PWL Portrait Tutorial
by Mikkel Bech, BechBox Productions © 2005
This tutorial will walk you through the steps I used to make this retouch. It was made under heavy influence of the style of Jim Fiscus, Sascha Waldman, Andrzej Dragan and the like. It seems eveyone and his mother wants to be able to do photo retouching in this style, but there isn't any resources anywhere explaining how to do it properly, so after numerous encouragements I decided to write this.
You should notice, that this is very very far from being a final recipe. The steps outlined here are what worked for this particular picture - for me. The only way to get where you want to go is to experiment, experiement and experiment! With time you will learn to see what steps/tricks are necessary and you will get there quicker.
Before we start: Get the original picture here
Step 1: Cleaning
First of all, this image has a lot of scratches and noise issues, so we've gotta fix that. Plus in the end we want really smooooth skin, so we've gotta remove some of those blemishes and so on in the skin. Everyone has their favorite ways of doing these basic restoration things ... I always end up using the good old stamp tool. Here's the result (original to the right of course)
Step 2: Noise remove / Sharpening
One of the essential tricks I almost always use first (all the other steps may vary quite a bit in order) is a combination of noise removal and sharpening. My favorite noise remover is Neat Image. The noise removal tool is great for getting very smooth skin, but you have to use quite som heavy settings to get the desired effect.
After the heavy noise removal use Unsharp Mask or Smart Sharpen (CS2) to sharpen up the image. Use Radius 1, almost no Threshold and be quite heavy on the percentage. You can see effect of the noise removal and sharpening to the right.
Warning: This trick can introduce some nasty artifacts, but there's really only one way to get it right: Experiment!
Step 3: Color control
Here's a great way of controlling color - it can give you a dramatic effect or a very subtle one.
First make a new layer and merge all visible layers into that (Cmd-Option-Shift-E). Name it 'color'.
Now select 'Channels' in the layer palette and go through the Red, Green and Blue channels. Copy the ones you like (sometimes I use all three) to a new layer under 'Layers' and name it accordingly. Place these B&W layers beneath the 'color' layer as shown in the image to the right, where you can see that for this image I chose the green and the blue layer.
Go to the 'color' layer and change the blending mode to Color. Cool eh?
Now it's time to experiment! Change the opacity of the B&W layers to blend them together - maybe even try changing the blending modes. Often I use the opacity slider of the 'color' layer as a saturation control to desaturate, but with this image I didn't do that.
Step 4: Oversharpen
The next trick in the bag is oversharpening. In the previous step we used sharpening in a more conventional manner - here we want a special effect out of it. There's several ways to do this, and I often end up with 3 or 4 different layers with combinations of the different methods and blend them in to suit my taste.
The most obvious way is to use Unsharp Mask or Smart Sharpen. Set the amount low to start with and set the radius around 20. Now fiddle around with the radius until the highlights in the picture 'pops out' the right way. And then turn up the amount at will. It's kinda hard to explain, but use the result here to the right as a guideline.
Another neat way to oversharpen is to use the High Pass filter. Make a new layer and merge all visible layers into that (Cmd-Option-Shift-E again) and run the High Pass filter. Start with a setting around 8 pixels for this image and fiddle around with it.
Oversharpening can produce a lot of nasty stuff, so last you have to mask all that out - I prefer using layer masks.
Step 5: Painting With Light
We are now ready for the painting with light part. In other words - we're about to dodge and burn. To have full control I use Chip Springer's Paint with Light action, so go to http://www.atncentral.com/download.htm and grab it from there.
Now choose the topmost layer of your document and run the action. It creates two new layers - 'Paint Light' and 'Paint Shadows' - but you will see no effect yet. Choose white as your foreground color and a soft brush with opacity set very low (around 4-10%) and start painting in the layer mask of the 'Paint Light' layer. What your doing here is the same as dodging, so paint the highlights, but be careful no to blow them out. The great thing about this method is that you can always choose black as foreground color and erase some of the dodging again.
When you're done painting highlights go to the 'Paint Shadows' layer and burn the shadows, but this time with black as your foreground color.
The key ingredient in getting this step right is patience!! Remember: BE SUBTLE!!! The light painting can easily be overdone!! Compare the image to right with the previous step - the difference is not monumental, but it's there and it's very important.
Step 6: Environment
An important ingredient in the style of Fiscus, Waldman, Dragan and others are the environment. The background in our image is just too boring, so we have to change it - here's an image I found somewhere which I thought would be great.
Click here or the image to the right for a bigger version
Step 6: Almost Done
The man in background image is highly unwanted, so we want to remove him and do some basic fitting of the background. And then do the PWL step once again on the background, but this time a little more heavy handed.
Our model then has to be cut out from the original background and especially the hair is a little tricky, but there's numerous tutorials on how to do that, so I won't go into detail here.
Now it would be good time to look back and go over the skin again - is there any unsolved issues? I know I always find some and what I like to do is to simple sample an appropriate color and airbrush very carefully. Another thing that sometimes works is to blur the some of the highlights - but again: be subtle.
Step 6: Finish
To round of our work make a Color Balance adjustment layer and adjust to taste. I may have desaturated a bit too.
That's it - I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and got some new tricks under your belt!
Take care, Megl
Acknowledgements
There's a fantastic online photo/retouching community from which I've learned a lot. I've been visiting several forums from time to time, so thank you all for participating and sharing your knowledge there! A special thanks to Chip Springer, PamR and Jim Radcliffe!