Digital Portrait Photography For Dummies®

Chapter 11. Retouching Your Portraits

In This Chapter

• Removing a background

• Creating a background

• Retouching your portraits

• Retouching portraits of older subjects

If every person you photograph has a peaches-and-cream complexion, and you photograph all of them against a perfect background, you can go out and shoot more portraits instead of reading this chapter. But if you're like most of us, your subjects have some subtle flaws they'd rather not see in a portrait. Perfectionists can spend hours retouching an image, removing every single imperfection they see. But people aren't perfect. The trick is to retouch a portrait just enough to make your subjects look their best without making them look inhuman — and without spending hours to achieve that goal. In this chapter, I introduce you to the joys of retouching.

Editing Non-Destructively

When you use a Photoshop Elements tool or menu command, the results almost always change the original pixels in some way, shape, or form. For that matter, any tool or command used in most imageediting program changes pixels. So what happens when good pixels turn terribly wrong? Well, you have the Undo command, but image-editing programs allow you only a limited number of uses of that command. Some image-editing applications allow you to increase the number of times you can use the Undo command, but this takes up system resources, resources you should be using ...