In this tutorial, we're going to be learning how to retouch a picture. Retouching a picture is an excellent way of taking a really bad quality or bland picture and transforming it into something that's incredibly beautiful and colorful. You can add anything on the image, a flower, a pin, anything you want. However, retouching a picture is usually more about enhancing the actual picture than making a totally new graphics. With that said, feel free to add your own little object in there but don't go all out.

I usually don't add anything though.

We're going to start with the following picture of Lily Cole. It's as hard as you can get with a picture and it's exactly what you would want if you were wanting to retouch something. It's extremely bland and lacking color.

to this:

Please don't use the same image as mine. Use something different. If you're afraid that the tutorial won't give you the same results with a different images then you need to get over that fear because the effect will always going to be different. It all depends on the image. This tutorial isn't supposed to be implantable on every image but it should give you ideas on how to make retouches.

With that said, here are some images for you to use.

I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended in this tutorial. It shouldn't matter much though. This tutorial mostly uses color and other program presets that other programs should have.

1. Take your image. Open a new Photoshop Canvas and paste your image in it.

2. Make two other duplicates of your image so you have three of them. Set the second layer on Screen 51% and the third layer on Overlay 100%. Mine.

3. Select the first image with your mouse, highlight it so that you can apply effects to it. Go to your blur tool (picture) , click on it and go over the face and any exposed skin. However, Do not blur the lips, eyes or eyebrows. We want those to stay sharp. After your down with the first image go over to the two other duplicates and blur them as well. However, blur as much as you need to. Sometime you only need to blur the first image to get smooth skin. However, with my image, because Lily has so much freckles and such I have to blur all three images. Mine.

4. If you can, try to add a Surface Blur to the first image. Surface blur can be found by going to Filter > Blur > Surface Blur. However, Surface Blur is only in the Creative Suite (CS) so you might not find it older version of Photoshop. It might be just a CS3 thing. It's not extremely important though so if you don't have it you can just skip to the next step. But I applied one to mine to get to look better. Again, I'm working with a hard picture so I need to do all these things to it. You're image may not need so much blur as mine.

5. Make a new layer by going to Layer > New > Layer or hitting the little 'Create New Layer' box at the bottom of the Layers Palette.

6. Using the Circle tool draw a little eclipse over the lips. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Set the radius on 7.0, You can also use a Drop Shadow brush to highlight the lips with color instead of making a circle.
Use color fill # fc4651. That color should work on your image too. I use it as a preset color for all of the images that I retouch. It works pretty well. You don't have to use it though, use whatever you like.

7. Set the above layer on Color 100%. Duplicate it. Set the Duplicate on Softlight 100%. If you don't have those two settings in your program, Color Burn or Overlay might work. Just play around with what you have and you probably will get something that looks good. If you get a little of the pink/red color laying outside the lips, use the eraser tool and erase some of it. Mine.

8. The same way you put color over the lips, put some color on the eyes. Depending what color eyes your image has, the color that you use in your brush fill or circle will depend. Since Lily has blue eyes, I'm going to use color #086b9e. Create a new layer. Make one circle on one of the yes. Duplicate that layer and move it onto the other eye. Merge the two layers (Layer > Merge Down, while selecting the second layer of the blue circles). Then apply a Gaussian Blur, radius 7 again. Mine.

9. Play around with the eyes and try to find a suitable effect. I usually like eyes that are bright in color and radiant. So I duplicated my eye colors and set the first layer on Color 100% and the second layer on Color Dodge 74%. Again, do what you like. Different people have different tastes.

10. Clean the outside area. You probably have some color laying on the cornea and outside the eyes. To clean things, I always use a soft, circular, Drop Shadow Brush which, if you have PS, you'll find in the presets. If you don't have Photoshop, here's the brush. Mine.

11. Using the Burn Tool go over the eyelashes, lips and the eyebrows. Burn tool.

12. Using the Burn Tool again, make sure it's set on Midtones 46%, go over the face. Do this only if you're face still looks a little in need of depth and color. Mine.

13. After the top most layer, go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation, put the following values: Hue -5 and Saturation -1. Do not select Colorize. Mine. It doesn't really do a lot but it does do something. With my picture it added a little pink tint to the face to make it look more alive.

14. Make a new layer. Using the Drop Shadow brush, gove over the eyelids to give your image a little eye shadow. If they already have eyeshow, use the same color. If they don't have eyeshadow, use the same color as that of their eyes. In my case, I used blue since Lily's eyes are blue. Set the eyeshadow on Overlay. I also, used the same method to add a little blue below the eye lids so that Lily's eyes looked deeper and darker. I set that layer to Overlay as well. Mine.

15. Using the Sharpen tool (click) go over the clothes, a little bit of the lips, eyes, eyelashes and especially the hair. Don't make them too sharp though, sharpen them within reasonable limits.

16. You may or may not need to do this step depending on your image. If this doesn't apply to your image, skip ahead to the next step.

Since my image still looks a little too unrealistic, I'm going to resize it. Only resize if you really need to. In my case, I do need to because I can still see her freckles. When I resize I like to select the image, hit 'Show Transform Controls' on the top tool box, click on the one of the corners of the image and scale down using the percentages of the Height and Width. It's the best and most accurate way of scaling down without messing up the original proportions of the image. Using the Blur Tool again, I went over the face avoiding the lips, eyes, eyelashes and hair. Mine.

17. Make a new layer. Using the Drop Shadow brush, use the same color of the lips to apply a circle over the cheeks. This is going to turn into blush. Apply a few Gaussian Blurs in order to get the color/brush to spread out over the cheeks. I set this layer on Color Burn 58%. Color, Linear Light, Multiply (58%), and Vivid Light should also work. Mine.

18. Merge Down and Sharpen the cheeks to get them to have that Sparkly look you can usually get with a Bronzer.

19. Flatten the image. Layer > Flatten Image. Duplicate it. Click on the second layer. Go to Layer > Layer Style > Stroke . Apply a 27 Pixel Inside Border.

20. Flatten again. Duplicate the layer. Set the second copy on Soft Light 48%. Sharpen the second layer a little bit (Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen).

Result.

Feel free to post your results for critique and also you're questions, if you have any

This was made the same way as well: