Photoshop process #1

I finally choice the photo for my front cover, but before I could place it in InDesign I needed to edit it first. So here I have screen shotted my editing process.

This was the image I chose. I love her hair in it, it is very conventional to my genre.

The first thing I did in PhotoShop was to brighten the image. This automatically makes the image much better. Then I used the selective colour adjustment tool to get rid of some of the redness in her face and make the blacks stronger.

Next I got rid of all the wrinkles in the background. I did this by first using the spot remover tool (found in the tool bar) and went over the very harsh lines to soften them. Then I used the filter 'surface blur' to blur the entire layer, then I used a reverse mask to only use that blur on the background/

Now I needed to get rid of all the blemishes on my models face. There weren't very many as she has quite good skin, but as this image is going on my front cover I decided to airbrush her face. I did this by first duplicating the previous layer twice, naming one blur and one detail. On blur I used the filter surface blur to blur the layer. Then on the layer detail I used a high pass filter (this will stop the skin from looking too fake as it keeps some of the detail) changed the blending mode to soft light and was left with a highly airbrushed image. I then used an inverted mask to paint in the airbrushing where I wanted it.
This was the finished result.

I then also went back over this layer with the spot remover tool to get rid of any blemishes the airbrushing missed.

I then wanted to make the eyes really stand out, so I used the smart sharpen filter to make them stand out more, and then used a curves adjustment layer to make the eyes have more blue in them.

Next I added a grunge filter, and to this I first added a new layer and inverted it and then added a surface blur feature to get the result above.

I then used the hue/saturation adjustment layer to completely dis saturate the layer and then changed the blending mode to vivid light.

I then created a inverted mask to paint in the grungeness to my image. This adds a lot more character to the image. 

The final edit I did to this image was to create a whole new layer, change that to 50% grey and dodge and burned anywhere that needed it. This meant I could add more contours to the face and make the eyes stand out more.

Here is the finished image!