How To: Fix, enhance, and retouch photos in Photoshop

Pixel Perfect is the "perfect" show to help you with your Photoshop skills. Be amazed and learn as master digital artist Bert Monroy takes a stylus and a digital pad and treats it as Monet and Picasso do with oil and canvas. Learn the tips and tricks you need to whip those digital pictures into shape with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. In this episode, Ben shows you how to fix, enhance, and retouch photos in Photoshop.

Bert's first example of retouching involves an etched wine glass that sites on a dark wooden table. Our objective is to create more wine glasses to draw more attention to the glass instead of the table.

First, add additional glare to the glass by using the pen tool to draw shapes of light. After drawing the shapes, create a new layer, select the work path, then fill the layer's selection with white. Soften the light by applying a gaussian blur. Apply a layer mask to the glare and brush a grey mask to soften up the appearance of the glare. Make sure Shape Dynamics (in Brush Presets) is turned off so that you get a uniform, even shaped brush. This layer mask should have a Screen layer style.

The monogram (letters) are saved as an alpha channel so we can apply styles to only the letter areas and not worry about being so precise. We will create a second monograph alpha channel and this version will be blurred. Nudging the blurred alpha channel a couple pixels to the left allows an overlap of channels. Use Calculations to save the overlapped areas into a new alpha channel. See episode 9 for a re-cap of alpha channels.

Select the new alpha channel that holds the blur overlap. Brush this selection with a white brush in a new layer to add tonality to the monogram graphic. The wine glass now has more attention pulled in than the table.

Search Pixel Perfect on WonderHowTo for more Photoshop episodes from this Revision3 show.