Fun and Beauty with Photoshop Age and Facial Manipulations

Posted on Jan 22nd, 2012

A lot of Photoshop age and facial manipulations on the internet provide tips and tricks that eliminate undesired features and add in desired effects to enhance one’s beauty and deceptively diminish one’s age to make one look younger than one really is.  I know that Photoshop has done a lot in helping one make beautiful pieces of art with eye-catching, jaw-dropping, thought-provoking effects and images; but on the other hand, I cannot help but honestly feel that Photoshop has done, well, … quite a lot in really perking up people’s vanity to the extreme.  But even Photoshop holds some pleasant surprises for those who are fed up with what I might call “plastic surgery via Photoshop.”  There are those tutorials that poke good fun at vanity and that just really aim to make something artistically beautiful without diminishing the natural essence of the subject portrayed in the picture.

One particular tutorial, which is appropriately named Age Progression, brings a different kind of spice to Photoshop age and facial manipulations because instead of decreasing years to your age, it adds a lot of years to it.  It adds not just 5 or 10 years – but 40 to 50 years.  And the very lucky celebrity test subject – Katie Holmes.  She got the whole treatment: wrinkles, facial spots, yellowing teeth, gray hair, eye bags and all.  But the tutor who demonstrated the techniques for this particular tutorial did a very respectable job; she still looked very presentable and her smile was unaltered.  She just really looked like a very pleasant grandmother.  The tutor notes that two key factors that greatly contributed to a good selection of the right kind of picture were: not too much make up and candid shots instead of studio shots because these revealed more of the person’s natural features as well as gave a better idea of how they would age; this enabled the aging process via Photoshop editing to become more realistic.  Reference materials like pictures of older women with the same smile as that of the subject and even pictures of the subject’s parents also became very effective sources that impressed upon the tutor a clearer image of how she should look decades from now.  He proceeded to trick out the subject’s facial features through the following: thinning out the eyebrows and eyelashes, re-molding and sagging the face, doubling the chin, placing wrinkles and refining them under the eyes and other parts of the face and neck, shrinking the lips, adding hair to them, imprinting age spots in strategic positions all over the face, and last but not least – raising and graying the hair.  My goodness, I had no idea that that adding of years on someone’s face required much attention to detail!  It was a pretty impressive tutorial.  It kind of makes me curious to see how I would look like decades from now.

Another tutorial that appeals to and arouses the aesthetic senses in Photoshop age and facial manipulations is the Watercolor Effect.  The picture selected must have a subject that evokes a certain expression of calmness, joy, or quiet sorrow to better complement the dramatic effect that will be produced through this tutorial; I personally feel that funny faces will not do because it may tend to diminish and belittle the desired effect.  The image is subdivided into various layers, always duplicating from the first one.  Each layer underwent certain procedures upon which the desired effects built on.  Desaturation, inverting, coloring and blending, blurring, setting forth of the background to the top layer, layer masking, applying black color to the background layer, readjusting the background layer to the bottom of the first layer, setting the opacity of the first layer and giving it a final brush – these are the steps that take place in acquiring the watercolor effect.  The finished product displays a somewhat animated yet softer feel to the expression of the subject.  It is worth noting that the simpler the picture the better the outcome – one or two subjects will do, and the background must be kept as simple as possible.  This type of effect is also very appropriate for sentimental (special relationships and/or objects), inspirational (quotes), artistic (personal expressions), and natural-environmental (plants, animals, and natural elements) types of images.

Photoshop age and facial manipulations can be both fun and aesthetically appropriate.  One must just have a good sense of humor, much willingness to poke a bit of fun at themselves, and an appreciation for the elegantly simple.

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