Lessons

Lesson Info

Portrait Retouching in Photoshop

now, one could successfully argue if I was retouching this photograph. I probably don't need to not destructively remove her pimples because I'm guessing she's not come back to you know what? Put the people's back in because, you know, that's unlikely. So, in theory, I could just say, you know what zapped those things off of there Right on the back home there. But again, I don't know. Just old habits die hard. I guess I still would just make a layer for that and take press, get my spot healing brush a little bit on the big side. Even though I know I just use it. I always do that quickly. Chest Yes. Our check content aware sample all layers. And this is one area. How many people here use a walking tablets out of curiosity? Okay, well, that's really weird. It was like half and half of that side of the room. Yes, this side room know. How do you organize that? Rust? That's awesome. This will be one of the times where the use of a tablet shines because what I used to do. I mean, this was a ...

long time because I've used a tablet for many, many years. But before that I was costly going bigger brush, smaller brush, bigger brush, smaller brush using some shortcut. Now I press change the intensity of my how hard I press to change the brush on the fly. And that's a huge difference. So, for example, look at how big my brushes right now. But I want to get rid of just this one. Little pimple. Very little. I'm just barely touching the tablet. So now it's using just that tiny little tip. Not that I would ever go that bay, but least it gives me that opportunity. So the harder you press, the bigger it's gonna go, which again wouldn't make sense in this particular case. But anyway, that's just an aside. But that with using this tool with the tablet, makes a huge, huge difference. So I'm gonna make, uh, my first layer and I would eventually label these to make sure I knew what I was doing is my basic retouching layer, which is get rid of any noticeable issues. I'm using the spot healing brush because I can just do all these single clicks. If you find there you're working on someone that has whatever it is, blemishes or problems that are very close to each other. And it keeps sampling one problem to stick on top of the existing problem. That's where it used the healing brush, and you can option click to, say, sample from this good skin. Put on top of that one now. Personally, I always start with a spotting brush. I know some people immediately jumped to the healing brush because they just figure they're going avoid problems that way. I don't know why. I just find that most of the time I don't have any major issues when I'm doing a little work like this. Okay, so those air for the what I would call temporary things on people's faces that the likelihood is they want you to remove completely, such as blemishes. It's whatever you want to call them. Many people have some other facial issue. If you say it that way, like for example, she has a little dimple or somebody is actually a some kind of indentation on her face. Now, if I root that completely, her family members will look at that and say something looks weird here because that's just who she is, she has that unless she specifically said, Please remove that. But I've had people that have a birthmark. It, like that's that's me. So you don't want to take that out if But what you might want to do is, for the purpose of a portrait, make it look less obvious. I always tell this story, and my daughter loves that I share this story on broadcast. But when she was a high school senior, she had her portion and we had just moved from Canada, where in Canada, Senior portrait, It's I was like, Why do people take pictures of old people who don't understand? Like we don't call them juniors and seniors in Canada? So I was like, Senior Portrait. Really? Anyway, she had her senior porches done, and we got the little package back with the proof saying Click here to take out a second mortgage to pay for the package of photos. And one of the little check boxes was retouched photo, and I did not check it because I thought What? I don't think the photo looks pretty good to me now in our family. Many of us have little dark areas under our eyes and in certain photographs show up more so keeping in mind that I did not check their retouch bucks, we got our package back and the first photo we looked at, all of us went, What's what is wrong here? And we realize they had retouched and taken out completely. It didn't look like her, because in person she has, like all of us, something there. But because they removed it completely, we send them back and said, A I did ask you not to retouch and be You did a really bad job. It doesn't look like her. So if someone has a birthmark in your movie completely, unless again, they specifically say, Please remove it. They're gonna look and go Wait. So here's the approach that I take is I have one layer that's, ah, 100%. So whatever's on that layer is gone completely blemishes things that air pimples temporary for anything that is part of the way the person looks, I make another layer, and I still do whatever healing or spot healing or whatever it is that I'm going to do. And that was bad. Let's do that. This would be a case I'd use the healing brush in this case, and especially, she obviously is quite young and doesn't have really noticeable wrinkles. But people have little smile lines beside their eyes or something like that. If you remove them completely. Same thing people