New Hobby

I found another hobby I enjoy. A friend of mine asked if I could retouch his acting head shot for his zed card. I had retouched some of my own photos in the past. The last one I worked on was my pregnancy photo last year. I had some unsightly stretch marks to remove, which, by the way, are the badge of a real woman! Hehe, love that movie For Keeps :) Anyway, I really figured out that I enjoyed doing it. The nice part too, I asked him to put my elliptical machine together that I have had for months, but have been putting off constructing. Thought it was a good trade off for retouching the photo. Mark really hates the kind of honey-dos that require manual labor :) Here is the photo. On the left is the retouched photo and the right is the original.

I am not a photoshop guru or anything like Mark's Dad, but I did enjoy working on it. It was much less taxing than designing something from scratch. I like seeing the progression of how much changes when you retouch. I added a softer light by using an overlay mask with gaussian blur, then I highlighted the hair, since the blur washes it out. In the process, it does get rid of a lot of hair wisps. I also changed the hue slightly, whitened the eyes, soften the skin tone and removed and softened lines and redness using the healing brush.  I didn't take out every flaw, since I think that a few flaws make the picture look more realistic and adds character.

Guess it's time to watch all those photoshop tutorials, right honey? Mark has been trying to get me the watch them for months. Maybe I can watch them while I am working out on my new elliptical machine!