Making of Annalyn

I choose the image that I’m going to edit, in this image I choose Annalyn Ecal, my friend’s wife.

STEP 1

First of all, I Choose the image that I’m going to edit, in this image I choose Annalyn Ecal, My friend’s wife. Even though It’s just a normal picture ( bad quality pic ), it really doesn’t matter as long as the pose is good and also the structure of the face is presented well. Pixelated picture is not a problem for I am going to paint over it anyway.

STEP 2

I dragged and dropped the image to a new file which has a size of 2657 x 3636 pixels so that I will have a nice resolution when I’m done painting it. I also saturated the image a little bit and applied gaussian blur. ( you can also use surface blur ) just to get rid of those noise due to the bad quality of the original image.

STEP 3

Now it’s time to paint things. I created a new layer and painted a similar hair with the original image. I always paint black as the base color for hair and I also created another new layer for the eyelashes and eyebrows, painting with the same technique as used with the hair.

Brush Used: (Brush size 1-3px)

STEP 4

In this Step, I created a new layer and started to paint over her face, eyes ( outline of her eyeballs), I also added some shadows so that her face will fit in to the new hair that I just painted. I used the EYEDROPPER TOOL to get the color of her skin tones and blend it smoothly as much as possible.

Brush Used: (Brush size 50-100px or higher)

STEP 5

I added some details on her mouth and teeth and filling her eyeballs with a solid dark brown color and added some black details ( seperate layers ).

STEP 6

MORE DETAILS! I painted more details with her hair. Using the same brush settings in Step 3.

STEP 7

Using the same brush on Step 3. I added some highlights (detailed higlights).

STEP 8

More highlights! but this time I created a new layer and set the blending mode to “overlay” then painted some highlights with a white color. It’s best to use the brush settings in Step 4 in this step and lower the opacity of the brush.

STEP 9

I saturated the original image ( cause she looks really pale in the original pic ) and just darken the shadows some more.
I also created another new layer and added a gradient light where the backlight is coming from.

STEP 10

The Final image. I just change the color of the backlight to orange using hue and saturation and added some red ambient using color balance.

TIP:

It is better to create new layers for every paint that you want to add in the image. So that you won’t have any problem deleting or editing it later on and if you are having problems or doubts if your image does look good or proportioned, try flipping it horizontally. For me it works.