Meet Facetune - The perfect portrait and selfie editor in your pocket

You can easily retouch your portraits and selfies like a pro using powerful desktop software suites like photoshop and lightroom. Imagine a situation where you don't have access to your laptop and you feel the urge to retouch a group of photographs you just got clicked with your friends. The standard photo editors that come pre-installed on your devices are just too austere for a professional magazine level retouch. Isn't it? Here's where the facetune app enters to your rescue. With facetune installed on your device, you carry flawless retouching capabilities in your pocket. Forget about photoshop and lightroom. You can't ask more from a mobile app like this one. Seriously friends!

Here's what you can do with facetune -

1. Say goodbye to facial marks and blemishes

Using the "patch tool" in the app, you can get rid of all the unwanted facial marks, spots and blemishes.

2. Look clean-shaven (for guys, obviously :p)

Does your facial stubble in the picture make you look shabby? Don't worry. Use the "smooth tool" in the app to get that clean shaven look!

3. Whiten your teeth

Pale teeth can be embarrassing. Use the "whiten teeth" tool to get that flawless smile :)

4. Remove red eyes

Clicking a selfie in low natural light with flash turned on is the main reason why you see that red eye in your photo. With the "red eye" tool, all that you have to do is to just tap on the red eyes, and they're gone! 

5. Look slim

Get rid of that double chin and fat belly using the "reshape tool"

6. Look younger

Using the "smooth tool" & "patch tool", you can reverse all the signs of aging!

6. Color your hair and clothes

Using the "tone picker", you can easily change the color of your hair and clothes to whatever you like.

7. Defocus/Blur the background

With a DSLR, you can easily click a portrait with shallow depth of field. But if you don't have one or if you simply forgot to introduce the effect with your DSLR while shooting the photographs, this app can help. 

8. Plus, a variety of amazing effects!!!

Grab it. It's available for just $4 on Android and iOS.

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4 Steps To Make Colors Pop In Photoshop

Color is very important information when it comes to photography. A good amount of color balance can really make your photograph pop out. In this tutorial I will show you how u can make your photographs more vivid with very simple steps.

We usually work on RGB colors mode, which has three channels, RED, GREEN and BLUE. For printing it’s the CYMK which has 4 channels Cyan, Yellow , Magenta and Black. In this tutorial we will be working on LAB color mode. Follow the stepwise process to achieve vividness in your photographs.

Step 1

Change the color mode from RGB to LAB mode from IMAGE > Mode > LAB color mode. The advantage is, LAB offers separate channels for colors and exposure.

 

Step 2

LAB color mode has two channels A and B for colors where channel A control Magenta and cyan and B controls blue and yellow. The separate channel Lightness controls the exposure of the photograph. When you increase the color you don’t change the exposure of the images.

Now all that you need to do is to increase the contrast of both the channel. When you increase the contrast of these two channels they only affects the color but not the luminance of the color. Luminance is the level of brightness of any color.

Step 3

Select the channel A and apply the contrast either by going to image>Contrast or applying ‘s’ curves. Now repeat the same process for channel B. You can see the difference now. If you have used adjustment layers you can use the opacity slider to control the amount of vividness and makes sure to merge it down.

Step 4

Change the color mode back to RGB from LAB color mode.

See the before and after in the image below

Anup Ghimre

About the Guest Author:

Anup Ghimire is a Nepal based photographer & re-toucher, blogger and
educator. He is mostly interested in landscape and fashion
photography. He also has a blog pixeltut.com and has been doing
video tutorials for lightroom and photoshop. You can follow him on
twitter @anupg44.

 

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The Importance Of Black-and-White Photography

What comes to your mind when you see a photo in black-and-white tone? Do you think it’s too archaic to think of? Well, think again! Black-and-white photography has started attracting many natty photographers from around the world. And here are the two solid reasons why many people still prefer monotones to full saturated colours:

1. A photo in black-and-white tone allows you to focus on lights, shadows, textures and lines, which are obviously difficult to discern in case of a full coloured tone!

2. Black-and-white tones are evocative to cheerful memories of the past.  For example – A wedding photograph in black-and-white tone will be more poignant to look at, than just a plain coloured one.

Well, this post is not to teach on how to shoot in black-and-white, instead, how to convert a coloured photograph into black-and-white tone in Photoshop!

