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Palliative care

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Léa Seydoux – Palliative care dose: 300mg

Léa Seydoux

Nose and chin job alert!

For French actress Léa Seydoux we’re stepping up the game. Cat eyes, pretty smile, cute nose, natural “French charm”, and yet Léa undergoes some serious graphic-palliative surgery. On the International Day of Women poster the actress’ face is stretched to the point of deformation. Sure, you can use the shape tool but do so lightly to avoid a comical effect. You can also apply the liquefier filter, very useful for protruding area like chin, nose, or cheeks. In this particular case, the chin has been revamped to look more athletic. To round it out, add a touch of overall blur. To get the intended artistic effect, play with gradient adjustment layers, hue/saturation, brushstroke colors, dust&scratch, and above all, use your color overlay/soft and raw light/darken layers wisely. For good measure, for a squarer look, chisel the nose with the stamp and sharpen the lines of the lips using the +/- bum or a brush overlay. No no, you are not dreaming, it’s Léa Seydoux alright on this cover of the magazine of a big French daily. Here you’re using dust&scratch to the max. The cheekbones are dug out with +/- burn, eyes pop either using a separate layer or the liquefier directly. Their color is altered using a separate layer and working on color balance and blend mode. Lip color is accentuated by shining soft, low opacity light on the lipstick, the nose gets stamped. The chin is enlarged using liquefier. For the overall tint you could clone the fused layers and add low opacity soft light. Making hair shine is easy: with just a few brushstrokes you can dot vivid colors in overlay and amuse yourself with opacity and diameter settings. And for the final touch, a helping of burn all over the face, and the treatment of the zones you want to lose or highlight using a layer mask and brush, and then contour blur. Kate Winslet – Palliative care dose: 500mg

Kate Winslet

That shape!

The woman who made scandal fashionable. On a certain cover of a certain famous fashion magazine Kate didn’t recognize herself and spearheaded an anti-Photoshop campaign. Let’s put her so-called unretouched photo under our microscope. Kate has curves and flaunts them. Cool! But yeah, not what you need for a fashion cover. So using the stamp, the shape of the face acquires a more... athletic appearance. Same for her neck. A bit of blending with water drop. Generous use of dust & scratch, soft highlights, subtle use of +/- bum to sharpen the facial features. Liquifier to reduce or highlight specific parts of the face. Those eyes! In their natural state, they are sort of green-grey but here we got baby blues! All you need to do is highlight the iris and work it with a separate layer, with a bit of color balance, then play around with blend mode, special effects, burn and a couple of brush strokes. You could also use liquefier to enlarge the eyes and redefine contours. For the eyebrows, use the clone stamp to achieve a perfect arch. Extreme touch-ups? You’ll see there are worse….. or better, depending on the object. Unphotoshopped? Not unphotoshopped, just not as much. That famous series of “raw” images Kate Winslett published along with other showbiz personalities including Scarlett Johansson, was intended to show them “as is”, and there is indeed quite a difference. Without necessarily using dust and scratch or surface blending, you can still improve coloring and contrasts by duplicating layers to play with blending mode and a light color balance. You can also work on the contrasts and finetune +/- bum and especially blurring contours. The facial zones that were treated to a touch-up: cheeks, lines, skin tone, contrasts. To leave the illusion of an entirely natural look intact, a couple of tiny spots and facial hairs were left on the cheek, the eyebrows were hardly reshaped, and her hair in slight disarray like the girl next door. Keira Knightley – Palliative care dose: 600mg

Keira Knightley

That face!

Keira gained a bit of weight, courtesy of Photoshop. It’s all very supple and neat. For that kind of neatness you use a high-pass filter with reduced-opacity overlay, then surface blur on top. Using fluidity you fill out the cheeks and the chin, then a good dose of dust and scratch along with the spot healing brush to clean the pores and lines, a bit of hue/saturation to give her white skin a warm glow, and a duplicate layer of dimmed light with reduced opacity. Blur the contours and puff up the hair with an overlay layer. Wrap it all up with a filler layer of overlay or dimmed light to add a touch of color to everything and to blur the contours. That way you get that creamy effect that is so easy on the eyes. That mouth! Fluidity helps to make the lips look more luscious, and you reinforce that effect with a layer of soft reduced-opacity red. Then sharpen the contrasts with +/- dodge. That look! Flaming eyes, eyebrows, eyelashes – everything is reworked with dodge, and the makeup is redone with stamp to get nice lines. What for? Like most English girls, the pretty Keira Knightley is quite porcelain-skinned and on top of that very skinny. Hanging out in night clubs, the flashlights, and the rhythm of shooting certainly haven’t helped her skin or her weight. But that’s not entirely her fault; blame it on the “personal trainer” who styles her into an asparagus twig rather than a juicy steak. And yet, our digital emergency surgeon and his intervention team of photographer and makeup artist have managed to transform the British skeleton into atomic bomb.