Start to finish - high contrast black and white with liquify

Its been a while since my last update, to be honest I find the blogger template awkward and too narrow, but hey I got a free one with my gmail.

Anyway since I've got nothing to do at work I will write up a tutorial on high contrast black and white, complete with liquify and dodging.

For this tutorial I am using the stock photo from little sheep here http://littlesheep-stock.deviantart.com/art/16-100443763 . You can use any photo with this tutorial but I chose this one specifically because of the large catchlights in the eyes.

Open the image in photoshop and duplicate the background (ctrl J). Composition wise, her eye is a little too close to the edge of the frame, so go to edit - free transform and turn the image clockwise a little so the eye and nose are a little straighter. This cuts away some of the lips so I made a layer mask (in your layers box at the bottom). Click the rectangle and paint away with black the parts of the original image you want back. I painted back the lips and hair, and slightly above the eye so it blended into the image. I ended up with an image like this



Click on the layer mask - add layer mask, merge down your edited layer (ctrl E) then make another duplicate (Ctrl J). Often when people take close up shots of their faces their noses appear prominent, mostly due to the nose being the closest feature to the lens and thus it ends up bigger then normal. To fix this (or you can leave this step out), it can be done 1 of 2 ways. One way thats often used is to use the loop tool, loop around the nose and free transform it, making it slightly smaller. The second way (which is often easier) is to use liquify, go to filter - liquify and use the pucker tool, with a brush size that covers the whole nose. Its easy to over do it here (the reconstruct tool lets you go back to the original) so keep your brush pressure at around 40. I ended up with this image, after masking back the skin that had been moved.



Note there is barely a difference from the original, we don't want to give her a new face all together, just make things a little more in proportion. If you want, you can also use the liquify tool on her eyes (using the bloat tool) to make her eye a little bigger. They often do this in magazines but I don't like to use it too much because it often makes the eye blurry.

Now we can move on to the converting to black and white stage.

Press ctrl atl E to make a new layer from the previously edited ones. Make a new black and white adjustment layer with red at 100. Note how dark the whites of her eye are now. Ctrl E to merge this with your new edited layer. Now we have a black and white picture of the girl. Click ctrl J again and go to the dodge tool - highlight - 7% and dodge the whites of her eye, particularly the catchlights. Go to midtones and do this again, focusing on the whites. Use the burn tool to burn in the areas you feel like, I focused on the lips and her eyelashes below her eye. Sometimes I like to dodge lighter areas of the hair also. Next to smooth the grey tone in her face, create a new blank layer, get a soft brush at a low opacity and paint over her face with white. Go to filter - Gaussian blur to smooth to white over her face. Set this layer to soft light and erase any bits you don't want. This is my image so far.



Add a new curves adjustment layer for more contrast, you can do a simple S shape curve on the graph or just play with the settings. Paint back the areas you don't want too dark with a black brush. Go to edit - fill - 50% grey and then go to filters - noise - add noise - monochromatic - 10% or so. Set this layer to soft light (this adds some grain to the black and white, but you don't have to do this step). Finally merge all the adjusted layers (select them in the layers tab and click merge all) then Ctrl J your final b+w edited image and sharpen it by going to filters - high pass - 5-7% and set this layer to soft light. Look over your image to see if it needs any more dodging or burning, its also good to walk away from the computer or ask a friend for their opinion.
This is my final image.



Compared to the original