It’s always a better choice to convert your coloured photos into black-and-white using post-processing techniques, than to directly shoot in black-and-white at the first place. There’s a good reason for that – A photo shot in black-and-white tone is very difficult and time consuming to colourize using Photoshop and, on the other-hand, a coloured photo can be very easily converted into a black-and-white one! So, in this way you have an option to preserve both the tones :)

How To Convert A Coloured Photo Into Black-And-White In Photoshop?

Before you start the conversion process, please note that - not just every photo looks great in b/w tone. You have to identify the types of photos first…

Here are some of the photo themes that look wonderful in b/w tone:

Child Photography,  Wedding Photography,  Portrait Photography and Wildlife Photography (For rest, you can always experiment)

Step1. Open up your image in Photoshop and navigate to Image –> Adjustments –> Black & White (70% of the task is completed here itself!). A pop-up window will appear soon after that. You don’t have to change any colour value there. Just click OK!

Step 2. Navigate to Image –> Adjustments –> Levels.

Tweaking with levels gives you a wide range of control over the shadows and lights of your black-and-white image. Tweaking the ‘input levels’ make your shadow areas more darker and the light areas more lighter while tweaking the ‘output levels’ does the opposite. So, adjust the sliders a little bit in accordance to your editing taste and till you get the desired results!

If the photo gets a little bit over-exposed, move the lighter slider in the ‘output levels’ a little bit to the left and if it gets under-exposed, move the shadow slider in the ‘output levels’ a little bit to the right.

Here are the slider values for the photo that I’m converting (that’s just for an example, your slider values might completely differ in accordance with the tone of your photo)

After all that, just click OK! and save your photo. Here are my results…

Can you feel the magic of the above monotone? While the coloured one appeared just plain and distractible, the converted one brings the main subject into focus. The tone is calm and soothing to the eyes!

So what’s your preferred tone? Coloured OR Monotone. I look forward to hear your thoughts in the comments below :)

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Picasa Editing and Retouching tutorial

After sharing an awesome photo editing tutorial in PhotoScape, here I present the next photo editing and retouching tutorial using Google Picasa. The new version of Picasa offers much more to edit photos using a variety of new photo editing effects like HDR(High Dynamic Range), Lomo, Cross process, Comic Print and even Vignette. Editing photos in new Google Picasa(version 3.9) has just became easier and and a lot more funnier. So without wasting any more time, lets go ahead and try out this awesome photo editing trick in Picasa !! You all will definitely love this for sure !

How to edit photos in Picasa ?

1. Open up your photo in Picasa and select the Retouch option in the left window (under the commonly needed fixes with wrench icon).

This removes all sorts of marks and blemishes from your photo. The process of retouching is quite simple –> select the size of brush and click – drag from the point of imperfection to perfection on the skin. I mean, just click-hold at the mark on the skin and then drag-release to the adjacent clearer point on the skin. This process will cover up all the marks/spots and the skin will look a lot more clearer. Have a look at the screenshot below…

2. Now navigate to the third tab (with plain brush icon). Under this tab, select ‘Glow’ and apply the effect with default slider settings.

3. Under the last tab, select ‘Vignette’. And that is it – Retouching and editing has been successfully completed in Google Picasa.

You can play with other effects as well, like – comic-print, pencil-sketch, polaroid and grey. These effects will pop your photo in case you are planning to use it as your Facebook profile picture. Anyways…this was the most basic editing and retouching that can be done using Google Picasa. Have fun – editing your photos !!

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Tilt Shift Photoshop Tutorial

Tilt shift is a photography technique in which a selective area of the picture is focused (the selective focused area is often stretched straight – either horizontally or vertically).

It is possible to play around with this photography on a DSLR using specially designed tilt shift lenses, but this would costs hundreds of dollars. However, this special effect can be easily applied to photos using some post-production work with Photoshop. With so much room for image enhancements and a variety of blur effects to apply, amazing tilt shifts are possible using Adobe Photoshop. In this tutorial, I will explain how to apply tilt shift effects to your photos in Adobe Photoshop. Here I go…

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How to create tilt shift in Photoshop ?

Follow this comprehensive step by step tutorial to create tilt shift effect in Adobe Photoshop. I assume that you have already installed Photoshop (I am using Photoshop version CS4)

Step 1: Open the photo in Photoshop press ‘Q’ key to enter the quick mask mode. Right after its selection, click on the gradient tool located on the same toolbar. Refer the screen shots below…

 

Ensure that the top gradient toolbar matches these settings - grey value stripes, reflected gradient and normal mode.

