey fill, healing brush tool, lasso, magic wand tool and gaussian blur. It's really easy and quick. Once you get used to them you can correct an image and clean up a girl's skin in 20 seconds without disturbing the entire shape of her face and background. Thumbs can bit longer due to cropping and brightness/contrast needing to be more precise but with pre programmed action I am able to do one thumb every 25 seconds.