As a creative person, you will often see a photo that is pretty interesting  to begin with.  By making a few minor adjustments you are able to fix any flaw or add details.  Photoshop is a great tool in preparing images or for editing web graphics.  It is also a fun tool for an exercise like this.

A good example is this photo of this lady sitting at the pool; when turned 90 degrees, it appears that she’s sitting on a ledge and there is a wall of water.  It is fun a to take a cool photo like this and make it even better.

The original photo, shown below, has some background distractions that take away the “wall of water” sensation.

Original Photo Before Photoshop Image Editing

After Editing in Photoshop

Everything was done in Photoshop CS4 using masks, patch tool and healing brush as well as rotating a layer to make the lady’s head look as if she’s not struggling to keep still in water.

Here’s a side by side comparison.  What do you think?

Last year I found a good deal on a Wacom Bamboo tablet and thought it would be fun to have.  I’ve always loved to draw, sketch, and trace.  I also loved to mess around with Photoshop and Illustrator.  As you know, if you been reading since the beginning, I want to get into web development; but its been taking much longer and its more of a hobby.

Anyways, here are some of my sketching I made using Photoshop.

I plan to practice more, but these are a couple of my first attempts at this.

Sometimes you find an image that needs little a work and I figured this would be a fun one because what can be done should be subtle. The girl in the image has great features and amazing eyes; but it is a bit dark. I tried to just clean it up a bit and add a bit more color to it.

The changes are minimal but the overall feel is considerably more vibrant. The little fixes made this quick snapshot photo of her almost professional. Take a look at the before and after photos and let me know what you think.

Before:

After:

There are many ways to retouch a photo and often times, not much needs to be done. I only worked on her face and hair so her neck and hand is still a bit bland.

So over the weekend, I started using some profile pictures of people to try to manipulate them, either from removing normal blemishes, losing weight, etc.  I decided to go for a more extreme and found a photo online that gave me an interesting time trying to manipulate the photo in photoshop.  How extraordinary is with a few filters, some skewing, adding some hair and color, a person can totally look different.

I think this gives a really good idea of how one should consider before going for an extreme make over.  Take a look at what I did below:

BEFORE PHOTOSHOP

AFTER PHOTOSHOP

As seen, I still need to put in some extra time to make the man more natural; his skin is almost ‘fake’ and I had to some how create a neck.  However, I am quite satisfied with the job on the photo manipulation.  I will post up some other creations and manipulations I’ve done.  Thanks for looking.