Retro Fashion Retouching Tutorial

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to do a retro fashion shoot retouch from start to finish.  This is a beautiful glowy look that is perfect for outdoor photos.

All the edits that you are doing are 100% none destructive, which means that you can go back at any time and tweak the different layers to your liking.

Difficulty: Intermediate – Advanced

Completion time: 1 hour – 2 hours

Tools: Adobe PhotoshopCS1 +

Resources

The image you want to edit

or

The stock gallery can be found here if you want some other images to play with 

http://niniel-stocks.deviantart.com/

What you’ll be creating

Note: For Mac users, the correspondent keys for CTRL and ALT are CMD and OPTION.

STEP 1

First things first, lets adjust the colour.

I’ve used a curves adjustment layer. I moved the curve up in the highlights, up a little in the mid tones and the moved the blacks up a little bit to make them a bit muddier and more film like.

STEP 2

The next step is to remove all the imperfections on the models skin. In this image, the model has young clear skin, so there wasn’t too much to do.

I’ve circled in blue all the spots that you would want to fix. I used the clone tool, set at 50% opacity on a new layer with the sample all layers option. This makes it easier to blend the clone tool.

STEP 3

Now lets bring out the eyes!

Add a brightness/contrast adjustment layer.

The settings that I used are:

Brightness: +26

Contrast: +31

Fill the mask in with black and use a soft brush with the foreground colour set to white to mask out the eyes.

STEP 4

Now that the eyes are all gorgeous and bright, lets make the colour pop!

This time with just the iris masked out adjust the colour of the eyes.

In the Midtones I used the following settings:

Cyan: -17

Magenta: +10

Yellow: +11

In the Shadows I used the following settings:

Cyan: +10

Magenta: 0

Yellow: +10

Basically, you just want to play with the colour settings until you have an effect that you think looks good.

STEP 5

Next make a merged copy of all the layers by pressing shift-ctrl-alt-E and turn it off. We’ll be using that layer later.

STEP 6

Add a colour fill adjustment layer and make the colour: #040426. Make sure that this layer is underneath the merged copy that we made just before.

Change the blend mode of this layer to exclusion and lower the opacity to 70%

STEP 7

Add another colour fill adjustment layer and make the colour: #fff6d9

Change the blend mode of this layer to multiply and lower the opacity to 50%

STEP 8

Turn on the merged copy layer and change the blend mode to softlight.

Add a hue and saturation layer above the merged copy and set the saturation to -100.

Clip it to the soft light layer by hovering the mouse in between the two layers and hold the alt key and click. When you hover between the layers you will see the mouse pointer turn to this:  You can also create a clipping mask by selecting the first layer above the base layer in the Layers panel, and choose Layer > Create Clipping Mask.

When you clip a top layer to the bottom layer, it just means that the clipped layer only affects the base layer that its clipped to.

STEP 9

Just to finish off the sun drenched look, create a new blank layer at the top of your layer stack. Fill it with white. Make sure that you background layer is set to white and the foreground colour is set to: #feedb7

Go to Filter>Render>Clouds. Change the blend mode to soft light and lower the opacity to 60%.

And there you have a gorgeous sun drenched vintage styled image. This style of editing can work on many different images, just give it a shot and have fun!

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