Our model in this case doesnt really need a liposuction but we will operate on her anyway for the shake of this tutorial.

Once you open your image on photoshop reach for your Liquify filter. You will find this under the Filter menu->Liquify.

Pick the Forward Warp Tool, thats the little hand tool on the top left.

Next we identify the area we want to reshape and gently click and push inwards. In the image below we are re-shaping the waste. This process requires stable hand and a bit of artistic touch. If you overdo it and the figure looks fake just hit ctrl+z and retry.

Repeat on the other side of the waste so it looks symmetric.

Next we will augment the model’s buttocks. We will use again the Warp Tool but a different technique. Instead of pushing from outside the body inwards we will click and drag from inside the body outwards. Its a really handy tool and it contributes hugely to this being a quick edit.

Click and drag, click and drag, slow moves till your get the desired result, dont be afraid to experiment.

Next we will augment the model’s breasts. Reach for the Bloat tool.

With gentle strokes, click and drag around the breast area, do this from the centre to get a more natural result.

Repeat on the other breast and you are done. Hope you have fun trying this tut.

Create a canvas with a black background and pick a soft edge brush with white as the foreground color and create a new layer.

On the new layer start painting random swirls, dont try to give it a particular shape, the more random it looks the better the final result!

If you want to get more variations on the shapes of your doodles just lower the opacity of your brush by 20-30% .

Next reach for your smudge tool and start dragging lines out from the core of the drawing you just created. Make sure that all the lines you paint begin from the centre as this will give your explosion a more radiating effect. Keep dragging lines with the smudge tool until you have created a halo around your initial drawing.

To prepare for the next step we will lock the Transparency of this layer. This will prevent color from spilling over the edges of the lines. Do this by clicking on the Lock button above the layers palette as shown below.

Next from the color palette set the foreground and background colors of the layer to red and yellow. You do not need to worry about the shade of the colors now as we will apply layers, just go for the basic shades.

The go to Filters->Render and click on the Clouds filter, this is what you should be looking at by now , well more or less…

Next change the colors of the layer to the default black and white and apply the Clouds Filter again, thats FIlters->Render->Clouds FIlter, this will eliminate all color from the image. Now go to Edit->Fade or simply hit Ctrl-Shift+F on your keyboard, that Ctrl-Command+F for Mac.This will bring forward the Fade dialogue, we will change the way the filter is applied from Normal to Linear Light.

Hit OK and this is the end result.

Now it may not say much on its own, but if you apply it on top of an image then the result is really impressive. And that is the coolest feature of this explosion effect that it is easy to create and as easy to customize it so it can be applied on almost all photos. So time for some creative chaos!

Step 1
First we need to create a new canvas with black background. The following settings are recommended:

Step 2
Create your type mask text using the Horizontal Type Mask tool as shown in the picture below:

Using the Horizontal Type Mask tool pick an area where you want your title to appear and type away.

Step 3
Using the Fill tool, fill the inside of your letters with white colour.

Step 4
Next pick the Smudge tool and smudge the edges of your text. For this pick a big brush area around 35cm diameter.

Step 5
Next step is to colourize your text. Bring up the Color Balance dialogue menu from the bottom right bar of your PS, and play around with the Shadows, the Midtones and Highlights as shown and hit OK. This will give you the burning effect.

Step 6
Moving on we will add some Gaussian Blur effect. Simply go to the Filter menu from the top toolbar, hit Blur and then Gaussian Blur and OK.

Step 7
To create the Neon effect you will need to duplicate your image and choose Linear Dodge on the copied layer. This will give the outline of your layer a neon like fluorescent look.

Step 8
Using the Horizontal Type Tool this time we will create another text layer to fill in the Neon fonts we created in the previous step. Choose the same font size and type the same word/words with your original text and overlay the new layer on top of your original one.

Step 9
Finally we will add the glow to our text. Double click on the layer of your Neon object and scroll down to “Outer Glow”. Change the glow color to a red glow. Your Burning Neon Effect is complete!

The last mode will bring up the color table, from it drop down menu, Choose black body. Using ctrl+a select everything in your image and then ctrl+c to copy everything. Then with F12 bring back the original image and straight after ctrl+v to paste the modified image you just created with the 3 steps mentioned above.

Finally drag the Blend mode to Luminosity, if you want to touch it up add a little noise by Select -> Filte r-> Noise, 3% should be sufficient for a relatively small photo and that’s it!

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But don’t be too disappointed. With some good photography skills and a little digital editing, you can create great looking pictures on your own. In this tutorial we’ll look at how you can fix your make up after the pictures are taken. This is called airbrushing in the digital editing world. We’ll start with a picture of a girl, note that her face has some blemishes that we’ll need to fix to make her skin smooth and silky.

Open the picture that you wish to edit in Photoshop. Create a duplicate layer start working with that. Photoshop has a very useful tool which is called “spot healing tool” to remove spots from skin. Use it to remove any obvious spots. Dont’ worry if you couldn’t remove all of them, we’ll get to them a bit further down in this tutorial. To achieve a soft skin look, we will use the filter Noise -> Dust & Scratches, keep the radius just enough - making the skin look soft and graded, don’t care about the eyes.

Now we will do further removal by bluring the image. Use the Filter Blur -> Gaussian Blur with a radius around 3 depending on the size your image. Tweak to find the right value.

Also, make sure to add a natural look. To do this we’ll put a uniform noise to the picture. This is achieved using Filter -> Add Noise, use the settings below:

Our skin is ready, now we need to graft it on the picture. Make sure you’re on the skin layer. Add a layer mask to it. Fill the mask with black color using the paint bucket. This will hide your skin layer and the original picture will appear. Select the brush tool and start painting over the skin with white color. Your new smoother skin will start appearing as you paint. Paint only the skin part leaving the eyes and the lips intact. To check out what you have painted, change the blend mode of your masked layer to ‘difference’ and the opacity to 75%. You can now clearly see what part has been painted and what haven’t.

