Get the Image You Want: Essential Photoshop Editing Techniques

Filter your portraits

It's so tempting to use filter effects in Photoshop to achieve unusual, eyecatching treatments. After all, Photoshop offers so many powerful and sophisticated special effects, it's hard not to resort to the ease of simply applying a filter. However, in portraiture, generically applying filters can often ruin our best intentions. It's more suitable to apply subtle and moderate enhancements to an image of a person, as shown in Figure A. We'll show you how to make these delicate changes.

Figure A1.

Figure A2.