Very good for your first try, It can be very easy to overkill it. I often find a setting I'm pleased with, walk away for a min and come back for a fresh look.
Heres my take of it, I'm pretty bored tonight so I thought I'd start a tutorial.
Ok so I was really bored so I thought i'd write a tutorial for everyone
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Before I begin, I found this gamma test strip online, You should be able to see a differance in all the grayscale boxes preferably even a, b and,c and y+z with a calibrated moniter, You may need to adjust your brightness/contrast to get it close. (Preferably in adobe gamma or hardware calibration)
To soften the skin:
Start with the original Image, its named background layer. If its not locked already click the padlock button, that way it will stay safe. Next duplicate the layer by right clicking on the layer and click Duplicate. I named this "lady" , it will make it much easier if you name all your layers.
Next use the polygonal selection tool to click around the woman and select her body and hair. If you need to add or subtract from the selection once your done by holding shift or Opt (alt for pc) and click to start a new selection this will cut out a chunk or replace it.
Now you want to hit this button on the bottom of the layers box
This will take your selection and make an Layer Mask, this will let us edit the lady and the background will not be affected. Look at the layer box above and look at the black/white box beside the lady layer, the white is editable and the black is masked off. Further up the bricks layer has the same one but inverted so the lady is masked off. Now your selection is saved and can be reselected by Cmd+ clicking the layer mask (sorry pc guys not sure of the shortcut...maybey ctrl+click??)
Now for the harder part, I used curves with the RGB channel and then the blue and red channels separately to remove the red color cast on her skin, rather then going into another subject I will just give you some values using the levels tool, and the selective color tool instead of curves. You may vary well be able to get better results by tweaking these are just ballpark.
I set the levels ( cmd+L or image>adjustments>levels) to 28-.97-255 as shown below. This should give it some contrast so the lighting isn't so flat.
Next I opened up the selective color ( image>adjustments>selective color ) select red from the drop down menu, and pull back the red slider to -20% , this will reduce some of the redness., you could tweak the yellow forward to try and bring some color back but I prefer the next step if you have cs /cs2
Open the Photo filters menu (image>adjustments>Photo Filters) and select the warming filter and set it to 22%
The skin should have a nice warm glow, if its not you might need to tweak the above settings a bit.
If you want to remove the hotspots on her face it needs done now before we make our blur layer. Duplicate the Lady layer. Working on this layer I used the patch tool (on the flyout where the healing brush is) to make a selection around a hotspot, drag to a clean area and release. repeat for other spots. Notice its a bit flat now? lower the opacity of this layer to around 65% (might depend of how good the clone job was), just untill it looks right. Now select "lady copy" layer and Cmd-E to merge down (or layers>merge down) click preserve in the pop up dialog and it should combine those two layers and keep the mask (important!) check the layers box above to see what it looks like, it needs that black and white box, i'll refer to this as the layer mask from now on)
Next for the blurring....
Duplicate the lady layer and rename it Lady-Blur. Now click on the lady-blur layer mask, and right click on mask and hit delete mask.
Now go to Filters>Blur>Gaussian blur> and set it to 2.5 , this will change depending on the image size. It looks very blurry but we will selectively add it in later.
Now Hit the mask button under the layers box, and it should turn solid white, we want to click on the layer mask and hit Cmd+I to invert the white to a solid black (or image>adjustments>invert) Now the blurring should disappear. Since everything on the mask is black, its all hidden. A middle gray would make the blur half as strong as when the mask was white. By starting out at black we can paint in with a transparent white (making shades of gray) to build up the blur.
Make sure the layer mask is still highlighted and hit B for a brush and select white. To experiment brush on with 100% opacity and watch the blur appear. Hit undo and lower the opacity anywhere from 8% to 15% and build up the blur. Use a larger soft brush at first and trim around the edges with a smaller one. To erase select black and paint over a mistake.( Tip: to edit on the image portion of the layer you need to click on the thumbnail of that layer, same with the mask, to edit the mask you need to select/highlight the mask thumbnail)
Ok so heres a resized version of my "Lady-Blur" mask, the lighter the shade the more blur that is applied.
Part II tomorrow.... using a non-destructible dodge+burn mask layer to light/darken area's of the skin, essentially painting with light!
I'll be back tomorrow around 5:00, Please feel free to ask any questions or add in anything I might have forgotten. This was my first tutorial, hopefully wasn't too hard to follow.
This isn't the only way or maybe even the best way to do it, but it works for me. Also looking at my image again I think the grass might be a bit to bright and distracting, it could stand even a little more desaturation.
Edit* I can add some more pictures for any steps that might be confusing or poorly written
Im very new at all of this, but I really have the determination to learn.
is it a horrible picture? Is there hope?
