From the course: Learning Photoshop Portrait Retouching

Quick work with the Patch tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Learning Photoshop Portrait Retouching

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Quick work with the Patch tool

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- [Narrator] In this chapter, we'll explore how we can reduce or remove shadows and wrinkles. And here, let's begin with a quick and easy example. And then things will get more complex as we go. What I want to show you here is how we can reduce or remove the shadows that we often have underneath the eyes in a portrait. Here I'll zoom in on the image so that we can evaluate and view that area of the photograph. And in this case, we'll begin by duplicating the background layer, and we'll name this New Layer, Shadows. Next up, we'll use the Patch tool and with the Patch tool, we want to make sure that we aren't using content aware. That wouldn't work very well. We want to have a certain amount of diffusion. A low diffusion is a defined edge, a high diffusion is a very soft edge so somewhere in the middle will work well. Next we'll go ahead and click and drag around the shadow that we want to correct. We also want to go over, around any wrinkles or edges that we may want to improve as well. Once we have that selection, it's just at matter of dragging and dropping below, to a nice, clean area of skin and let go. Then we'll move over to the other one and what this will do, is it will patch over that area of skin, it will do it in a way that it looks kind of unnatural. But what will happen eventually, as we've learned in other movies and other chapters, is that if we lower the opacity of the layer, it will look really good. So here I'll go to Select and De-Select. You can see the before and after. It looks kind of strange because we've lost, in a sense, some of the shape there and it looks like I have a couple little edges that I need to improve just a little bit there as well. So I'm going to go over those edges just a little bit more. All right, after having done that, Select and De-Select and then lower the layer opacity. It might be a good idea to go all the way down to zero. And then just nudge this one up. And nudge it up, what we're looking to do is to reduce the shadows. You don't want to remove them necessarily, all the way because a shadow is telling you there's some sort of shape there, right? If it's completely gone, then there's no shape, we've lost that sense of dimension to the face. And so, you want to find just the right value for that. And so, in this case, perhaps somewhere right around there, looks good. And then click on the Eye icon. There's the before. Then here is the after.

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