Airbrushing

In my first lesson of photojournalism, I learnt how to airbrush on Photo shop. Generally in advertising, airbrushing is just to get rid of any spots or wrinkles that might be on the model, however airbrushing may be used in other photography on objects etc.

I was first demonstrated how to airbrush by my tutor and then had a go myself. 

• I opened up my image of Bruce Willis into Photo shop
• I then duplicated the layer of the picture, which I then added a surface blur to in order to soften to the image overall
• After adding this surface blur, I then completed a layer mask with the use of completely black brush which I used to paint over the areas I wanted to keep the detail of. These areas where such things as the eyes, and the hair etc.
• I then zoomed into the area around his left eye, and removed the wrinkles by using the clone stamp with a very small brush. I cloned the area of skin which looked the best, to create a nice skin tone around the eye 
• Next, I created a new layer of the image and took the brush tool. At this point, I knocked down the opacity and flow to 40%, then I held alt to sample parts of the skin tone colour and brushed the face with this same colour to even the skin tones out.
• After, I then used the blur brush to create a smooth skin tone around the eye so that the image would look less fake, as using the clone stamp made the area look flat and out of shape. 
• I then decided to make the teeth and eyes of Willis whiter, in order to make them stand out even more from the skin. I did this by creating a new layer of the image, of which allowed me to use a bright white in order to colour over the teeth and the eyes. By creating the new layer this allowed me to reduce the opacity of the white paint brush tool and so the teeth would not look that fake in comparison to the rest of the picture. 
• After finishing my airbrushing, I decided to apply higher contrast and some highlights into the image, to give the model a more tanned skin tone as in the original image he looked rather pale.
• I then saved my image as a JPEG on Photo shop, and inserted into my blog. The image is below, also with the original image before any editing took place.