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Retouching a Photo with Radiance

Learn how to retouch a picture and give them a nice radiance. Excellent for photographers who want to give more radiance to their models/family members and so on.

I don’t know how many photographers are using the GIMP as a solution, but I’m sure they want to keep their girls to keep the radiance they deserve. You can find multiple use with this tutorial, either with family members, friends and more.

Step One

File to open:

I’m going to use THIS FILE as an example:

Attribution goes to DeusXFlorida

Step Two

Go to your Colors -> Bright-Contrast

Brightness: 39
Contrast: 34

I really suggest that if you are doing this with a different picture—use your common sense and don’t over do it. Sometimes cameras have a high brightness on them so it’s a problem to do exactly as I say. What you are looking for is an excellent radiance in body and eyes, discard the rest, use what looks good for you.

Step Three

Go to your Filters -> Enhance -> Sharpen

Sharpen: 65

Sharpen is a very important role when retouching in my opinion. It gives you a vivid and crispy style in the result, the important this is how far do you want to sharp the details in the photograph. There might be issues when printing, like the Sharpen might not be effective in printers, but if you try with a higher DPI and a higher Sharpen the result MIGHT pay off.

Step Four

This is really optional, but it’s good for you to know that GIMP do have the capability to go beyond what people believe. Here I am going to use Softglow, it also have a sharpen option but it does not affect the image as much. It’s also good to have to keep that radiance of the model flowing.

Go to your Filters -> Artistic -> Softglow

Glow radius: 13.25
Brightness: 0.41
Sharpness: 0.67

Again, I’d like to remind you that you must use your senses to know if it looks good enough, you can alter the softglow as much as you want.

Step Five

Now this step is really experimental. I did like how the result came but you should watch it because this one is really tricky

Colors -> Alpha to Color

HEX COLOR: eaeaea

By now you should have gotten the exact results I’m having. If you are using other photo I hope you get the results you expected.

Change the mode to Addition

NOTE: Before merging this with the original photo, if the photo came out too bright I suggest you lower the opacity of that layer before merging.

Merge down

Final Step

Wow, we made it! You might think this is hard but it isn’t I just divided it into tiny sections so you could see the examples. I hope you got the radiance you wanted in your photo.

Go to your Colors -> Channel Mixer

Red: 112.2
Green: 1.6
Blue: 27.6

Give the photo a nice touch using the Channel Mixer

Thanks for reading this tutorial! Any questions or comments can be made here.

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