8 steps Desaturated Portrait Look Photoshop CS4

Right now i am writing about

" Desaturated Potrait Look in Photoshop CS4 "

I will explain step by step.

" Desaturated look is one of photoshop effect which very popular in high-end portrait photography. Also it used often in automotive shots and any type of photo where you want a realy dark and dramatic sky. The challenge in adding this effect is with your subject's skin tone. Also it looks great and sometimes it makes your subject look washed out, but you wont know until you see the final image. In this tutorial you will learn what to do if you run into the latter. "

Step One:
Open the image you want to apply the effect to and then press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to duplicate your background layer. Press that keyboard shortcut again to duplicate that layer one more time ( so you have your background and two copies about it, as seen here).

Step two:
Go to the layers panel and hide the top layer from view by clicking on the Eye icon to the left of the layer's thumbnail. Click on the middle layer ( shown highlighted here) and then press Command-Shift-U (PC: Ctrl-Shift-U) to remove the color from this layer. Now, go up to the Opacity slider and lower the Opacity to 80% ( as shown here) to let just a tiny bit of the color come back into this layer.

Step Three:
Make the top layer visible again by clicking where the eye icon used to be, then click on this top layer to make it active. Change the layer blend mode of this top layer from Normal to Soft Light (as shown here), which adds more contrast to the image, and brings back more of color. Now, you could just flatten the image and be done right at this point, and a lot of people will do just that, because they like how the desaturated skin tone looks. Generally, i like to go another step or two bring back most, but not all, of the original fleshtone skin colors. So, if you want to learn how to do that (its easy ), then go on to the next step.

Step Four:

Press Command-Option-Shift-E (PC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E) to create a new layer at the top of the layer
stack that is a flattened version of your image, and then get the History Brush tool (Y)
 from the Toolbox. I always
think of the History Brush as “undo
on a brush,” and if you started painting
over your entire image with it, it would
return it to how it looked when you
first opened it. We’re going to use this
brush (in the next step) to bring back
the original skin tone of our soccer
player, and the original purple and
yellow colors in her uniform.

Step Five:

From the Brush Picker in the Options Bar, choose a medium-sized soft-edged brush, then take the History
Brush and start painting over the soccer player. Make sure you paint over her uniform, as well (as shown  here). When you’re done, the original skin tone and uniform colors are back, but now, with the rest of the colors desaturated, her skin color looks a little too vibrant. There are two ways to fix this: The first is to undo your painting with the History Brush (press Command-Z [PC: Ctrl-Z] if you only made one continuous brush
stroke or Command-Option-Z [PC: Ctrl-Alt-Z] if you made multiple brush strokes, or just click on your merged layer and drag it onto the Trash icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and then create a new one). Then lower the History Brush’s Opacity (up in the Options Bar) to around 60%, paint over her again, and
now you’ll only bring back 60% of her original skin tone. Here’s a little trick you might want to consider: paint over her skin tones at 60%, then go back up to the Options Bar, raise the Opacity back up to 100%, then paint over her uniform, which will bring back those original vibrant colors. It’s a little more work, but I think you’ll like the result. 

Step Six:

The second method is to paint over all of her with the History Brush at its default opacity of 100%, then just lower the Opacity of this layer to 60%, giving you the look you see here, which I think looks very natural
with the desaturated surroundings.I wanted to give you both techniques and let you see which one you like
the best for the particular photo you’re working on.

 

Step Seven:

Here’s a before/after using the second History Brush method. By the way, the reason her skin tone
looks yellowish is because I put a gel over my off-camera flash to mimic the setting sun (I used a half-cut of CTO [color temperature orange] gel taped over the front of the flash).

Step Eight:

Here’s a shot of the goalie’s brother taken at the same shoot, but a little later, as the sun was going down.
I used the exact same technique on him as I did with her (the second method).