How to Put Your Best Foot Forward with a Headshot
Are you speaking at an event? Will your students be putting on a special event? In addition to all the preparations for the big day, you will likely need to submit a photograph of yourself or your students. The portraits will end up as part of the marketing for the event whether in print, on a website, or on social media (or all of the above).
The goal of this post is to show you how (step-by-step) you can take an image of yourself (or someone else) whether taken with phone or with a fancy camera and make it ready for prime time. This process is known as retouching, but has become commonly known as “photoshopping.”
As such, this tutorial will make use of Adobe Photoshop. A free 30 day trial is available and educators can receive a substantial discount if you want to end up keeping the software after the trial.
How to Capture a Nice Photograph in a Pinch
The first step in getting your portrait ready is to get the best quality photograph that you can get. Great results can be obtained these days from cell phone cameras. Traditionally, photographers will use high-end hardware to capture high resolution images.
On the day of “the shoot,” take as many photographs as you can. Consider your background and the lighting as well. Beware of overhead lighting and (believe it or not) sunny days. Overcast days make for the best lighting because they cast an even light.
See the images below for the difference between standing directly under a light and stepping a few feet backwards.
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| Poor Face Lighting |
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| Better Lighting in the Same Room |
Getting Setup for Work in Photoshop
Now that we have our raw material, we can begin to retouch the portrait. Fire up the Adobe Photoshop application and open your favorite shot. To keep your original safe, the best thing to do at this point is to work on a copy or duplicate of the file. With the original open, click on the image menu and select “Duplicate…” option. From here, you can rename the copy to something more meaningful for you.
Now that we have a “working copy” of our image, we should make a new layer via copy. So that our original image is at the bottom. I prefer to rename this layer “retouch.” Double click the layer name to rename it.
At this point, we want to examine the photograph for “imperfections.” These could be blemishes, dust, hair that’s out of place, etc. We will make use of Photoshop’s healing tools for this. For small items like specs of dust/makeup/stray eyelashes, the spot healing brush tool will likely work just fine. For a strand of hair or something else that spans a larger area, the regular healing brush tool is most likely our best bet.
How to Use the Spot Healing Brush Tool
We are going to have to get “up close and personal” with this photo, so a good place to start is ensuring that we are looking at the photo at its actual size. A quick way to do this is to double click on the zoom tool.
Now that you’re looking at the full size image, you will be better able to find things that need to be removed. On my (taken today with my phone and a friend) portrait, I can see plenty of freckles which are too numerous to remove manually. I will target one to show you how to use the spot healing brush tool.
Using the zoom tool, I zoomed into the left (my right) eyebrow area. There are two larger dark freckles that we will retouch (remove). Make sure your retouch layer is active by selecting it in the layers window. Select the spot healing brush tool from the toolbar on the left side of the application.
Your cursor will become a circle with a thin white border. You will want to adjust the size of your “brush,” and the easiest method to do this is by using the square bracket keys. The left bracket will reduce the size of the brush and the right will increase the size. Make sure the freckle, blemish, or other item to be healed away fits comfortably within the bounds of the brush (the white circle). Simply click the brush tool once over each freckle. Do not click and drag. Just single click the two freckles.
How to Use the "Regular" Healing Brush Tool
If you were able to achieve results like what you see above, you have essentially mastered the spot healing brush tool. There will be times though, you will need to use the regular healing brush tool. I have found this to be particularly useful for areas where a stray hair is obstructing a part of the face.
In order to demonstrate this, we will use a free stock photo of a model which will represent yourself or a student. This photograph appears to be untouched. So let us see how to use the healing brush tool. On her right (our left) cheek, you will see a hair that we will remove.
If you painted with the spot healing brush tool, the results would not be ideal. So, switch to the healing brush tool by clicking and holding on the healing brushes and select the appropriate tool (see below).
Zoom in on the portion of the face with the hair and adjust your brush size so that it is just wider than the width of the hair. Next, you will want to hold down the alt (option on the Mac) key and click an area of the skin next to the hair where you will start your brush stroke.
This is essentially telling Photoshop where you want to borrow from to heal the hair away. If when you begin to heal away the hair, you don’t like the results, click edit and select undo (Control or Command +Z) and sample from a different location. Usually, you want to sample close to the hair but not too close. As you paint the hair away, you will see a crosshair follow your brush showing you where the sample is coming from.
How to Use the Patch Tool
The last tool that you may want to know how to use when retouching a photo is the patch tool. The patch tool lets you select a custom area to be healed. After making a selection, you drag the selected area to an area that you’d like to replace it.
With the patch tool, you may want to try with the patch being content-aware or normal and see which you like better.
If you’d like to see how this all works in video rather than in pictures, you’re in luck. The video is below. Let us know what you thought of part 1 of this training series.
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