The Engagement Picture

Posted by: Dan on Feb 15, 2008

I originally didn’t want to post this picture because of copyright control. I know that Brooke and I arranged with the photographer that our wedding pictures will not contain a copyright – we can print them as we want. I’m not sure if that comes into play with the engagement pictures.

However, this image works perfectly to show the powers of Photoshop. And because I’m using this image as a method to show comparison it falls under fair use – no copyright violation.

So have a look at the two pics and see what you think. Was it worth me doing a bit of Photoshopping?

Original Picture:
Engagement Pic - Original

Edited Picture:
Engagement Pic - Edited

(I don’t know why it looks like I’m wearing lipstick… I didn’t edit that into the picture).

Basically what I did in this edit was…

  1. I had a few blemishes on my face. To fix those I used the stamp tool to cover them.
  2. Used the blur tool with a softer setting and smoothed out our skin. You don’t want to go overboard and end up with plastic looking skin (or blur lines)
  3. Used the lasso tool around our teeth and whitened them with the dodge tool. The lighting made may teeth look bad… ugh.
  4. Used the burn tool on the shinny spots on the skin. Too much light was reflected off my massive forehead!
  5. Blurred the area I used the burn tool on in the step above.
  6. Used the “unsharp mask” filter on the whole image (to crisp-up the finner details)

And there you have it… simple as 1, 2, 3.