Photoshop Actions - Flatterizer

It’s happened to all of us. We’ve taken a portrait photograph of someone, and, while it’s technically pretty good — the exposure’s right, focus and depth-of-field are good, and the expression’s lovely — it’s just not exactly flattering. It happens most with women. Or, maybe it just doesn’t matter as much with men, I don’t know. Point is, the picture’s got to be fixed.

Of course, there are steps you can take in Photoshop to help. Generally, you’ll find that you take pretty much the same steps when you deal with this kind of thing. Why not use an action! Or, better yet, you can use mine.

I’ve added one that I call Flatterizer to my Geren’s Actions set. And, you can download the whole set, which includes my previous actions, ”Quick Orton” and “Geren’s B&W”, right here.

Here comes the part where I get in trouble …

Here are two pictures of my very lovely wife, Donna. As we all know, it’s very difficult to take a bad picture of Donna. So, my goal here is to take a very nice picture, and do the nearly impossible — make it better. My original image is on the left, my finished portrait, on the right.

Flatterizer is a very subtle action, which works best on an image that’s been sized to 8″x10″ at 300dpi. The nice thing about it is that it can be used more than once on an image. In the case above, I ran Flatterizer three times.