For this discussion let's use a photo taken by my dear wife A at an event in Bangkok:
Original JPG
What can one do to improve the photo?
Step 1 - Cropping to improve composition
The first step is to crop the photo to improve the composition. As the main star of the event is the pretty Thai actress, the photo is cropped to re-focus attention on her.
After cropping, the usual treatment of color adjustment and sharpening is applied. Most people will be quite satisfied and will stop at that point.
Step 2 - Transformation
However, the glamorous star seems to share the stage with another person, even after cropping. Also, the background is noisy, the actress's face needs a light retouch. Above all, the skin tone could be better.
What must we do? Immediately many methods comes to mind: masking, extraction, etc, etc.
There are many roads to Rome. Just use the shortest and simplest. In this case, instead of using the various complex and challenging extraction methods and masks to isolate the subject from the background, I duplicate the background layer 2 or more times, add layer masks, then try different blur types on them to get the effect I look for.
Cropping to improve composition
After some trial-and-error I decide Gaussian Blur gives me the effect I wanted.
That step is followed by skin tone correction, facial retouch such as eye and teeth whitening and blemishes removal. On retouching, always do less rather than more, to avoid overdoing it ! Finally, I do two or more rounds of USM, depending on the circumstances.
The finished work is below:
Transformation
Postscript: I avoided embossing my watermark on the retouched photo so that you can, if you like, use it as the background image for the Clutter-Free Desktop tutorial.
