Digital Makeup

This post is not going to be a step by step guide to adding Digital Make-up. I’m really not that good at writing step by step guides, but I will give some highlights on what I did to this photo. Over the weekend (4th of July weekend), I bought a new book by Scott Kelby, Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques for Photographers Using Photoshop (Voices That Matter). This book started teaching me how to retouch my Studio Photos. This book is “amazing”! I have learned so much about how to use photoshop to fix my photos and make them look so much more professional. I have edited about two dozen photos so far using the book as a guide. The book is written so you can go step by step and basically do the same thing I did.

This blog entry is a combination of a bunch of techniques I learned from the book, to ultimately get me to the point where I could start adding Digital Make-up. Now I want to start by stating, that I’m a normal 42 year-old Technical IT guy, that loves Photography. I’m also Color Blind. I state this, because I have never used make-up, worn make-up, or applied make-up to anyone. I used photos from the internet to give me an idea of what the make-up should look like on a model. So first thing I want to caution you, I don’t know that much about makeup and don’t really know if the look is correct from a makeup artist perspective. I also didn’t ask my wife for any makeup tips, I just started painting it on and tried to do the best I could based on using photos of women wearing make up. I’m not even sure I used the right color of make up, it just looked good to me! Of course I’m RED – GREEN color blind, so who knows if it looks good together!

The first step was to take a photo of one of my wife’s friends. See the photos here unedited, pretty much as it did when I took it 10 days ago. I’ll describe my setup for this photo. I used a single softbox (48″X36″ ) on the left side of camera. The softbox (with 300 ws Strobe) was centered at eye height, at a 45 degree angle to the model. I also used a silver reflector on the right side of the (left side of model) to reflect light and provide some fill light on the other side of the model. I purposely did not highlight the models Hair, as I wanted it to stand out against the background. The Background was White Muslin. I used a separate strobe light with a Blue Gel over a barn door attached to the strobe. I have started using Gel’s on White backgrounds to bring different colors, it is also nice because you can angle it and get it gradient fill with the blue gel attached.

Once I had taken the photo, I imported it into Adobe Lightroom so I could manage the photo and then edit it in photoshop. The 2nd photo shows the edited photo that I used Scott Kelby’s book. Basically the photo was edited in the following way’s. I used Liquify to adjust the shape of the face and thinning it out in the cheeks, neck and nose. I also adjusted the lips to make them a little more full and reshape them to look more symmetrical. The eye’s were sharpened, the skin smoothed out and imperfections of the skin cleared up. I wanted to keep the basic shape of the face with some of the wrinkles in the face but just softened. At this point the photo was sent to the model as a final edit, that she could print it or put it on facebook.

Now that I had a final photo, I wanted to practice a few new tips I had learned and start painting digital make-up! In the Third photo I will explain what I did to the photo. So I had a plan, I wanted to add a few things to the face and practice my technique. The plan was to outline the eye’s (add eye-liner), at eye shadow, change the lip color, even out the tone of the skin with the natural make-up that had been applied, but just even it out. I also added digital eye lashes. Finally I highlighted the hair!

The trick to adding digital makeup is as follows:

1. Get a Tablet – I have the Wacom Intous 4
2. Use the Tablet Pen to draw
3. Use lots of layers to paint on the colors you want
4. Create one layer for each eye, eye lashes (uppper & lower), eyebrows, lip, eye brows, foundation, etc.
5. If something doesn’t look write, erase what is in the layer and start over.
6. When you think your done, use Command-option-Shift-E to flatten your image, but keep all the other layers
7. Use the new flattened layer to start creating new Layer masks to do things like lighten area’s that don’t match, like darkening upper eyelid but leaving the under eye lid alone or sharpening something.
8. Use the Opacity and Flow settings on the different layers to lighten or darken any of the layers to even or make more subtle the effect you are looking for.

In the Final Photo, I used twenty one (21) layers to get the effect I wanted. Since I had made a layer for every thing that I edited or painted, if I needed to go back and clean something up, based on changes I made later, I could do it independently of the other work, so it wasn’t affected. When I was applying eye shadow, I actually used 4 different colors with different opacities, and filtered noise to get a little more shine or sparkle, since colors can’t do it naturally! You will even notice eyebrows are much darker and more clean, this was done by painting the outline that I wanted and using a soft brush with strokes in the direction the hair beneath was facing. Then I lowered the opacity and fill until I got a even and natural look , so it didn’t look like Groucho Marx.

I didn’t send the third photo to the client, mostly because, it was my first digital make-up and need to spend more time practicing before I would do it for a customer, but I didn’t think it was to bad for the first attempt. It was subtle changes, only a little bit of a change from the natural makeup, I just tried to bring more emphasis to the eyes and add digital eye lashes. I do think that looking at the original photo to the final photo, that the model looks about 10 years younger! Maybe one day I will send it to her! Just not today!