Pixel2Life

Welcome to another Corel Photopaint tutorial!  In today's lesson, we're going to be using Corel Photopaint v12 to look at some of the basic tricks for editing your photos that are fairly common and should be part of your basic graphic knowledge.  In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to smooth skin like a magazine cover, how to enhance eye color with the airbrush, create a greyed out desaturated look with isolated colors, enhance photos with contrast, and finally, how to convert a photo to a pencil sketch.  I'm going to cut down on repeating keyboard shortcuts and basic functions, such as how to copy/paste, so if you don't know how to perform there simple functions, please read some of my older tutorials that details these areas.

Now the master plan here is to perform all these effects, one right after the other to create a final piece, but feel free to stop anywhere in this tutorial if you've already reached the desired effect.  For example, the first part of this tutorial covers how to smooth out skin, so if that's what you needed to learn, then you don't really need to go any further.  After that we'll cover the eye enhancement and then just keep going through various tricks that can be combined into one final photo manipulation.

We're going to start off with a photo I downloaded from a free stock website some time ago, which is of a beautiful girl with amazing eyes and textured skin that will work very well for this tutorial.  The harsh sunlight really raised the bumps and pores of her skin more than an average photo, so this will work quite well for our lesson:


And once we're done playing with all our tricks, we're going to end up with a final photo that looks like this:


Now this is going to be quite a large tutorial with over 75 images in total, so we're going to split this up into several sections and pages.  I'm going to break this down as follows:

Part 1 - Skin Smoothing
Part 2 - Eye Enhancement and Airbrushing
Part 3 - Desaturation and Color Isolation
Part 4 - Contrast Enhancement and Softening
Part 5 - Sketch Effect

So let's get started!

Part 1 - Skin Smoothing

Step 1 - Let's start off by opening up our source image in Corel Photopaint and making 2 duplicate objects of the photo.  So in all, you should have the background layer, which is the photo, and two additional copies of the photo as extra objects:



We're going to actually only touch the 2 object layers, but I like to make 1 extra copy just in case I need the original photo for something.  So in this case we'll be working on the two object copies, and we'll leave the background copy alone for the time being.  Before you continue, be sure you select the top object layer as that's our first level of attack in this tutorial.

Step 2 - The first step in creating our smooth skin is to create a primary layer of smooth skin, and we do this by applying a fairly significant Gaussian blur to the photo.  Go ahead and click on Effects > Blur > Gaussian Blur:



Slowly increase the pixel radius control button until you get a level that obliterates all the rough bumps and skin textures.  Don't worry about stuff like the eyes and hair getting too blurry, it won't matter as you'll find out in later steps.  For this particular photo, the level of smoothness I wanted kicked in at a pixel radius of 7.  Click OK and your blue is applied.



Step 3 - We now have a basic smooth skin layer, but we've lost a lot of detail in areas we didn't want to smooth out.  So let's fix this up by selecting the eraser tool:



Grab a nib that is fairly large, but don't go too huge or else you'll lose control on the parts you're erasing and you'll go too wide.  I'll go with a 57 pixel nib with a very soft circular gradient effect:



Now start with the eyes... slowly click and move the mouse around the eye, being sure to erase the entire eyeball, eye lashes and other details around the eye socket:





Don't forget the eyebrows and hair line:



Now we work the other side:



Along the cheek:



The lips:



Nostrils and tip of the nose:



Work in the details of the nose ridges:



And finish off by erasing along all remaining hairlines:



With that done, we're now brought back the detailed areas we want to keep, BUT we've revealed some areas of skin that need smoothing again.  Click on Page 2 and we'll fix up these detailed areas and finalize the skin smoothing portion of this tutorial.