For a “good photo”, you may want to take a passable photo, apply the basic touch-ups (the Spot Healing brush is great for acne, small cuts, and out-of-place hair), and then perhaps overexpose or otherwise apply a visually appealing edit to the image such that it looks like you, but obviously edited.
Hello. Person experienced with Photoshop here. Most of the time that stuff looks positively painful, and an honest picture of a pimple isn’t nearly as bothersome as bad editing. And human vision isn’t fooled easily; consider for instance when you edit a stray hair strand out of existence. You see it beginning at the hairline, disappear across the area of interest (say, face), then continue down the neckline. Ouch.
I’ve even seen moderately decent photo edits that, to the experienced eye, have Surface Blur written all over them (Gaussian Blurring skin is for newbs, by the way). Even cosmetics print ads have understood sometime during the last two decades that pores are a good idea. If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it.
The only non-horrid edits I’ve seen applied by amateurs to photos are subtly applied color actions, and if your only tool is Picasa even those get boring after the first 200 or so photos.
I concur that you need some basic competency in photo editing before you start to photoshop your face :-)
Surface Blur, I think, is good either in subtle amounts (you DO want to sharpen the skin differently from e.g. eyes or hair) or—since we are talking about “artistic edits”—you can go completely overboard and make a fully plastic face. That is also fine as long as you understand this is going to be an in-your-face :-) image and not the I-tried-to-look-pretty-and-failed one.
Hello. Person experienced with Photoshop here. Most of the time that stuff looks positively painful, and an honest picture of a pimple isn’t nearly as bothersome as bad editing. And human vision isn’t fooled easily; consider for instance when you edit a stray hair strand out of existence. You see it beginning at the hairline, disappear across the area of interest (say, face), then continue down the neckline. Ouch.
I’ve even seen moderately decent photo edits that, to the experienced eye, have Surface Blur written all over them (Gaussian Blurring skin is for newbs, by the way). Even cosmetics print ads have understood sometime during the last two decades that pores are a good idea. If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it.
The only non-horrid edits I’ve seen applied by amateurs to photos are subtly applied color actions, and if your only tool is Picasa even those get boring after the first 200 or so photos.
I concur that you need some basic competency in photo editing before you start to photoshop your face :-)
Surface Blur, I think, is good either in subtle amounts (you DO want to sharpen the skin differently from e.g. eyes or hair) or—since we are talking about “artistic edits”—you can go completely overboard and make a fully plastic face. That is also fine as long as you understand this is going to be an in-your-face :-) image and not the I-tried-to-look-pretty-and-failed one.