Graphics Zone - Style Library Part 1

PUSSY CASH

Photoshop Professional Airbrushing Tutorial

by Damien King, YuuFuu.com

In this tutorial, we'll take a look at how photographs can be airbrushed to give them that professional glamour look, in just a few easy steps. I'll be working with Photoshop 7, although any recent version up to and including CS2 should operate in the same way.

Note: if you haven't gotten a copy of Photoshop yet, head over to Adobe.com and download a free trial to test the program out. It's by far the most advanced and adaptable graphic design package available.

To start with, grab this image of Danya (of Danyalicious.com and © MilkItCash.com) as it'll be what I'll demonstrate the technique with. You can use your own image if you prefer. Open it up in Photoshop, and make a copy of the image by going to Layer and clicking on Duplicate Layer:

Here's where the magic begins. You should now have a second layer, called "Background copy". Now, we'll add the richness of airbrushing - click on the Image menu, go to the Adjustments submenu and click Brightness/Contrast. Type 60 into the contrast box, like so:

Now press OK. Woah! We have one high contrast Danya. Let's soften this up a little - click on the Filter menu, scroll down to Blur and click on the Gaussian Blur option. Change the value to 3.0 pixels, and hit OK.

We're almost done. We're going to change the translucency of this high contrast layer and make it blend correctly with the original image below. Head over to your layer palette, and click on the small dropdown box to the right of the word Opacity - this controls this layer's translucency, with 100% being fully opaque and 0% being entirely transparent. Drop the value down to around 50% or so - this'll be slightly different for each image you use. Finally, click on the dropdown box just to the left of the Opacity box, where it says Normal, and select the Soft Light option:

So, here's my finished result below. Try it out on various photographs of models, friends or yourself, and see what you can come up with.