Thinh's Photoshop CS3 Secrets Revealed!

Portraits filter method:
So... you wanna edit like a pro huh? Then be sure to follow this Thinh's Photoshop CS3 Secrets Revealed Series. In this article I'll show you one of my many tricks to give your photos that pro look. Warning: I'm not saying this method should be used on all your photos, sometime it works and sometime it's better to use other techniques.



We'll be working on this image on the left to make into the one on the right. Of course to follow what we're doing you need to have Adobe Photoshop CS3. First we want to open the image. You can work on the image provide above, or one of your own.


Go to FILE>OPEN or hot key COMMAND+O on the Macs and CONTROL+O on the PC.


One of the habit you should pick up when working in Photoshop is hot key-ing. Hot keys can cut your work time down tremendously, especially if you have tons of photos to edit. A few seconds here and there can add up. So the first thing I want you to do is hit COMMAND+J (Macs) or CONTROL+J (PC) to duplicate the layer. Make sure you have the layer (the "background" layer) selected first. I want you do to this twice. We want two copies because we'll want to keep the bottom layer untouched just in case we need to refer back to it later. This is another good habit to get into when working in Photoshop.


So far we just have two image laying on top of each other. Now we need to go into the blending mode selection box and choose the overplay option. What this does is overlay the pixels from the top image through to the second layer. This will darken the picture and raise the contrast a bit as you can see from the image below.


So here we can see the result of the OVERLAY. Now it's contrasting quite nicely but it is a little too much. So we want soften up this layer. One way to do that is to use the blur filter.


So go to FILTER>BLUR>GAUSSIAN BLUR.


Depending on the image, the radius you want will differ. For this specific image, I decided to go with 4. It really up to you to decide what looks good.


It looks awesome, but I still think it's way overboard still, so to lighten it up, we'll go over to the OPACITY bar and dim in down to 50%. You can play with this until you get the result you desired. So there it is. Now you have a powerful tool to use to boost your photos. Be sure to subscribe to this site via RSS (that orange icon thingamajig on the far left of the menu to get the latest tutorials and updates.