Video Training Review: Beyond Skin: Going Deeper with Photoshop CS3 With Lee Varis

Three tutorial DVD set shows the image editing techniques described in the book Skin: The Complete Guide to Digitally Lighting, Photographing, and Retouching Faces and Bodies (click here for the book review).

What is covered in volume 1

• Photoshop CS3 User Interface. Shows you how to arrange palettes and customize menus to make your workspace more convenient.
• Image adjustment tools:
  • Curves. Learn how to remove color overcast and adjust the most important color in the image—the skin tone.
  • Hue-saturation adjustment. Learn how to make reddish skin look healthier. A great technique for healing acne.
• Basic Retouching. Covers tools to do typical flaw removal retouching:
  • The Spot Healing brush. Helps to take out little defects.
  • The Healing brush.
  • The Patch tool. Helps to clean out background spots. Works pretty good on even backgrounds.
  • The Clone tool.
• Dodge and burn technique. Helps to retouch little wrinkles.
• Rebuilding skin. Learn how to preserve the real skin texture and avoid creating too smooth spastic-looking skin texture. Recreate the skin texture to cover up skin defects.
• Storing texture libraries as patterns.
• Limiting the depth of field to throw the background out of focus. Learn how to achieve a realistic looking limited depth of field.

What is covered in volume 2

• A technique to add a soft diffusion glow in the image to get a classic portrait look.
• Advanced sharpening techniques.
• Getting the foreground figure away from the distracting background by adding more contrast and shape.
• Converting color images into back and white. Taking advantage of the channel structure of a colored image.

Beyond Skin: Going Deeper With Photoshop CS3 is a great training program for a photographer who needs helps understanding image retouching and enhancement techniques.