retouching | Tyson Robichaud Photo-blography

As many of you have figured out, we stopped our monthly flicker photo blog challenge, much to my dismay. Flickr’s desire to dumb itself down, into little more than a mobile app proved to be the death rattle for our monthly project which was going really well, bringing in hundreds of submissions for our monthly contests. C’est la vie.

Well, with these lemons, I’d like to make lemonade because lemonade is awesome, especially if you only use half the recommended sugar and watch your unsuspecting friends, and young children drink it.

I’ve been in conversation with my friends at Alien Skin Software, and have had the great fortune to be both a contributor to their blog, and a beta tester for many of their programs over the years, the newest of which is the yet to be released, Exposure update. As a long time fan of Exposure, I’m excited to see the final version. With this new project, I’d like to gauge interest in having a retouching tutorial, where by I process and retouch submitted images using Exposure, which may then be shared with many, many thousands of viewers here and through the Alien Skin blog. Come on in for more details, and my hope for this collaboration…

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A couple years ago, I’d posted a tutorial on simple eye enhancement techniques and I wanted to revisit and build on that. Lately, “Photoshop” has seemed to be getting absolutely bludgeoned and cast as some evil, socially destructive outcast. Used as a verb, photoshopping has become akin to kicking a blind puppy, and then forcing it into a life of anorexia. While I am in no way a fan of, nor support using photoshop to unnaturally build unrealistic body proportions, or overly plasticize a face to perfection, I will make the case that retouching is an art and like anything has boundaries. If viewing retouching from a creative angle, there are things that can be a lot of fun. If viewing retouching from a practical angle, it can be effective. Going overboard in any direction can certainly lead to criticism, but so many forms of artistic manipulation have and will always continue to draw ire. For this post, I want to play around with both the creative and practical angles in regards to enhancing one’s eyes in a portrait. Thank you to my friends Mat and Heather from Mirrorlessons – Bestmirrorlesscamerareviews.com for the shot you see above. Eyes are often a focal point in many a good portrait, so why not add a bit of punch to that focal point? Come on in to see how I achieve this quickly and easily. If interested, you can download these eye enhancement Photoshop actions for free…

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