Tutorial photoshop

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Tutorial Change your body shape

Change your body shape
Lose pounds, improve muscle tone and eliminate skin blemishes in a matter of hours with our Photoshop body make-over…
he ability to make changes in shape is an essential part of the image-manipulation armoury. However, in the early days of image manipulation, there wasn’t a lot that could be done to improve body shapes. The imageprocessing needed for distorting shapes calls for awesome computing power in addition to clever programming. While computers now have all the power we need, the software still has some way to go to give us easy-to-use tools. One problem is that changing body shape is not a simple, one-click process. It’s a

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technique that’ll be familiar to typographers: the overall look of ‘rightness’ oftype depends on the balance between the size and weight of all the details. It’s the same with the human body: you can’t turn a large, corpulent body into a slim one simply by squeezing the entire image – you have to leave some parts the same size, while others can be reduced much more. In this tutorial, we work with only one section of a body to create a torso that is slimmer, with younger-lookingbreasts and unblemished skin. Working with a full-length body involves exactly the same principles.

Part 1: Image health checks

Expertise provided by Tom Ang. Tom is a photographer, book author and all-round digital guru. He is Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster and his books include Advanced Digital Photography, Digital Photographer’s Handbook, and Photoshop for Photography.Tom also gives lectures as far afield as Hungary, Kyrgyzstan and Malaysia. His book, Private Album and is a manual of erotic photography. His Website launches in March at [w] www.tomang.com

Checking Image Size and Levels are essential first steps to any image manipulation …

This image was captured on a digital camera with a default output of 180dpi resolution. The image is on its side becausethe camera was turned to portrait orientation for the shot: if you take a lot of these types of images, choose a camera which automatically turns the image on download.

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what is acceptable for a 133lpi screen – but we suggest you change the resolution to 300dpi because that’s what most production people expect. Rotate the picture, using a pre-defined Action.

2 settings as they are –which is on the limit of

When preparing for print, you could leave the

over-exposed (the Histogram is clumped at the right-hand end). This is good enough to work with, but, as you could be making many changes to the image, leave Levels adjustments till later.

3 A look at this shows that the image is slightly

The other key check is Levels (or Histogram).

Part 2: Removing irritationsClear the image of anything that’s not needed before you get stuck into the serious stuff…

The Art Director of this project didn’t like the 1 strong line of the tiles in the lower part of the image, so let’s just get rid of it. The obvious tool to use is the Dodge tool.

removed it completely, the Art Director decided the line actually needed to be there – it was just a little too strong.

2with very, very light pressure. When we had

Set the Dodge tool to work on Shadows,

Brush applied at 50 per cent. This leaves the line on the wall so that it helps with the composition but it’s not so strong that it’s a distraction.
Tutorial Change your body shape 35

3 reconstruct some of the line using the History

So step back through the History Palette and

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Tutorial Changeyour body shape

Part 3: Tummy tuck and breast lift
Body re-shaping has never been easier. It’s painless and reversible, unlike the real thing…
Sharp margins
When manipulating images, you usually need to select an area with enough feathering to define a region cleanly but without so much feather that it blurs detail more than necessary. When working with distortion effects, however, you...