From the course: Learning Photoshop Portrait Retouching

Simple skin clean up - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Learning Photoshop Portrait Retouching

Start my 1-month free trial

Simple skin clean up

“

- [Instructor] Sometimes, retouching and cleaning up skin is simple and straightforward. And in other situations, it's a little bit more complex. So let's begin with a portrait where it's a little bit more simple and then in the next movie we'll look at a situation which will involve a few more steps. Alright, well this is a photograph of my friend Ashley and she has near perfect skin. Yet sometimes a camera sees things which the eye overlooked. And when you're retouching skin you want to zoom in really close to the image. So here I'm zooming in nice and close. And you want to start to look for anything that's catching your eye. Perhaps a few of these little skin variations. To get rid of those, just click on the new layer icon, then double click that layer name. We'll call this one skin. Now the tool of choice for dealing with little teeny skin variations or blemishes is the spot healing brush. We use the spot healing brush on Content-Aware and Sample All Layers. Now, one mistake that people often make is they use a brush which is too big. You can change your brush size. Right bracket key is bigger, left bracket key is smaller. And often what you want to do is have a brush which is just a little bit bigger than the blemishes that you're working on. So here we'll go ahead and just click around the image a little bit, looking to reduce and simplify. Now let's say we come to the point where we're looking at the freckle on the nose. Should we retouch that out or not? Well it really depends upon the type of photography you're doing and the final intent of the photograph. Let's say it's a character portrait. Well I want to have that in, so I'll go ahead and leave that freckle there. Or if it was a beauty shot or something, also a little bit more idealized, perhaps you would retouch that out. So you have to make that decision based on the type of photograph that you have to work with. Here I'll press the space bar key and click to pan around. You want to make sure that you're retouching in multiple areas. You notice that I'm using a really small brush and so far it doesn't even really look like there's much of a difference. That's a good thing. You should have retouching at this point, here I'll make my brush even smaller to work on a few little wrinkles that I'm seeing here, you should have your retouching at this point look really seamless, flawless, natural, nothing outstanding, nothing over the top. So again here just doing all of this little detail work to improve the skin in this way. Now what we should see though, is when we turn off our background layer, we can see all the retouching that we've done above. And if we turn on and off this layer, we can say well this is our before and then here's our after. It's pretty simple and straightforward but it definitely improves the portrait. You also want to zoom out a little bit because sometimes you can be in so close that you're almost overanalyzing the image. So, I always like to zoom in and zoom out and look at the image in different zoom values. And one of the things I actually noticed here is there's sort of a weird pattern up here which I hadn't noticed when I was super close. And there is some little dark areas up here which I hadn't noticed when I was up close as well. So, another mistake that's common to people who are new to retouching is to get in so close, they're neglecting to look at the overall picture. And that's exactly what happened to me. So, sometimes we need to zoom out and do a little retouching here as well. And then of course you want to look at your before and after. So here I'll click on this to view my before and after. And we'll zoom back in so you can see how that's looking now. Here it is, our overall before and then now, the after.

Contents