looking go well, thanks for the bad plastic surgery, but doesn't look like me. So now I have, ah, layer that looks like that, which is weird. But now it gives me opportunity to say, But let's lower the opacity that one to somewhere between 50 and 70%. So now it's still there. It's just less obvious. You can only do that if you're retouching onto a separate layer. If you were in this direct on the background, there's no easy way to say Wait, let's make that less obvious. So I end up with several layers that I actually label with numbers to remind me that's the layer that's 50%. That's layer this 20%. So if there's something I wanna just remove a little tiny bit, I'll click on that layer first. Before I used the appropriate tool. Okay, so that, in a nutshell, is why it's so important to do any kind of retouching onto a separate layer is so that when you look at it later, you're like, Yeah, that's a little intense. Let me pull the opacity back to let the original person or object or whatever it is show through. So I would still initially do it 100% to make sure I'm getting the right spot. But then pull it back to a more reasonable amount with some lower opacity. And depending on the project, I might have three layers. One that's 101 that and one that's 25 or something like that and will depend a little bit. And then it just means each thing you're looking at yourself. For that part, I probably should consider using this particular layer, so that will affect once it's already it. 50 something percent. It means as soon as I use the tool on that layer, it automatically is 50% off. The pull it back is that layer is already at that value, and it doesn't matter if I'm using, in this case, the healing brush spot Healing brush patch to Laura Clone Stamp tool. All of them worked fine. But by putting on separate layers that It gives you that opportunity now to come back and say, um, but let's pull that back. So it's not quite so obvious. I'm talking about this in the context of a person, but it could be anything where you're tryingto remove some object. When you think all the one is removed completely, it looks a little bit fake. So what if I made it just less obvious? That could be like and like stone texture or something, where there's something that just distracting a little bit. But if you remove it completely, it just looks a little odd so he could use the same theory. I use it mostly for retouching faces. Makes sense to be able to not remove issue of the face completely, but initially moving quickly and then lowered their passes. That makes sense. And once you do this a few times again, there's always people out there that ask this question, and I love that they do about Could I automate this in some way? And I know people who do a lot of retouching who the first they haven't action. That makes three blank layers with different levels of opacity labeled as such so they're ready to start retouching. They just click on the appropriate layer and start their work, Not every time going another layer. So there's always that opportunity you can't automate. There's no automated tool to say automatically thick, find all her blemishes and fix them. But at least it gets me the point where I'm ready to start retouching because I have all those layers in place. Now, I probably don't need to say this out loud because many of you have sat in my classes during this last couple of days, but at this point, I would not flatten. I know you're probably shocked to hear that at this point, but I would say this just as is as a PSD file. But here's a question I will again address because it almost always comes up. When I talk about this, people say, Yeah, that's fine to say, but now I need to sharpen this or do some other step. When you have three separate layers. How would you do that? In the old days of photo shop like a year and 1/2 ago, there was this command called people called stamp visible, which was a way of preserving your layers, but then making like a merged copy on top and not tell you the shortcut. How to do it because I don't use it anymore. It If you really want to learn it, you go find it. The theory was, you do this command often shifty bank. There's a new layers and I can keep working. That was a good theory back then because there was no alternative. But the problem is, if you realize I made a mistake on this layer, if I edit this layer, that top one doesn't change, because that was like snapshot at that moment in time. And I used to use that to because it was the only way to do it. Now what I would do is once I get to this point of having my retouching layers looking the way that I want ready, I think to move on I would select all three layers and choose Convert to smart object. Now built into this smart object are my separate retouching layers, but it acts as if it's one merged layer. Then I can move on and do other things like sharpened or softened skin or whatever. But at this stage, even if I'm in the middle of say, I'm softening or skin or using some method, I went, Oh, that's I made a bad error on that one blemish. I can double click and get right back to all these layers again. So it's just continuing that process of being able to do the blemish retouching Moviles that you want. But never in a way, we're like, darn it all. Now I've got to start again. I hate any time where someone feels like, Well, now I've done it and I got to start again. I would think almost always there's a way where you can sort of just go back to a certain point and then continue from there, okay?