Smudging

J

jpd300

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Name
Ju
Edit My Images
Yes
I would like some advice on how we do this, I am having great difficulty in doing faces - hair / clothes I can just about manage.



Firstly around the eyes, I might be wrong here but I always thought you should follow the flow on that you are doing, so with the skin around the eyes should I go round the eyes in a circular movement of fan out from the eye itself. Because if I do circular movements I get a sort of whirlpool effect around the eye (not good) or am I doing too long a stoke.

My other problems is the tones / shadows - I always keep making shadows - I think it's because I am dragging them too far I just end up with very blotchy looking skin.

Any advice would be fab.

Thanks
Julian
 
I take it you're talking about air brushing? It's a technique which is well overdone in a lot of pics we see, but having said that, it's also a technique which requires lots of practice and sound judgement.

Have you tried varying the opacity of your brush and building up gradually?
 
If you're talking about retouching a photo then smudging is not the best way to do it. Have a search on google for retouching tutorials. There's loads of techniques, find one that suits the way you work. But as CT says be sure not to over do it.
 
What exactly are you trying to do. Are you trying to reduce facial blemishes such as lines etc? If so there is a simple technique you can use in Photoshop, and I think Elements as well.

Duplicate the image onto another layer.. Select this layer and apply Gaussian blur, just enough to soften the image.

You'll see the image soften. However eyes teeth and other areas are to soft . We have to remove the softening from this area.

Now on the duplicate layer, make a layer mask. Thats the circle in a box symbol at the bottom of the layers pallet . Just click on it

With the foreground colour set to black, choose the Brush tool. Dont choose a brush size to big. Now simply brush around those areas you want to have return to their orriginal sharpness. Don't worry if you make a mistake, change the foreground colour to white and paint over your mistake.

When done, flatten image and save it.

If you could post an example that would help define what the shadow / tones problem is
 
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