Enhancing Portraits Tutorial

Portraits can often be improved with selective blurring.

First, blurring the background gets rid of distracting detail. Large format photographers can do this by controlling depth of field, but digital cameras have so much depth of field that little can be done at photo time.

Second, most of us have a few blemishes on a given day that we would rather hide. Selective blurring can help here, too.

Below is a step-by-step guide to portrait enhancement using Paint.NET. Of course, this could be done in almost any advanced editing software.

Here is the original. A nice portrait of a girl, but even an excellent portrait can benefit from some tweaking.
1. Use clone brush to get rid of main blemishes. (Simply cover them up with skin colour.)
2. Next, select Layers > Duplicate. 3. Select Effects > Blur > Gaussian Blur, radius=3. The top layer is now blurry and the (hidden) bottom layer is sharp. (Rather than blurring just where we want it, we blur everything, and then erase the areas we want to be sharp.) If you are working with a larger image, you will need to increase the blur radius proportionately.
4. Select the eraser tool. 5. Erase eyes, eyebrows, mouth and lips, ears and earring, nostrils. This lets the sharp bottom layer show through at these spots. An old adage is that if the eyes are sharp, most people will consider the photo sharp. We are already that far. 6. Erase all the edges between what you want sharp and what you want blurry: along chin line, outside edge of hair, edge between blouse and neck, edges of neck
Here is just the blurry layer from the above image, so you can see clearly where I have erased. I have saved one version of the file at this stage so you can see what I have done.
7. Erase the blurry hair and blouse. This gives the final image, as shown at right.
At right is just the blurry layer of the final image.

That's it!

Here are the initial and final images side by side.

I have chosen to leave the background blurry, since it is less distracting that way. If you prefer a sharp background, just erase the background area of the blurry layer.

This tutorial was taken from the following url:

http://www.wfu.edu/~matthews/misc/psp/portrait/portrait.html

The author’s name is Rick Matthews. He is a professor at Wake Forrest University.

The original tutorial was made for Paint Shop Pro. Minor changes were made by Mr. Campeau to adapt it for Paint.NET.