Now we tweak the skintone to give it a more natural look. There are several ways to achieve a natural skintone. One was is to use the One-Stop Photo Fix (under Adjust). This feature analyzes the image, calculates what changes need to done (remove red eye, lighten, darker, adjust saturation and hue, and adjust brightness and contrast). Sometimes the results are stunning, sometims they are not. Experiment. Test it out. A handy feature with Paint Shop, which is with almost all paint programs, is the Undo feature. Click Edit>Undo. I've undone 10 levels of experiments before. Another thing I should bring up. Save you image. Name it anything you like at this point. I named mine Angelina_jolie_gqGREEN.jpg. Answer yes to the Color limitation box, if you get it. The second way is to use the Automatic Brightness and Contrast (under Adjust). You'll have several options here: Bias, Strength, and Appearance. Same advice - Experiment. The third option is to manually set Brightness and Contrast, which is what I use most often.
04a. - Click on Adjust>Brightness and Contrast>Brightness/Contrast. A word or two about contrast and brighten. Professionally, I'm an X-ray technician. Nonprofessionally, I'm a photogtapher. In either profession contrast is very important. Here are a two terms: High Contrast, short Scale. Low Contrast, long Scale. There are more terms, but we'll stick with these for now. First off, Contrast is the amount of light and darkness within your image. For X-Rays, it's the amount of lightness compared to darkness. The Scale just means the degree or number of shades between the lightest color and the darkest color. If you have an image that has High Contrast and a short scale it means that you have a sharp distinction between you bright color, say yellow, and your dark color, say black. If the scale is short that means you have the bright yellow color, the black, and only a few shads of each in between. If the scale is long that means that you have many shades of yellow and black and maybe other colors in between. Personally, I perfer High Contrast with a medium to short scale. This combination gives you a very sharp brilliant bright image. A Low Contrast image with a long scale makes the image look dull, both in sharpness and in appearance. A radiology wants Low Contrast, long scale. A photographer or photomanipulator may want High Contrast, medium to short scale. NOTE: Click the magnify glass with the minus sign to shrink the image. The one with the plus sign increase the image. If you have a wheel mouse then moving the wheel up or down will increase or decrease the image.
04b. - This is what it looks like so far. We now have an image with High Contrast and a short scale. Don't forget to save.
04c. - Now for the fun part. Open the original image. Click File>Open>then select the directory or folder and highlight the image. Click Open. Remember, double-clicking the left mouse button does the same thing. As you can see, I've scaled down each image so that it fits side by side in the work space area. View>Zoom>Zoom Out. Do this a few times to scale each image down some they can "sit" nicely side by side. Normally, I leave each image at 100% or close to it. I like to see details when I work and later on you'll realize that a larger image is easier to touch up - you can see what needs to be smudge, soften, erased, etc.
