Provide your personal information below. Only your NAME is required for submission. | |
Name: Janee Aronoff |
Tell us about your tutorial. | |
Select a category for your tutorial: Type your category here >: Special Effects | |
Name of tutorial: Porcelain Portrait | |
Give a brief description of your tutorial:
No studio needed! Create a beautifully soft and intimate portrait from a snapshot! |
Describe each step of tutorial below. Explain your tutorial in 10 or fewer steps. |
Step 1 | |
|
1. Setting up.
For this effect, quality of your photo is not critically important. You will need to be sure that you have good contrast in the photo, though, and you may need to do a little retouching.
|
Step 2 | |
|
2. Begin removing the background.
We want a nice soft portrait, with all of the attention to be focused on the subject. Therefore, you need to remove any background, placing the subject against a layer filled with plain white.
|
Step 3 | |
|
3. Paint away the rest of the background.
Tip: Making a Merged Visibles Layer: This takes a picture of everything you have showing, and places it on that new layer, merging your visibles, whilst leaving the layers intact below!
|
Step 4 | |
|
4. Get ready to make the blurred layer.
Now we are readying ourselves to make the layer which will eventually impart the soft "magic." You won't want to have this pronounced softness on your entire image, though. In particular, you want the main facial features to be left more crisp.
|
Step 5 | |
|
|
Step 6 | |
|
6. The MAGIC!
At this point, the image looks hopelessly bad, but hang on!
Now this is pretty good... but notice that we've lost some detail on the baby's face. In particular, I want to preserve the outline along the top edge. I would like a bit more detail in the fingers, too. |
Step 7 | |
|
7. Use your artistic hand.
Don't panic! This is painting, and you CAN do it!
In the illustration to the left, I've shown the Layers palette with just the mask, to show how you don't have to get detailed with this painting. |
Step 8 | |
|
8. Touchups.
You may have some areas which you want to have lighter, or you may want the whole portrait to be lighter. If this is the case, duplicate the Blurred/Screened layer. You will see that the image gets lighter each time you duplicate this layer. For my portrait, I wanted her hair to be lighter, especially the shadowed area at the bottom. Here's how I fixed this:
|
Step 9 | |
|
9. Soften the portrait's edges.
Because we deleted the background, the only "edge" we have to soften is the bottom.
|
|
The final result!
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. To see many more tutorials I've written, visit myJanee.com! |