Once you are finished with painting the skin. Turn back the blend mode to normal and the opacity to 100%. Here’s the results that you should see at this point:

The skin has improved drastically without losing any detail on the places which matter - like eyes and lips. Here’s the before and after picture, take a closer look at the details:

Using this technique you can improve your pictures without spending on expensive make up products. It’s reasonably easy to implement and looks great! Hope you enjoyed it.

Here’s another airbrush technique.

Once you open you Jpg image the first thing you would typically do is Levels -> Adjustment Layer.

1. Once this pops up you would want to move the white and the black sliders to the corresponding tips of the histogram as shown here.

Then you adjust the centre slider so you will achieve a pleasant brightness level.

2. Next thing you want to adjust is the contrast. So you open the Curves Adjustment layer of your photoshop and increase the contrast to point out the main features of your image.

3. Following that is the colour balance. In a Jpg it is not uncommon the colours to be either too cold or too warm. In this case we want to even that out using the Colour Balance too slightly warm colours up. The best practise to warm colours is to add a bit of red and yellow by moving the corresponding sliders.

4. Next step is to add a bit of saturation to the image to avoid our colours from looking dull. This will have an effect to both the dress of our model and her skin tone.

5. Last thing you want to do is slightly “burn the edges”. For this you need the laso tool on your photoshop, for a rather small size image like this one a feather size of 50 should be sufficient.

The idea is to “laso” the parts of the image you want to draw attention to. In this case would be the face of our model. Once this is done you invert the selection and add an adjustment level of layers and using the middle slider you darken it. This essentially will darken all of the picture but the model’s face because we inverted our initial selection. Once all the post processing steps are completed the results should be rather visible.

And in these 5 simple steps we gave new life to our undervalued Jpg image!

Click any shape you want. Make for instance a circle, remember to hold down shift to make a perfect shaped circle. You can use any colour you want for this tutorial. Once you have this, look in your layer palette, right click the image you created and select “layer transparency”. Create a new layer without deselecting, go to select -> modify -> contract -> contract by 3 pixels.

Now, in select a darker colour than the one you have for your shape (as mentioned, you can use any colour for this one). Now switch to the gradient tool and use gradient to transparent. You can either go up or down over your picture, it’s probably easier and wiser to go up. This will add the volume to the shape you created.

Once you have this, deselect (ctrl+d) - now do the same thing all over again. Right click on the first image, select layer transparency, create a new layer - put this layer on top. Then select the marquee tool, but make sure to use the elliptical marquee tool, the third option is to select “subtract from selection”. This will make sure that it’s going to subtract anything you’re going to select instead of adding it. Then go to Select -> Modify -> Contract by 5 pixels.

To make it smoother, we’ll right click on the selection, while holding the lasso tool - use feather and 10 pixels. Fill this with white (or any brighter colour from the one you chose originally), using the paint bucket as you normally would.

When we have the base for this, we’ll create a new layer - select the elliptical marquee tool again and set white as your foreground colour. Then create a circle on top of your shape. It’s easier to make a circle, but it could really be any shape - oval or so would also work in this example. As the white is the foreground colour, set foreground to transparent using the gradient tool and go from up to down over your shape.

Once we have this done, it’s more or less finished - all we have to do now is link the layer by selecting them and then select “merge linked” from the layers palette.

And that’s it really! You’ve now created a glass effect to your circle.

You can also spice this up by adding a glass reflection. You’d then duplicate the layer and flip it upside down, set the opacity to 50% or so, and then use the erase tool (again using opacity maximum 60%). That’d make the final result look something like this instead.

First thing you want to do if you open a Jpeg in Camera Raw is to NOT open up the original Jpeg! So it is essential that you create a copy of your image by right clicking on your image on the Photoshop bridge preview and select Copy-Paste.

Now once you have your copied image ready what you want to do is open it on Camera Raw, so you do not want to double click on it as you would normally do as this will open it on Photoshop thus bypassing Camera Raw.

So what you want to do is again right click on your copied image and select the actual command named “Open in Camera Raw…” that will allow you to open your pictue on Camera for further processing.

One of the nice features specifically on CS3 is the fill light feature creating higher or lower exposure effects on the colouring of your image.

However we are going to focus on this tutorial on selectively colourizing. For this we will use the set of cool tools that Camera Raw has on the top of the right hand menu. You want to choose the little HSL zig-zag looking graphic icon as shown on the image below.

This will change the front panel to new settings that you can experiment with consisting of 3 new tabs.

From these 3 tabs choose the middle one named Saturation. If you take the Reds and Oranges sliders to the left what you get as result is knocking down the colours on the skin without any selections or masks or filters!

Similarly using the same panel if you want to emphasize the clothing of your model simply slide your Blues, Purples and Magentas sliders to the right!

Moving on the luminance tab if you move your reds slider to the right this turns your model’s lips whiter and brings forward the freckles and skin details. Playing around with the oranges you affect the dark of the skin as if you were playing around with the blacks and the whites using filters in a dark room.

What is really important when applying this tip is playing around and experimenting with all your available tabs and sliders. Turning back to the Normal view after playing around A bit what I have essentially done is collectively colourizing my image without applying any masking of filtering to it!

Once you are done with your settings you can choose either Open Image or Save Image from the bottom toolbar of your Camera Raw. Open Image will open it up on photoshop for further processing in more detail.

It is remarkable how time saving collective colourizing can be using this cool feature on your Photoshop!