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Retouch Challenge

• Kayla came to me with a challenge.  Her mother-in-law had a framed image of her daughter in her house and wanted a similar one of Kayla from her wedding.  Kayla snapped a photo of this framed image and sent it to me as a reference for what she wanted.  Luckily, Kayla’s photographer for her wedding took a picture of Kayla in a similar pose.  But that was where the similarities ended.  Kayla’s portrait was in front of a church altar and extremely busy.  There is no separation between her and that background.  The lighting in Kayla’s portrait also has no depth, no direction.  It is just flat.  Another issue with the image is that it is very noisy.  The noise was so bad that it added splotchiness to her skin and was very obvious at larger sizes – not suitable for framing.

  If you compare that with the image Kayla’s mother-in-law had framed of her daughter, you see just the opposite.  The background is not distracting.  It is also dark so it contrasts well with her and her wedding dress, drawing your attention where it should be…toward the beautiful bride.  The lighting in this portrait is interesting and classic.  If you notice, it falls nicely on the left side of her face and arm, creating even more contrast separation from the dark background.  This “kiss” of light is so important in making this picture what it is.

  

  A picture is worth a thousand words.  Left to right: (1) The reference image hanging on Kayla’s mother-in-law’s house, (2) Kayla’s portrait at her wedding, (3) My final result.

  Removing the background

  So how did I do it?  First thing was to get rid of that background.  This really was the hardest part because of these nasty reasons:

  • It is so busy!  There is no constant edge I can use to isolate.
  • So many of the colors are close to the skin tones and flower tones making it difficult to isolate anything by color.
  • The noise in this image makes everything soft when zoomed in, so it is hard to pick apart what is what at a close level.
  • You can see through her veil!  How do you cut out something when you can see through it to what is behind it?

  Luckily, I had recently purchased OnOne’s Perfect Photo Suite which includes a piece of software called Mask Pro that did a lot of the heavy lifting.  This masking software allows you to pick colors you want to keep and colors you want to discard and start painting away your background.  In theory it should even allow me to mask away the colors under her veil! However, due to the challenges listed above it was not all roses and there was a lot of manual masking going on to get the proper cutout.

  Once she was removed from the background, there were a few tweaks that needed to be adjusted.  While Mask Pro did a decent job getting rid of the color contamination in the veil, you could still see the red and green horizontal stripes in it.  Some careful cloning in Photoshop did the trick there.

  You could also tell she was cut out from a background…the edges were just too sharp.  Luckily using Photoshop CS5′s Refine Edge menu, I was able to fade in the edges of the cutout to more closely resemble what you’d see if it was real.

  Creating the background

  The new background was created by using Photoshops Render > Clouds feature.  I just rendered some brown clouds on a black background to mimic the way the background looked in the framed image.  To get the center to show up more than the edges and floor, I used a layer mask to gently mask away the clouds where I wanted the black background to show through.

  Finishing touches

  One of the key aspects of the image we are trying to look like is the direction of the lighting, coming from above and from the left to highlight the face and arm/shoulder of the bride.  The image I had to work with had no such lighting, so I had to fake it.  I used a Photoshop dodging and burning technique for this.  I created two layers with an Overlay blend mode (one for highlights and one for shadows).  You paint white on the highlight layer to add highlight detail and paint black on the shadow layer to add core shadow and shape where there was not previously.  The result is a more three-dimensional look with that beautiful light that just kisses the left side of her form, just like in the framed image.  It looks like a light is actually shining on her from that direction.

  I also added some noise to the background layer to make it somewhat noisy like the source image so they didn’t look too dissimilar.  Finally, to help clear up some of the blotchiness in her skin and deal with the excessive noise, I applied some skin smoothing using Photo Tools to even everything out.  The result is a nice soft feel to the photo that removes some of the noise and gives her skin a nice glowing effect.

  Although this particular retouch took about 6 hours, I am very pleased with the outcome and it is now something Kayla’s mother-in-law can frame and hang in their house next to the other photo.

  
  

  December 25th, 2010 | Ryan | 1 Comment | Tags: photoshop, retouching

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