The Retouch Challenge I

OK, it's time to exercise our PhotoShop skills. The challenge for this round is:
Evening out skin tone. But, it's not going to be all that easy. The image I am going to post is of a girl (a beautiful girl) with lots of tiny little freckles all over her face. The model was chosen specifically for her freckles so in your end result the model should still have freckles or you're disqualified. Have fun!!!

1 Week from today I will choose a winner. The winner will post the next challenge using an image they have rights to, and become the judge.


Maxium width to post in the forum is 600px

http://www.jamesbelk.com/belkmediagroup/images/stories/portfolio/photos/unedited/OI058108.jpg

Please, long after the challenge expires I encourage that you continue to use this page as a learning tool and continue to post your entries and ask questions.

Well, here's my entry.
Freckles

Man you certainly don't make it easy. *lol. Nice work on yours. This is an area of photoshop that I haven't ever touched. Not even certain where to begin. Time to dig into a couple tutes I recon.

atno, tuts are always good, just make sure you don't go over board...
http://www.notesondesign.net/inspiration/graphic-design/photo-retouching-the-delicate-balance/

That might give you some good insight

I'm giving this a shot. Learning a good bit as I go, but this isn't as easy as it looks. Going to need to do a lot more of this. There's quite a few photos I have that would be really cool to touch up like this. Good challenge.

OK here is my first ever retouch.

Hi Res Entry



That was really difficult, not knowing a single thing about what I was doing. Made the mistake of trying an airbrushing technique first, but the way that was going would have been bye bye freckles. In addition to the skin retouch I tried a variety of other new things like brightening her eyes, whitening her teeth, enhancing her lips, removing skin blemishes and wrinkles, and since it wasn't a disqualifying factor (just to see if I could), I removed her tattoo. Over all for my first attempt ever, I'm pretty happy with the result.

For my own future reference, and for the benefit of others wanting to play around with it, I used and learned a heck of a lot from the following tutorials.

Basic Post Processing
Curves
Eye Enhancement
Whiten Teeth
Remove Tatoos
Retouching Lips
Retouching Skin

This looks like fun. I should play... If only someone would loan me about 60 extra hours for my week.

given interruptions It took me about 6 hours on mine including reading the tutes.

cool I want to try this (I know what you mean graphixboy time just wont wait for me either).

well done atno. You used a lot of the same techniques as I did. She came out pretty good!

Looks like the bandwidth limit on Jame's server has been exceeded. If anyone else needs the file and wants to join in I've also made it available here:

http://www.alaron-nuclear.com/ozzu/OI058108.jpg

OMGoodness, I didn't even think about the image here. Sorry. Thanks ATNO. Ok, today is the last day to submit entries and tomorrow there will be a winner. Later, I will post my version of the image and explain how I did it. Thanks for participating. I hope more of you will join in next round.

I will try to try

Sorry for the delay. Alright, the winner is, *drum roll* MindFullOfScience.

Great job to both participants, MindFullOfScience and ATNO.

Thanks for this challenge RD. Congrats MFS. I rather suspected yours would get the winning vote. I know you did a better job of blending.

For educational purposes I'd be interested to know exactly what your thoughts were in choosing his RD. For example if we were given this as a real time assignment, we'd present what we thought the client/boss was looking for and expect feedback and go back and do it again if they didn't like the finished product.

I'd also be curious MFS how you accomplished your blending of tones. Looking at yours I can see much more of a Gausian blur than I used (I think I used like 3 or 4 pixel blur). As noted I attempted an airbrush from a tute, but basically lost all the freckles, so instead I used a lot more of the healing tool.

Finally, if you don't mind sharing, it'd be educational if you could provide the psd to see what you actually did.

Regardless it was fun and educational at the same time. As previously noted I had never done a retouch, and learned several new techniques I had never tried.

I hope all the challenges are as effective as this one. Looking forward to seeing what you put up for your challenge MFS.