It’s Friday PHOBAR day again. The youtube video “The Perfect Lie” is another example of a retouching transformation using Adobe Photoshop.

Here are five great retouching examples showing people that have been Photoshopped beyond all recognition (PHOBAR).  Some of them transformed the entire face, while others went nuts on changing the body using the liquify tools.  These pixel pushers did an amazing job – credits noted below each image.  Digital manipulation at its finest!  Some of these are more extreme makeovers than others, but all here are really well done examples of photo retouching and “digital airbrushing”.

Before and after by ~silverpaw98 Read the rest of this entry »

This is a really good Photoshop tutorial video on advanced dodge and burn techniques for portraiture.  These are the types of things that are good to know for that one special image you’re working on.  It’s not the quickest or easiest stuff in the world.  This stuff takes time, but the time is definitely well spent.  Most stock photographers like myself can’t afford to invest this much time into just one image or piece of stock art, for the sake of workflow and return on investment.  These dodging and burning methods are definitely something I might do for a client, or for a very special marketing or advertising campaign where one portrait is the main focus or feature image.  Editorial or fashion photographers and retouchers might employ this much retouching in their workflow, especially for headshots, magazine covers or article spreads.  Here the artist/author, Sean Armenta, also shares how to work with curves, curve adjustment layers, and layer masking.

Tutorial shared from the Red Dot Blog.

This is a short video tutorial by The Miz on how you can very easily set up a rule of thirds grid for your designs and images in Photoshop.  Composition is important in effective imagery, and this grid will definitely help you in both your design work layouts, as well as in your photo cropping in post-production.  The newer versions of Photoshop also have a “rule of thirds” grid automatically when you select the entire canvas using the crop tool.

Unfortunately the weather and time of day have a lot to do with how your outdoor photos are going to come out.  Landscapes are something I find incredibly challenging, just because of the lack of control you have over all these elements.  When you go on a trip, on vacation, or wherever you are at the moment, you pretty much are at the mercy of nature.  There are certain educated guesses you can make by planning what time of day you might shoot according to the direction of the sun, and it’s height in the sky, but when the clouds or fog start to roll in it’s an entirely different story.  Here is a Photoshop video tutorial by our good buddy Bob that shows how you can repair these types of hazy images in post processing.  Using lab color mode, and later switching back to rgb, you can maintain control of adding too much extra artifacting.  Here we learn how to use the curves on the lightness channel, as well as on a, and b by moving the little points around.  I have to be honest, this stuff was greek to me until I watched the video.  It ended up being a very simple and to the point technique which I find myself using more and more in my daily workflow.  The beauty of Photoshop as I always say, is that there are so many roads to the same outcome, so sit back and enjoy this one.  I’m sure you’re going to find it very useful to remove haze, increase saturation and mid to low level contast.  The results might actually impress you; a lot. They did for me, on an image that I just processed of Flamenco beach.