MAKE OVERS: SHAREN

Sharen sends us a typical webcam picture. You know the type, nothing done special to prepare the subject for the photographic onslaught and a picture taken by the digital cousin of a pinhole camera in lighting reminiscent of the inside of Moby Dick. In other words, not the best quality photo...

Problems with this one include a bunch of junk in the background and way too much gleam off the glasses. Let's see what we can do... How about we start with that background?

There ya go. A little messing with colors and making it look like brushwork, and we have a nice little background to start with. If we need to, we can come back to it. For now, let's deal with the subject and get her looking her best. First, we change the shirt:

I took the hue of the background in the upper-left part of the picture and also its saturation level, then colorized the area of the gray shirt to match those values. Now I need to fix up the face. I think a little less gleaming white and a little more warmth should do nicely.

Still need to do some work, though. Gotta make the face stand out more, for one thing. One way to do that is to make the background darker...

Now to fix up the hair and makeup...

Some extensions, highlights, and a red ribbon for the hair. A shade more color on the bright patches, although I'll keep them bright for contrast. Some softening of the t-shirt, although I'm not happy with it yet... we keep going...

This effect will now be copied and pasted as a new layer and blended with those beneath and it'll look something like this:

OK, so it's no Sistine Chapel, but let's see if it's better than what we started with.

Oh yeah. It's a makeover, all right.

NEXT:

It could be you! Send me email if you're interested in having me convert your picture from normal to stellar!

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