[Deiberson]

I've always used LR and Aperture and just moved the sliders around. Now I'm starting to need a little more. I took these pictures for a friend and need to edit them. Typical senior picture stuff....blemish removal, skin smoothing on the arms, pimples, etc....
I'll be using the trial for CS5. What terms and techniques should I be looking up and what would I need to do to remove the line from the white board in the first image to blend it into the background? I'll research it once I know the name of the technique.

[blackcloudbrew]

I'm no expert on this but it looks like better lighting was needed to start with.

[A-z]

Hey, you can use the smudge or blur tool to remove the line.
Also, play around with curves and levels in the first instance. As far as skin smoothing goes there are several ways to go about it, I like the surface blur method on selected areas only, and always work in layers so you can adjust the opacity of layers as needed.

[hcc]

What camera, lens and camera settings did you use?

The second picture lighting is inconsistent, possibly poor. I feel that some good lighting woudl improve drastically the shot.

Food for thought...

[George Lama]

You can probably correct most of the lighting issues within LR, to include using the tone curve adjustments to adjust highlight/lights/darks/shadows. They could certainly use more fill and contrast to make them pop.

You certainly want to do that before you blur the line in the backdrop, particularly considering they're two different shades of white and blurring alone will not do it.

[tstaires]

Lighting needs some definite work. You can fix this with LR or PS. Also you could fix the stray hairs and soften the skin a bit on the first image.

[SpecialK]

Not really processing, but they could use some cropping. Maybe go vertical on the first, and lop off some of the blank top on the second...

[kneonx]

I used photoshop to tweak the photo alittle and recropped the dark areas of the first photo, did some work to the blemishes but at this resolution it actually doesnt make that much of a difference Lemme know what u think

[cats_five]

These all look a bit underexposed to me, and a bit soft, and the colour balance looks off as well - music is normally printed on white paper not pale blue!

I don't know if you need better lighting or a more appropriate exposure - she looks to be evenly-lit and there aren't any shadows that shouldn't be there.

I'd like to see her feet as well in the first shot.

[tstaires]

This is what I came up with after a quick edit in LR3. Would have fixed the fly away hairs but didn't feel like opening up Photoshop.

[ivoire]

i agree with cats_5. i opened photoshop and applied photopop in the topaz adjust4 plugin at the standard settings. heres the result, brighter, more color and contrast

[Deiberson]

I used photoshop to tweak the photo alittle and recropped the dark areas of the first photo, did some work to the blemishes but at this resolution it actually doesnt make that much of a difference Lemme know what u think

What techniques did you use in PS? That's kind of what I'm looking for. I want to learn some of the basics but I'm not sure where to start. Masks, skin smoothing etc....what are the features you applied?

[boone]

Not sure... just played with it.

[einstrigger]

I like boone's post processing the best so far and agree with what others have mentioned about lighting. OP, if you have access to CS5, make use of the Spot Healing Tool/Brush. For the face, zoom in and use a smaller brush size with "Content Aware" checked. It's very handy to get rid of acne and other blemishes. You can also do the same to merge the backgrounds. Zoom out and use the spot healing brush with a larger brush size to blend the two backgrounds. Use the blur tool to get rid of specular highlights on the face. From there, play with the curves adjustment layer or exposure adjustment layer to tweak your exposure and lighting. Those are the basics, since I'm guessing you don't have Filters like Topaz Adjust installed.

[kneonx]

Deib:

I popped the image to CS5, started to remove the lines at the back first, tried using content aware fill (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt). If auto fill doesnt work, ill usually grab a brush and dab the nearest color drop the opacity to 10-20% and start drawing over with a decent brush size that can cover the line at least, then ill work to blend both colors together with a layered gradient over the more obvious portions, then use a eraser brush at 10% opacity and slowly remove the more obviously unfitting colors. u gotta mix and match adding and removing til u get the right shades.

For facial clean up, the Healing Brush tool works fine. Hold ALT down and select a region you want to copy, and then when u let go you can attempt to replace the spot you are clicking with the copied portion, do note that colors that are too far apart dont work too well as they smudge big time and are often unusable when that happens.

Next to brighten up areas like the bottom left and right areas (esp left) i generally try to lasso tool the areas that are severely underexposed and do a contrast/brightness tweak to match the surrounding alittle more. I drop a radial white gradient on the darker areas in a new layer and then set the blending option to soft light (adjust the opacity to your liking)

I lasso'ed the teeth and dropped the saturation so that they dont show the yellowish color, then i change the tint alittle to it remains naturally white (make sure that they still look alright beside the gums.

As for overall color of the subject, I lasso the portions i want to edit, usually the whole person, and i play with levels/curves often ending up with darker blacks and brighter whites on levels (pull the left arrow and right arrows inwards alittle, u gauge) and then the curves would resemble a S tilted to the right alittle (though no so round, more gradual)

Lastly I crop the photo because its generally better to work with more colors and natural photo pixels/objects as they contain the natural colors of the scene.

My PP is still way behind the pro's but it gets me by most of the time