Using Photoshop

For my photoshop assignment, I chose to repair and retouch an image and use an oil paint filter on the photo. Here is the original image.

And here is the finished image.

To retouch the image I followed these steps: 

1. I opened the raw file in camera raw and clicked on the Auto settings. That adjusted the exposure and histogram to better levels. Then, I clicked on the white balance eye dropper tool in Camera Raw and set the white balance by clicking on some of the white snow in the background.
2. Next I opened the photo in photoshop and then duplicated the photo and renamed the second layer “Retouch.”
3. The first thing I did was use the elliptical marquee tool to circle different blemishes on my face and then use the content aware function to fill the blemishes. I also used the spot healing brush and content aware option and the healing brush to clear some smaller blemishes and stray hairs.
4. I used the dodge tool to brighten up some dark spots on my face and also used Gaussian blur to soften the lines, etc around my face. 

On this last photo, I used the oil paint filter in photoshop. I didn't really encounter many obstacles with this activity since I followed some of the online tutorials step-by-step and I feel like I was successful is eliminating many of the blemishes on my face in the original photo. Learning more about photoshop is important to me right now because I love photography and digital art. One of my hobbies is digital scrapbooking and I use photoshop to to put my artwork together. I love learning new shortcuts in photoshop and would love to seamlessly be able to retouch portrait photos. In my future profession, knowing photoshop is very important for editing photos and putting together engaging instruction for whatever type of company I work for.