Step 2: Now start by placing the pointer on the image where you want most of the focus. Press-hold ‘Shift’ key and click-hold-drag down to the point where you want the focus to terminate.

Quick tip: If you want a horizontal tilt shift/horizontally focused area, then you need to click-hold and drag the pointer vertically starting from the point where you want most of the focus to the point where you want diminished focus. Similarly, if you want a vertical tilt shift/vertically focused area, then you need to drag the pointer horizontally starting from the point where you want high focus to the point of diminished focus.

In my example, I want horizontal tilt shift or a horizontally focused area, so I start by click-holding and dragging the pointer in vertical direction (from high focus point to low focus point of my interest)…

Step 3: De-select the quick mask mode by pressing ‘Q’ key on the keyboard. You will see dotted selection area on the photo as shown below…

Step 4: From the top most toolbar, navigate to Filter –> Blur –> Gaussian Blur. Apply a suitable level of Gaussian blur tool and your tilt shift photo is almost ready. Press CTRL+D to remove the dotted selection lines from the photo.

Step 5: It’s the time to enhance the overall photo by playing with the color, contrast and hue/saturation options of Photoshop. This will add more life to your tilt shift photographs. It’s not necessary that you strictly follow the settings shown below. Just add them in accordance to your photos and taste.

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And these are some of the tilt shift pictures I obtained as a result of this tutorial…

I hope that you will find this tutorial helpful and interesting too. Go ahead and experiment tilt shift on a variety of photos with this tutorial Your comments and feedback are always welcomed…

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How to Change background in Photoshop

A distracting background certainly spoils the beauty of a good photograph. With powerful image editing softwares like Adobe Photoshop, it is very easy to change the background of a photo. In this Photoshop tutorial, I will explain - how easily one can replace a distracting background with a desired background photo. I am using Adobe Photoshop version CS4 while creating this tutorial. 

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Step by Step tutorial – Change/replace a background image in Photoshop 

Step 1: Open your image in Photoshop. Press ‘Q’ to quick mask and then select brush tool from the left toolbar. Paint the entire subject completely with the brush tool, ensuring that you don’t spread the color out of the picture. This process takes time.

Step 2: Now after finishing painting the whole subject, press ‘Q’ again and select inverse from the drop-down menu of Adobe Photoshop.
 

Step 3: After that, copy your image using Ctrl+C and open up the new background image in Photoshop itself by navigating through File –> Open. Paste this copied picture on this new background using Ctrl+V. To adjust the photo on this new background, press Ctrl+T (transformation tool). With this tool you can easily resize or rotate the picture on the new background, so that it looks a part of it  
 Wasn’t that easy ? This is how you can change or replace a background image inPhotoshop. As an alternative, you can also choose to blur the background in Photoshop instead of replacing it with a newer one.

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How to blur the background of a photo in Photoshop with quick mask and Gaussian blur tool

Blurring the background of a photo is very easy to do in Photoshop. All that you have to do is to mask your photo or subject and apply the appropriate blur effect in Photoshop. A well focused subject standing against a soft background is a great way to draw the attention of the observer towards the subject. Although one can easily shoot a subject with a blurred background using basic digital cameras, the background can also be blurred easily by using this post-processing technique in Photoshop. So here we go with our new photo editing tutorial on defocusing the background using Photoshop…

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Step 1: Mask the subject completely. Press ‘Q’ and select the brush tool from the left toolbar. Since we need to blur the background of the photo, we have to mask our subject so that it does not gets affected while applying blur to the entire photo. Refer the sample below…

Make sure that you cover your subject neatly and completely. This process can take time but it’s worth doing for achieving amazing results. If the mask spreads out of the subject, use the eraser tool for correction.

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Step 2: After finishing the masking of the subject, press Q again. Navigate to Filter –> Blur –> Gaussian Blur. Select a smaller radius value for the Gaussian blur tool, or else the photo might look over edited. a radius value of 4.0 to 5.0 should produce reasonable blurring effect.

 

That’s all. When you are satisfied with the level of blurred background, click OK and save your picture. This is how easily you can blur the background of a photo using quick mask and Gaussian blur tool in Adobe Photoshop. Thanks for going through this short and easy tutorial. Your comments and feedbacks are always appreciated  

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