Preparing Images

• Credit would be nice if you use this tutorial!

This tutorial will guide you through one of many ways to prepare images for use in graphics. This one will focus on photographs of people, and how to make a natural skin tone look with even poor quality source images. Note, it was written for Photoshop CS2, but it should work for most programs.

First of all, we'll be using this picture of Keira Knightley.

1. Open up Photoshop (or your prefered application), and open the file. I adjusted the levels, but it isn't necessary. If you do, each image will vary, but here's a guide:
   1. RGB - 0, 1.00, 255
   2. Red - 0, 1.00, 255
   3. Green - 0, 1.00, 244
   4. Blue - 0, 1.00, 204
      
2. Now duplicate the base (This is just a precautionary measure I take, just incase). Choose the Blur tool, with a brush size of 5 and hardness of 30%. Go over the skin, excluding the eyes and lips. Be carefull around the edges too. This helps to get rid of any pixelated areas. Note, you must not change the size of the brush - otherwise, it doesn't work well.
   
3. Take the Dodge tool (with the same settings) and go over the eyes and lips, and teeth if they're there. Only do it a little bit on one side of the eye etc. It gives a bit more depth.
   
4. Duplicate this layer and set it to Soft Light. It should look like this now:
   
   
   
5. Merge the layers. Now add a Selective Colour layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Selective Color). Use these settings:
   1. Reds - Cyan: -20%, Magenta: 0%, Yellow: 6%, Black: 10%.
      
   This improves the skin tone. It should look like this now:
   
   
   
6. Use the Polygon selection tool with feather of 15px to select around the main part of the image, but leave a gap. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, and apply one of about 1px.
   
7. That's it! Of course you can mix and change these steps to suit you. See the result below!