What Can You Use Photoshop® For?

Rather than talk about the many great features of Photoshop, like getting rid of red-eye, or placing yourself on the top of the pyramids, let’s talk about photo retouching, that is, making people look prettier than they are in person. It may sound, well, less than nice, but in reality, whenever you get your photo taken by a professional photographer, they get on Photoshop and retouch every blemish, wrinkle and shadow from your face so you, in turn, get photos that make you look hot.

Use Photoshop to Clean Up

I helped my cousin at her wedding by acting as the photographer. They spent all the money and the honeymoon and wanted to give me, an aspiring photographer a little blurb to put in my resume, “wedding photographer.” It sounded great and I got paid, so I figured, why not? I went around and took the photos. Cute flower girls in pink shoes holding hands, giggling bridesmaids, and handsome groomsmen. Guests in feathery hats and the bride and groom kissing and smashing cake on each other’s faces, not to mention the family group shots. So, at the end of the night, armed with my 4GB memory card I drove home and turned on my computer to use Photoshop. Read more about the relationship between Photoshop and digital photography from John W Scherer on these other pages.

It’s a good thing I know how to use Photoshop because looking through the pictures, I realized that some people, really needed a little more makeup and some people, needed a little less. Some people probably didn’t want their pimples to be immortalized and some people might want those cute little wrinkles and bags under their eyes to disappear forever. Lucky for them, I use Photoshop and got to work, fast.

Rubber-stamping and cloning into the wee hours of the morning I had de-bagged, de-wrinkled and de-pimpled half the photos in my cache. Things were looking up for my photo subjects as I continued to use Photoshop for the next couple of days.

Things Look Better After You Use Photoshop

So, it was time to make some shots look classy, and I immediately moved to black and white schemes. When I use Photoshop, I like to play with the light on a subject’s face, and since I was working with the bride’s photos, she needed to look radiant. Adjusting the saturation and changing the light source gave her a radiant glow that was proved more elegant when I changed her shot to a black and white photo. Perfect. Everything looked beautiful.

I went back to my cousin’s house about a week later with the portfolio for them to look at. My cousin cried and said everyone looked so beautiful that day. Maybe she forgot that her 13-year-old nephew actually has bad acne and that Aunt Jenna had used too much blush and looked like a tomato. Looking at the photos that I was able to use Photoshop on, I understood that the simple editing tools I had used had helped my cousin remember, for a lifetime how beautiful and magical every moment of her wedding had been. And who cares if Uncle Dan looked a little less heavy-eyed or Grandma Annette looked a little younger, everyone wants to look beautiful and see themselves as such. Because I could use Photoshop, I can help them feel as beautiful as they look in the pictures.