How to touch up your people pics
How to retouch your portraits to present more flattering versions
it wil take 20 minutes
you will lear n How to remove blemishes, reduce wrinkles, and whiten eyes and teeth
Yo u’ll nee d Affinity Photo Affinity Photo has all the retouching tools required to make you look your best
Portraits have always been one of the most popular subjects for a photograph.
In the distant days of analogue cameras, we’d pop framed family portraits on the mantelpiece. If the portrait was less than flattering we could take comfort in the fact that only a handful of relatives or visitors would see it.
In today’s digital era, a portrait can be viewed worldwide a few seconds after it has been snapped, courtesy of social media sites such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
You may also use your portrait to attract a companion via dating sites such as eHarmony, or impress potential employers on LinkedIn. For these reasons, you can’t afford to put out a picture that’s less than flattering.
Fortunately, you have all the portrait retouching tools required to make you look your best, courtesy of Affinity Photo.
Digital darkroom
Affinity Photo is the perfect app for the selfie generation. You can use its tools to flatter your complexion by banishing blemishes and reducing wrinkles. Patches of sweat can create unflattering shiny hotspots on skin, as you can see from the specular highlights on our subject’s nose. In a professional studio, a make-up artist would dab the model’s face with powder to absorb sweat.
Thankfully, you can mop up sweat digitally using a skin-coloured brush tool. Once you’ve improved skin tone, we’ll also show you how to whiten teeth for a fresher smile and brighten up the eyes. You can even summon up a digital barber to tidy up distracting stray strands of hair that may be missed when preparing your subject to pose for their photo.
The process of capturing a portrait on camera can create unflattering results too. Our example start image is underexposed so the subject looks dull and drab, and doesn’t really come to life in the picture. The camera’s white balance setting was incorrect so the shot is too warm, making skin tones look an unrealistic and unflattering orange.
In the steps opposite, we’ll show you how to create a more correctly exposed shot and counteract colour casts for a more natural look. We’ll then move on to perform common retouching techniques to create a perfect portrait.