This was all done on Photoshop 7 (step by step how to below)






First I air brushed her (she wasn’t wearing any makeup, this shocked a friend) with the stamp tool (S). I had the brush at : Opacity, 58% and Flow, 66%. It made the air brushing look more natural, and I changed the brush size frequently, but it was at about a 125 a good portion of the time.

Next, black and white. I took the picture in color (so that if I ever wanted to go back to color I could since you don’t have that option if it is taken in black and white) so I just stuck it into grayscale (Image-- > Mode-- > Grayscale) since I didn’t like the color scheme of everything.

Then, contrast! I ran it through curves (ctrl + m) and made the traditional S shape for the line, and played with it till I liked it. It helps make her look very pale, and therefore stand out against her hair and the door behind her (which you can’t really tell is a door).

Curves took away most of the shine in her hair so I used the dodge tool on it (O, or the straight dress makers pin looking thing). I set that to: range, highlights and exposure, 4% to 16%. The brush size varied here too.

Now, I wanted to emphasize a few of the shadows in her hair, so I used the burn tool (also O, but the hand) and set that to Shadows and around 6%. The brush size varied here too, but it was fairly large. Dodge and Burn are strong tools, so you have to go light with them, and more often then not, use a large brush so that it doesn’t look TOO forced.

I used the burn tool to also darken the left side of her nose, and to darken her eyebrows a tad. I also darkened the line under her bottom lip, and the crease between both lips. Then, I moved onto the eyes.

I darkened the lashes (upper and lower) and just put more contrast on the lid.

For the iris, I went back to the original photo (after I stored this one on a different document) and used a tool called quick mask (Q). It lets you select the part you want to work with or copy and paste with out the lines looking…jagged. You have to use the brush tool to play select what you want to play with, so I set my brush to: opacity 51%, and flow 34%. I just dotted it over the eyes, and inversed (ctrl + I) the picture so that it would select just the eyes (quick mask is weird that way…what you draw on with the brush WON’T be selected). I took it out of quick mask (Q again) and copied the eyes (ctrl + c).

Then, over on the black and white picture, I took it out of grayscale and put it into RGB (Image-- > Mode-- > RGB color) (and told it to not flatten because I like having a lot of layers, but you could flatten it). I pasted the green eyes (Ctrl + v) onto the picture, and it was made as a new layer automatically, which it good since now I can move and adjust the color any way I want. They were pasted somewhere around the neck, so I obviously had to bring them up to the eyes. Then, I ran them through a gentle curves so that the green would pop a bit more, and I went to hue and saturation (ctrl + u, or image -- > adjustments -- > hue and saturation) and upped the saturation until I was happy.