Photo retouching fashion photos is exceptionally fun since there is oftentimes a more open and quirky space for playing around with styles, colours and graphics. Children’s fashion photos are on of our personal favourites because it allows us to also go back to imagining ourselves as kids too. In this layout, we’ve done hand painting and graphics for a Dutch fashion photo. The theme applied was Dutch Delft.
In this tutorial we’ll be making a creative layout for kids fashion picture, using watercolor graphics that we painted in house.
Here is the RAW base images and some samples of the water colour paintings we made.
We combine these two mediums by turning the Watercolor art to digital first by scanning them and cutting them out through Photoshop. We have separate tutorial videos and blogs for cutting out objects.
After that, then we can start with the base image by cutting out the subject using the pen tool.
When the subject is cut out of the background we can then use the select and mask tool that is on the new Photoshop CC and refine our selection further.
Now that we have our model in a white background we can start building up our layout. Start out by putting any element that you can use then try to make a rough layout before finalizing everything. You can make your workflow faster by making your cut out graphics to smart objects then you can re-arrange and resize them anytime and your pixels would stay the same.
The theme for this layout is Dutch Delft and I made it similar to the artwork that you see on delftware. Mostly it has framing and floral patterns with curves and mostly different hues of blue.
With the graphics I had, I made my own style of framing and made the borders symmetrical as you could commonly see on delftware.
I started building more elements to the canvas to give structure to the overall image and make it look like the model is on a watercolor world. I replaced the umbrella she was holding to a bouquet of different flowers to add interest. Then inserted some buildings in the distance to add perspective and depth.
Even though I added her shadow it still seems like she’s floating so I painted on a brick road to complete the empty space under her feet.
I used the new brushes from Photoshop CC available to subscribers. They have different brushes you can use but since this is watercolor art I used the watercolor set. These are very helpful for illustrators because they recreate realistic brush texture and strokes.
I created a guide for the brick road which helps me with the perspective. You can do a rough painting of these to make it look like you’re actually using watercolor.
Now that everything seems to be taking shape nicely, we can go into the small details of the image. We can go into retouching the model’s skin by using the healing brush and clone tool to smoothen out tiny hair on the skin.
And since this is a fashion photo we have to make the dress look clean and dust free. By cleaning it up with healing brush
A porcelain, doll like skin seems to be appropriate on this kind of layout so in order to do that we have to smooth out the skin thoroughly with the clone stamp tool. And then we add shape and shine to the skin by dodging and burning areas of the skin and face to make her look like a doll.
Then we cans start adding some blush to her face to make her look like she’s glowing and youthful.
After the clean up look at your image again and we do some slight changes on the composition to make it more interesting and asymmetric.
Small details matter to make the image stand out and balanced.
Finally, we have the completed image for Kids Fashion Retouching.
