jacobandreas.net » Senior Portrait Photomanip Magic

One occasionally encounters outraged exposés (somebody check my French) of the heavy amount of editing that goes into magazine cover shots and the like. But, with the proofs from my senior portrait today in hand, I decided to indulge myself in a little photoshopping (or in this case GIMPing), just to see if I could make a difference in my own pictures.

The raw material:

This is a scaled-down scan of the pictures the photographers gave us to take home. The pixelation is a remnant of the screening of the original picture, and unfortunately, there was nothing I could do about that.

The surgery:

The letters were removed using the clone stamp tool to duplicate their background. As will be apparent, I gave up after only two letters (though I admit I rather like what is implied by leaving the rest of them on).

Birthmarks and pimples were similarly removed using the clone stamp tool

The skin was smoothed by duplicating the base layer, pixelizing it (averaging every 5×5 block) and applying a Gaussian blur with a radius of 10. This layer was then masked completely and brushed on over large open areas like the forehead (leaving edges intact and crisp).

Finally, both layers were collapsed and I let the GIMP automatically adjust white balance.

The result:

And lastly, a side-by-side comparison:

Lessons learned

This is really easy. The photographers have no right to charge so much for blemish removal.
By choosing not to mask the blurred layer but setting it at ~40% opacity, I achieve the sort of glowy effect that appears to be favored by Chinese pornographers (judging by the pictures in the Chinatown shop windows). In actual fact, doing this makes me look rather like that photo of Ting Hsu in the yearbook.
I’m beautiful just the way I am, but I’m sexy with only minor retouching (though we knew that already, didn’t we?)

Moral ambiguities aside, a thoroughly edifying project.