Free glamorous studio portrait

Ok there’s no such thing as ‘free’ studio photography, or getting into a studio for a portrait for free, but you certainly can create your own at home. Professionally done studio portraits can be quite complicated, and requires lots of touch ups in Photoshop, but I’m not interested in that, I’m interested to doing something really simple that anyone can do in a matter of minutes. Sometimes, we just like to create some fun glamorous portraits, well, for online profiles or whatever portfolio you may have.

What you need: Digital camera for a digital photo, great lighting (the sun), nice smile and a PC with Photoshop running

Great, first start, put on a pose and take picture of yourself at maximum resolution, preferably with the sunlight towards your face, there’s nothing better than natural light.
On the way out of the house yesterday, John just snapped this photo of me.

As you can see, it looks very normal, and certainly very cluttered in the background. Focus is definitely not on the person to be considered a portrait shot. This was taken with Panasonic Lumix Fz3 set at automatic Portrait mode. With the photo ready, open it up for editing in Photoshop CS. Althought you can use Filter > Extract feature to extract out the background image, I prefer to use the Polygonal Lasso Tool to manually select off the background.

At this point, open the Digital Background file you want to use. You can hardly find these free online, but you can make your own. For this picture, I downloaded mine from here.

I changed the size of the backdrop file to a bigger size at 1024X768 so that the original picture can fit in it. After that, go back to your photo, and with the photo still selected, drag the selected part into the background pic.

There you go, well of coz, this is not the final photo. To create that ‘glamour’ effect in the shortest time, I use these steps from Sue Chastain on About.com:

1) With your photo layer selected, Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.

2) Set the radius to 4-10 pixels (use a high amount for hi-res images, low amount for low-res) and click OK.

3) Go to Edit > Fade Gaussian Blur. (Note: This command is under the Filter menu in older Photoshop versions.)

4) Set the fade opacity to 50%.

5) Go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.

6) Experiment within the following ranges: Amount: 80-200, Radius: 2-5, Threshold: 10-15.

7) Go to Image > Adjustments > Hue or Saturation Move the saturation slider up to somewhere in the 10-20 range and click OK.

Tada! now you get the softer look without really having to edit each part of your face and skin. After that, you want to make your photo blend into the background like it’s real. To do that, go to Filter > Render > Lighting effects

As according to the forum earlier, set to this.

Remember to do it this time with your background selected instead. Give your background some texture by going to Filter > Texture > Texturiser and selecting any of the textures you think look good. Here I use Texturiser Canvas.

I want to set some shadows without looking 2D, so I use the Add a Layer Style for Outer Glow. This were my setting for that.

Done! It is not the most professional way of editing, but it will do for fast and fun.