First lesson In Image Retouching

     I have spent the last week watching another lynda.com course, this weeks lesson was called "Retouching Bridal Portraits". It covers all different ways of enhancing and retouching different types of portraits. I have done a little bit of retouching in the past, but this was a really great eye opener into better practises of using lots of layering and masking so you don't make changes to an image that can't be undone if you make a mistake. I liked the face that the course focused on enhancing what was already there rather than completely changing the person in the photo. 
     I have tried out a few of my own images from the archives, turns out I really don't have a lot of good quality portraits to mess around with! So these were the best I can do and my sister is a little mad I picked a "moody" photo of her... Sorry Flo...

This first image I chose was based on one of the images on the  course being backlit. I got rid of some flyaway hairs, retouched small areas with lens glare and warmed up and brightened the whole image. The screen shot below shows some of the many layers and masks I used in creating this image.

     This next one is a holiday photo of one my oldest friend Missi, this one didn't have too much work done to it. I cleaned up the background, smoothed the skin and brightened up the teeth and sunglasses and added some contrast and curves adjustments. 

This final image was by Hannah Nichols from Pink kitten Dance School where I take aerial circus classes. I chose it because it gave me a chance to try lots of different types of clean up on the background. I used lots of different filters to remove the dust and add blur. I also copied areas of the curtain across to cover the lights before blending these in and adding spotlights and colour edits in the Camera Raw filter tool. 

I still need a lot of practise with this but it is good to know some more skills and tools I can use to clean up images and enhance them in a natural way.