Retouching a Studio Portrait

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Step 12

Right click on the plane text layer and go to blending options and add a drop shadow and an inner bevel using the settings shown below.

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Step 13

We want to add some soft vignetting now, which means darkening the edges of the image. You could do this with a gradient but here we’re going to brush it on because we don’t want it symmetrical and you have more control if you do it this way. So first create a new layer then grab a soft round brush with a size of about 150px and an opacity of about 10% then set the foreground color to black. Now just brush round the top corners (the bottom ones are dark enough) make sure you don’t brush over the plane and keep doing this until your image resembles the one shown below.

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Step 14

Most movie posters contain some credits and most of them use extremely compressed type. Basically here what you want to do is to type in your text and center justify it, it doesn’t really matter what font you are using but set the color to something like #39362d. Now to compress it go Window>Character to bring up the character editor again then highlight the text and adjust the character width as shown in the image below.

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Step 15

Now add some more text, I added the names of some actors at the top and a website at the bottom and just kept it pretty simple.

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Step 16

I felt the image was a bit cold at this point so to fix this I added a curves adjustment layer by clicking the button at the bottom of the layers panel. Next just go through each channel and alter the curves slightly, the main thing I did was to lower the amount of blue in the image. Try to get your curves looking like the image shown below.

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Step 17

I also felt the flames were not bright enough so I fixed this in two steps. First add a levels adjustment layer and drag the black slider in to about 35 and the white slider in to about 225; this will brighten our image a bit as well as raise the saturation.

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Step 18

You’ll notice that the flames look awesome now but the rest of the image is a bit off so we’re now going to mask off the adjustment layer. This time hold Alt and click on the layer mask button in the layers panel and this will create a layer mask and fill it black so this adjustment layer is fully hidden now. Select the brush tool and choose a 30px soft round brush with an opacity of about 20% then set the foreground color to white. Now select the layer mask and just paint over the flames a few times and you will notice that when you paint over them they will become brighter as what we are doing is unhiding the adjustment layer in these parts.

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