All right! Welcome to another NoBSPhotosuccess workflow tutorial. This is an image that I took last week, and I just used window light coming in from the left to have in my studio shooting space. I have pretty large windows, so just drape some material in the background, some white cloth and I use my window on the left and I just brought in some big white reflectors on the right just to fill in the shadows.

So I'm just going to show you actually, I should say briefly. I'm actually going through the workflow of this image and what I think I’d like to do to it. It is a very high key image, so I would like to see it soft. I’d like to see you know in a little bit skin tones, maybe a bronze in color or something. And with the background here, I’d like to maybe just kind to blur this just a bit more, remove some of the stray away hairs; I'll probably push in the shoulder here because I should have the shoulder blades sticking out a bit. I’ll clone this stuff out too with the clone tool and, you know, do a soft and step out and we’ll see what we got.

So the very first thing is, again, I'm just going to do defog, so filter. Actually, what I'm going to do so that things would go just a little bit faster with this is, I'm just going to downsize this image just for the tutorial’s sake, just to show you—so it goes a little bit faster with my processing. So I'm just going to do a defog, so filter sharpen, unsharp mask and we’ll go 20x60. Again, I do these to all my images. It is the first step that I do.

Now, I'm just going to clone this stuff out. I'm not going to workflow the skin tones or the contrast just yet. I did shot this with the Canon 5D and I believe it was an 85-mill, F1.8 or 70 to 202. 8. I can’t really remember. So, I'm going to just use the clone stamp just to remove all this. I’m not going to go into, you know, I'm not going to make sure it’s very precise. I am going to blur that corner out. I'm actually going to blur the background a little bit more. So I'm just going to nicely just kind of remove it just a bit a 100% opacity. There, just like that.

Now I'm going to go in with lighten, and a low opacity and a soft smaller brush and I'm just going to go in and do some of the face here. Put a shadow underneath the eye. Just bring this up to about 23. Perfect!

Now I'm just going to go under normal, because I'm going to soften this quite a bit and I'm just going to go through and just fix some stuff out, put some stuff in and just kind of even out. Shot stray hairs, I'm just going to go through that.

Now, on 100% opacity, I am going to just remove some of the stray away hairs here. I'm going to leave some just because it’s the way her hair is. And I think now, with the clone step in darken mode, I'm going to go in, and just kind of fill in this just a bit. So we’ll go to darken and we’ll just fill on that just a bit. Perfect. Now, the shadow in the neck here, I'm going to just take that out of it too. Perfect!

Now, let’s go into the liquified tool and I'm just going to push this in a bit. First thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to just make a selection just over here, actually what we’ll do, and I’ll have it just come around there like this, the we’ll go filter liquify. What the selection does is—I probably should have reversed that first which I did not. So let me just go back and inverse that. There we go. Now, what that is, all this part is frozen, I'm just going to work with this here. So I'm just going to very quickly just go in and play around with my liquefied tool. Now again, I'm also going to play a softening to this. So it will soften up those edges. I’ll bring it back up nicely big. Let’s see what we got here.

Now, we look back in the history. That will do. What I'm going to do now, is I'm just going to clean this up. I'm just going to remove that down there, going normal with the clone stamp, I will take brush right about here to about here and then I will just remove that. Perfect!

Now, I'm just going to blur some of this. Actually I'm just throwing the clone stamp, so just go in and clean up just a little bit more of this hair. There we go. And I'm going to use my—I like using my smudge tool right here. Let me just go in and just kind of smudge some of the leading lines coming in, try to follow the direction that the lines are already going. This will take just a little bit longer. There we go. I’m going to do a little bit more.