"V. Desjardins" wrote in message
Hello,
I would like to retouch a photo: it is a portrait and I would like to make it look like a "movie star portrait"…
Any advice, especially for the skin? What about the teeth ?
I already tried a slight blur for the skin, but I don’t really like the result. Not very realistic…
Thanks for your help
I found this tutorial a few years ago… I can’t recall the name of the site it was on.
Penthouse Blur Tutorial
by
QUAGNON
WHAT YOU NEED
For this tutorial, you need any kind of picture and some kind of high-end paint program. I use Adobe Photoshop here, but the high-end programs all carry similar features — it’s just a matter of knowing where to find them. I haven’t used any fancy plug-ins, it’s all standard Photoshop tools.
I’m assuming you have a basic knowledge of your paint program as well, such as knowing how to create layers, blurs, etc.
I haven’t done any pictures for this tutorial, because it’s very straight-forward, but if you do run into any snags, just e-mail me.
I’m sure many of you are wondering at the name of this technique. I can’t take credit for it, as a friend of mine taught me how to do it and whether or not the "origin story" is true, I have no idea, but here goes anyway… way back when, all airbrushing done by nudie magazine was done by hand, but eventually, they began using computers for their touch ups. To speed up the process, they began experimenting with different actions and a touch-up artist for Penthouse Magazine came up with the technique explained here.
GET TO WORK
The technique, as I said, is pretty simple. The first thing you need to do is open your picture in Photoshop. Now, if you have a multiple-layer image, the effect will only be applied to the active layer, so any layers you want affected merge together. I’ve found that the blur looks best when only applied to the "human element" of a picture, i.e. people. It gives them a kind of soft-focus look, which can best been seen here.
Select the layer you want to affect and hit the key combination ALT + CTRL + tilde ("tilde" is the name of that little squiggle right below the ESC key). This will create a selection based on brightness — only the brightest parts of the layer will be selected.
Without deselecting at any time, copy and then paste the selection. You should now have a new layer that contains a mostly-transparent copy of the original layer. The guy who taught me this technique always called it the "ghost layer" so I will too. NOTE: you may have to nudge the ghost layers a bit to line it up with the original layer, it just depends on the shape of your canvas.
Make sure the ghost layer is selected, then go into ADJUST > LEVELS and increase the brightness of the layer. The starting value is 255, and I usually go to about 235 – 225, depending on the brightness of the original layer. The brighter the original layer, the lower you’ll need to make the value in order to see any real difference.
Once you’ve adjusted your levels, go into FILTERS > BLUR > GAUSSIAN BLUR and blur the ghost layer. Again, the value you enter will depend on the size of your image, but a good starting point is 6. I believe for "Britney’s…" I used a value of 10, because it was a portrait, but for "Winter Blue" I used
6.
Your image will now be rather blurry, so grab a soft-edged brush and erase the ghost layer’s eyes and mouth to make them stand out more.
Now, set the ghost layer to between 40-60% opacity — whatever looks good — and you’ll have a soft-focus effect on your image! Pretty easy, huh? There are other things you can try now to get various effects, like increasing the opacity or trying different blending modes. Even try duplicating the ghost layer and having the two ghosts with different blending options.
