Air brush programs

Ladywriter1968

Does anyone know any good free or freel trial air brush programs I can download to try out? Where you can airbrush to make yourself look slimmer better and so on, thanks.

abibee

GIMP maybe? I've not used it so I can't say much, but it's free.

http://www.gimp.org/

I'm sure there will be lots of Youtube video tutorials for the programme.

Gloomendoom

Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard, although the learning curve is rather steep. Free trial here...

http://www.adobe.com/uk/downloads.html

paddyrg

I've done exactly what you're after (not photos of me, but tweaks to some modeling shots), it's not as straightforward as it sounds.

Airbrushing will only work for areas of skin, so these need to be bikini shots. If dressed you can use a tool like iwarp in GIMP to deform the photo (actually works well for bikini shots too), but you need to pick a background where you won't warp the background too (a la Kim K's tweeted selfies).

So, shoot against plain background (note that posture and dress and lighting make a big difference here), use GIMP iwarp to *gently* reshape the picture a little. You can then slim arms and legs a little, too. Then colour correct the image, generally get skin tones about right, blacks black and whites white - you may gently boost some tones to look more glamorous. Use the healing tool to remove blemishes, use smudge sparingly to reduce creases and wrinkles and cellulite. Dodge and burn to make areas pop and partly compensate for bad lighting. I add later with opacity maybe 30% 'soft light' mode and then airbrush on that work white and black airbrush clocked right down to add alternate horizontal stripes over the midriff, trace white 'shine' down the limbs, darken the under and shine the top of the bust, etc.

That's before fixing make-up or anything else. The hardest part is keeping it subtle, before you create a monster. See Photoshopdisasters.com for examples of bad work.