- Fabio

I bought the original image on a stock photography web site for $3.0. The subject is nice, but the colors are awful, the face is too dark with respect to the rest of the image and it appears like the photographer focused on the earring rather than on the eyes, which are kind of blurry.

 

The first thing I do is color correction, there is a definite greenish cast probably due to foliage near the subject when the shot was taken. I use the Color Cast tool for this purpose. With the eye dropper I clicked on the glow on the inner part of the right arm of the bride.

Colors are a lot more natural now, still the face is very dark. To correct this I will use a Zone Mapper in conjunction with a mask, to limit the correction to the face only.

Moving the cursor over the Zone Mapper tool you can find in which zone the shadows of the bride’s face fall. I will then brighten that up by about two segments until it “looks right” (every segment is half EV, two segments is one EV). This is equivalent to having shot the image one stop brighter.

The exposure on the face looks better now but the tonal range is kind of compressed, to compensate for that I bring up the hilights of the face a bit, until it looks natural. As you can see each change is spaced by two Zone Mapper segments (an EV), covering most of the face’s tonal range.

At this point I will add a mask to restrict these changes to the face only. I select a Spline mask on the toolbar and draw an outline of the mask directly on the image clicking on the image evenly all around the area I want to select. For best results it is always better to use fewer points and then adjust them subsequently. You can add or delete points to a mask at any time.

Above you can see the image before and after applying the Zone Mapper. To my taste the eyes are still a tad too dark, I will apply another zone mapper with a mask encircling the eyes

Voilà, now mum won’t know that she’s been dancing all night...

 

The eyes are kind of soft, I will add a sharpening layer where I reuse the same mask I used for brightening the eyes and sharpen them with a radius of 2.5 and an amount of 35. I will also add another sharpening layer without masks with a radius of 1.o and an Amount of 100 for the fine detail of the image.

The eyes look better now.

 

The image is still a little bit cold for my taste, I will use the White Balance tool to warm it up and simulate a nice afternoon light:

The last touch is slightly cheesy, but it works here, it is a “glamour” effect done with a Gaussian Blur layer blended in Soft Light and with low opacity:

And with this we’re done. The pictures below show the original image and my new retouched version. To me it looks a lot better for the bride’s family album!