Photo retouching
I’ve gotten pretty good at retouching and color correcting most of my photos (if you think you’ve ever seen a real photo of me, think again) and thought some of you might be interested in this wiki. Now, I can’t give away all my secrets, but these are some useful tips. Funny though, I fix shiny skin in a completely different way. That’s what I love about Photoshop, though. There are always a number of ways to acheive the same effect. Red eye is tough, though. That one took me awhile to master, probably because I went about it in a much more complicated way than this person teaches. But once I figured it out, Flickr came up with a function that does it with the click of your mouse. Figures.
PS - if you don’t have Photoshop, you could use a free program like GIMP.
I use pretty much the same technique to “whiten” peoples’ teeth in photos. Sometimes if the light source is in a peculiar position their teeth might be in the shadow of their lips and look unnaturally dark or yellowed. Desaturating can usually make them look more natural.
Their tip for darkening backgrounds is OK, but I think in their example they way overdid it. Also, rather than just adjusting the contrast and saturation of the whole background at once, I often like to use the burn tool on a really large, but softly exposed brush size. That way you can hit some areas more than others and the background can be less distracting, but still have some texture to it. It’s also especially effective when just a corner or one portion of the background stands out more than the others.