Wedding Photography and Pimples
Make Precious Memories Free From Temporary Skin Blemishes
Their wedding is the most important day in some girls' lives, and photography plays an important role in preserving those memories for a lifetimeby editing out pimples.
While pimples may fade, the wedding photos should ensure they do not live on forever to mar the memories of the day. This is a quick look at how to remove temporary skin blemishes from the bride’s face. Good professional wedding photographers do this as part of their normal workflow. However, if you are doing a favor for a friend and acting as the official wedding photographer, then you need to know this technique. Of course, it applies to all portrait photography.
The photo serving as the example is an anxious bride and the photographer checking images on the digital camera’s LCD preview screen. This highlights the importance brides place on the photos. Photo 2 is a blown up section of the original showing a large pimple on the left side of the bride’s nose. This is will probably fade in time, and careful editing can make it fade in the bride’s photographic prints.
In many digital editing programs, such as Adobe Photoshop and the Gimp, there is a clone stamp tool for this purpose. There is a more automatic spot healing tool but it automatically selects the area to sample and in complex areas, it can often select the wrong pixels to stamp. It is very good for quick fixes on large areas.
This procedure is based on Adobe Photoshop CS2. Select the stamp tool in the tool dialog box (see picture 3), and zoom in to the image. It does not matter if the image looks slightly pixilated, as the further in you zoom the more accurate you can be with your editing work. A handy keyboard shortcut is as you zoom in holding down the space bar changes the active tool is to the moving hand to allow you to keep your target area in the centre of the image display area.
It is important to select an area to sample for the stamp tool that will blend in. To set the initial sample spot, hold down the ALT key and the cursor changes to a crosshair inside a circle. Move this to the desired source area of skin and press the left mouse button. This is not absolute spot, but sets the distance and angle for where the pixels come from. Your first stamp, after selecting a source, fixes the relative distance and direction from the source to where you apply the stamp. This works slightly differently in the Gimp. There you use the CTL key to select and area and it always starts from that selected point as you start to stamp.
Finally just to finish off this stage of digital image processing use the blur tool to smooth out any transitions in the area you have been working. All the brushes and stamps are adjustable for size and hardness so they will suit the size of the area you are editing.
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