More Photoshop

I hope everyone had an awesome, relaxing holiday! I know I did, so much so that I just left a pile of "unfinished business" for myself when I came back down from holiday-land.

One being that I wanted to share a couple images from last weeks class at CDIA. I'm slowly, and I mean slowly, getting more acquainted with photoshop. We covered a ton of information last week including HDR, panorama, basic beauty retouching, uhhhh, crap, a lot more but my brain hasn't fully come back from holiday.

Beauty retouching...what a tough subject. It is abused all the time. I think a great thing to say to yourself before you start thinking about retouching any person, or even place is "just because you can, doesn't mean your should"...

The world of fashion especially is a big culprit of false beauty as I will call it. I like things to be as natural as possible unless you're doing some specific project that it clearly "NOT natural." I could dive into this subject and show you tons of everyday examples of retouching abuse but I won't...just bear in mind if it looks seriously unreal...it probably is.

Here is my attempt at basic beauty retouching. This girl is quite a beauty and really doesn't need any help from photoshop or myself. 

before:

after: if I were to redo this retouching I would take some of the skin softening off and bring back some of her natural smile lines... 

this image below is an example of a 3 image panorama and then tonemapped for added color.

I have some of my holiday outing photos to post soon but until then...have a great Monday!