The Star of My Own Blog

The title says it all.

I have been receiving comments from few friends who haven’t seen me for quite a long time saying:

• Patt, did you lose weight?
• Wow, your pictures are so nice. What type of camera are you using?

Ok people, the truth is:

• No, I have not lose weight. I am still as chubby as the last time you saw me, in fact I actually gained some few kgs these days. (Grrr, late dinner ppl!)
• I am actually only using a compact camera. No SLR / DSLR what not.

So, what did I do to my pictures? I edit them using the forever HEBAT editing software, Photoshop.

Since this is a personal blog which of course will be about me Me and ME, I would like to make this space as a place where I am the star in it. I like to think that I am some kind of a huge celebrity and this page is dedicated to write stories about me and post pictures of me. (Earth to Patt !!! lol.)

You know how celebrities put on sometimes excessive, sometimes natural looking make ups on their faces whenever they step up on the red carpets,  more than often they ended up looking good in their pictures. But with me being me, I am always lazy to apply these liquids / powder / stuff on my face, so I resort to something else; picture editing.

Without make up or any cover ups at all, I look plain, dull and sometimes hideous. So, before uploading them into the net, most of the time, I edit the pictures before putting them on this blog or my Facebook.

Yes. Yes. Vain indeed.

But I have always been told to uphold this principle; Honesty is The Best Policy. That’s why I am writing this. I want to tell you the truth. I want to tell you how I did it.

*Chieh~ “I want to tell you how I did it”. Sounded like something so big. But it’s not.*

So in this post, I bring to you simple Photoshop Tutorials for The Dummies. Strictly for the dummies only because my skills in picture editing is like the difference between the sky and the ground if I am to be compared with the likes of Xia Xue. With myself as the ground, XX the sky.

Ok. Ok. Enough talking. Bring it on with the pictures!

Picture #1.

This is me without anything on my face. No moisturizer, no foundation, no compact powder at all.

As you can see from the picture, I have tiny wrinkles and visible dark circles under my eyes, chicken pox marks on my cheeks, visible pores and red tiny zits on my upper lips. Basically, I look tired.

Using photoshop, I can take away all these flaws and turn this picture into a very nice profile picture. How?

Using filters, I chose the function called surface blur. This helps to eliminate visible pores on my face and make the texture of my skin more even. Then, I use the healing brush to eliminate other traces like zits, dark eye circles and wrinkles under my eyes. To use the healing brush, first I select a sample of how I want my skin to look like from other regions on my face. Normally I chose the cheeks area, because I have quite an even texture on my cheeks. Then I just paste it using the healing brush on the parts where the flaws are visible.

Resulting in a clean, smooth face like this:

Next, using ordinary brush, I added colours on my eye lid so that it’ll look like I applied some eyeshadow on my eyes. In this picture I chose blue, light orange, dark drown and dark grey. Light orange as the base, blue as the colour on the lid, dark brown and dark grey as eye liners.

What I did was, I started with the light orange base. I line them up randomly on my top eye lid. Then using spot healing brush and the ordinary healing brush, I blend the colour on my lid. After the colour has been blended, I proceed with the dark brown and dark grey to line my eyes. Using the same technique, I blend the colours on my eye. And lastly, I add in the blue colour.

I also have quite chubby cheeks, so to reduce the chubbiness of my cheeks, I use the liquify tool (which is available under the filter menu). With the liquify tool, I push my jaws inside a little bit so that it looks smaller.

As seen in the picture above, my jaws are thinner, my eyes are more alive. And oh, using the same technique as applying the eye make up, I used light peach to add in a little hint of blusher on my cheeks. It is a bit rosy now if you compare it to the first picture.

Also, I added some “lip gloss effect” on my lips. It’s a bit glossy there if you see properly. This can be done by making a new layer on the lip using magnetic lasso tool and then, just simply changing the brightness and contrast on the lip part.

To make it even clearer, here are the before and after pictures, and spot the MAJOR difference yourself.

That was quite easy, let’s move on to a tougher picture shall we?

Picture #2.

Taken during a karaoke session with the AUG beach volley ball volunteers. I did not realize this picture was taken, that’s why I look all meaty. I wasn’t poised at the right angle. See all that double triple chin? That need to go away.

How?

Like in the first example, I use the liquify tool.

I made my jaw and my neck thinner. I also liquified my flabby arms to make it appear leaner.

But that’s not all. I didn’t stop just there. I went extreme with this picture by removing my spectacles!

To do that, I used the clone stamp tool.

After virtually removing my spectacles in the picture, I realize that my eyes looked so small, so I added eyeliner using the technique described for the 1st picture. By the way, see that I have red eye there? I removed that too by adjusting the hue and saturation.

Lastly, I change the contrast of the picture and walla!

It’s a little bit over the top, but you get my point right? Photoshop is the best editing tool! And oh, I did not edit the 2 guys. Sebab malas. Hoho.

Picture #3.

This was taken some time ago when my hair was still long.

For this picture, I am going to share something different from what I did for the first 2 pictures. As you can see, there is another person in that picture right? The girl in brown top. That’s my sister by the way. What I want to do here is, I want to remove her from the picture and make it looks like as if  I was captured alone.

So first thing I did was, I select her using magnetic lasso tool. Then I made a new layer by cutting the selected portion off.

After the new layer has been cut off, I deleted the layer. Then I used clone stamp tool to fill in the dark silhouette by cloning it with the region that would look more or less like how the space would look like if my sister wasn’t there. (Am I making any sense?)

As seen in the above picture, I have red marks at my back. My mom gave me a massage the night before using the massaging stones, thus causing those red marks on my back. I used healing tool for the marks. Also, I liquified my calves to make it leaner.

Resulting in this picture:

See the difference?

This is a simple tutorial for those who would like to try out Photoshop. I myself am still learning new tricks for picture editing. There are still so much to learn, and every learning process is just so fun and exciting. Do try this out. I hope it helps, especially for the dummies.

Capt Zed, I hope this marks as a stepping stone towards fulfilling your 2009 to do list.

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