Touch Up Portraits, Part 1

Tweak intimate shots so your subjects look their best.

Dave Johnson

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Feature: Touch Up Your Portraits

During the Renaissance, the nobles of Europe commissioned famous artists to paint their portraits. These were pictures not as the subjects really were, but as they imagined themselves: beautiful, refined, and noble of spirit. Knowing those unspoken rules, the great painters of the age always improved on reality with strategic strokes of the brush.

These days, digital cameras aren't quite so generous, so our portraits can sometimes benefit from a few improvements. This week and next, let's look at how you can tweak your family portraits to put--if you'll excuse the expression--everyone's best face forward.

Make a Checklist of Improvements

Let's start with a picture that could use some improvement. Take a recent photo of my daughter and her grandmother, save it, and load it into your image editor. It's a wonderful shot that spans generations, but we can do a lot to make it more pleasing to the eye.

For starters, I see some wrinkles on Grandma's face. Don't get me wrong; there's nothing wrong with wrinkles. But let's smooth them over a little anyway. While we're at it, she has a few blemishes--dark spots on her face--that we can clear away as well. Both faces have "hot spots" from the camera flash. I hate that, so let's see if we can eliminate them as well. Likewise, there are some reflections in my daughter's eyeglasses. We may not be able to completely erase that, but we can try. Both faces have a little red-eye effect from the camera flash. And--what the heck--let's see if we can whiten the teeth a little, too.

Once all that's taken care of, we can isolate our subjects from the background with a little well-placed blur.

That's a lot to do, so let's get started using Jasc Paint Shop Pro--though these techniques are very similar no matter what image editing program you use.

Smooth Away Wrinkles

One of the easiest ways to make a portrait of someone a bit more flattering is to smooth any wrinkles--especially in the forehead and under the eyes.

To do that, start by selecting the region of interest. I suggest using the Freehand Selection tool, which lives in the fifth cubby from the top of the toolbar on the left side of the screen. In the Tool Options palette at the top of the screen, set the Selection type to Freehand (you can turn on the Tool Options palette if necessary by choosing View, Palettes, Tool Options). Left-click and hold while "drawing" the parameters of just Grandma?s forehead; lift your finger once you've closed the loop of your selection. Then choose Adjust, Blur, Gaussian Blur and set it to about 0.8. Click OK and you'll get something like what I have.

Now repeat the process around the rest of Grandma's face to smooth things out a bit. I applied a little Gaussian blur to the forehead, both cheeks, including the crow's feet around her eyes, and the chin.

You might be wondering why I picked a blur value of 0.8. The answer: I experimented, knowing that low values for Gaussian blur yield the most subtle effects. For this picture, I thought anything over 0.8 was simply too much; but, as in any image editing, you need to season things to your own taste.

Remove Red Eye

Before we go much further, let's get rid of the red-eye effect. Thankfully, it's not terribly pronounced in this image, but we should get rid of it nonetheless.

Choose Adjust, Red-Eye Removal and drag the preview on the right side of the Red-Eye Removal dialog around until one of the eyes is front and center. Zoom in until you can see the eye well, and pick an appropriate eye color from the Hue and Color controls. Finally, click and drag the diameter of an eye in the left side of the dialog box. Repeat the process for each eye that needs some work and click OK to close the dialog. By this time, your image probably looks something like mine.

We're off to a great start, but we still have a lot of work to do. If you've been playing along at home, you might want to save your picture now so you can finish the project next week, when we'll eliminate blemishes, zap reflections, and more. We'll even whiten the teeth a bit and hopefully end up with a picture that's good enough to frame.

Dave's Favorites: Watch Movies on Your Palm With Kinoma

Have you ever recorded a short movie using your digital camera and wished you had a bigger screen to view it on? You don't really need a 42-inch television, but the 2-inch digital display on the back of the camera is just too small. Why not display the movie on your PDA?

I've recommended movie players for Palm and Pocket PC devices before, but the newest version from Kinoma--Player EX--makes it all so simple.

The problem with most movie players for PDAs is that you usually have to convert the movie on your PC into a format friendly to your movie player, then copy the files to your PDA. No more: Kinoma Player EX has built-in support for most popular movie formats, including MPEG-4, QuickTime, and DirectShow. The bottom line is that you can now pop a Secure Digital Card out of your camera or camera phone and insert it directly into your Palm OS PDA to watch whatever movie your digital camera just recorded, with no intermediate steps needed.

Kinoma is available for $20 and runs on any PDA that uses Palm OS 5 or higher.

Q&A: How Do I Get Great Moon Photos?

I've been trying to get some night shots lately (with a tripod, of course!) and have been shooting with an Olympus C-5050. I have been told you can get good shots of the moon by taking multiple shots at a fast shutter speed (to keep the moon from creeping across the sky) and then layering them in an image editing program. What do you think of that?

--Robert Bainbridge, Oberlin, Kansas

That's a good technique for some kinds of night shots, Robert. It's so good that I may cover iy in an upcoming newsletter. But I think that it's needlessly complicated for taking pictures of the moon.

Moon shots require a fairly short shutter speed to begin with, so there's no advantage to combining a sequence of photos. I have shot the moon extensively with a variety of digital cameras, and the recipe is pretty simple: If your camera has an ISO setting of about 100, try to set the aperture to f/4 and use a shutter speed of about 1/125 second. From there you can fine-tune the results by eye. If the picture is overexposed, double the shutter speed to 1/250. If it's underexposed, extend the shutter speed to 1/60 second. Alternately, you can get the same effect by leaving the exposure controls alone and tweaking the exposure compensation setting to slightly over- or underexpose consecutive shots. You should be able to get some really nice moon pictures with these settings.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This Week's Hot Pic: "Homework Daydreamer," by Ken Maurer, Omaha

Ken says that he took this picture with a Panasonic FZ10 while experimenting with the camera's black and white setting. Here's what Ken has to say about the picture: "The black and white mode adds a soft, dreamy quality to the image. In Paint Shop Pro 8, I sharpened the image slightly and blurred the background. Finally, I used the selection tool to create a small border to which I applied a Gaussian blur."