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Lindsay Adler - Adobe Photoshop Retouching

Hi, everybody. I'm Lindsay Adler and I'm a fashion photographer based in New York City. And what I would like to do is I would like to walking through our retouch oven image I took because that what I want you to see is the order of operations, the process that I would take for fixing exposure and color and skin detail and contouring and all of those things so you can kind of watch start to finish the process, the steps that I would take in perfecting this image. So with that, let's get started. And I am going to cover a lot of the basics. You could understand the most important tools for retouching. All right, so when open up this raw file in photo shop, it's gonna bring up adobe camera raw. So I'm looking at the file here, and the first thing that I need to do is make sure that my white balance is correct, and then also that the overall exposure of the images correct Now, later on, if there's color issues with the skin or I want to go ahead and do specialize color processing, I proba...

bly going to want to do that later on in case I changed my mind. So right now I'm just worried about exposure. So let's take a look at this And what I can see by looking at the history Graham in the top right hand corner here is that there's a little cluster of pixels on the right hand side in the brighter area. And then there's a whole bunch in the darker area as well. Now, if I turn on the little triangles in the top, right and left hand quarter, What that will do is it will tell me if I have any clipped information. So what that will show me is if I have highlights that are blown out, that will show up in red. If I have black points that have no detail at all that will show up in blue. Well, I just turned those two on, And if you look at my file, look, you can see just a little bit of black on her shoulder there. Well, what that really means is that I I'm not clipping blacks. I don't have many black points blown out, so I'm actually okay, but the thing I wanted to let you know is that you can't always tell by the hissed a gram. There's not really a correct hissed a gram, because if you're trying to judge, should there be an even distribution of pixels will know the backgrounds dark and then she is very light. So you do have to make some judgment calls here. And that's one of the reasons I like to photograph great cards and color checkers because it will allow me to set the correct white balance, whereas right now I am kind of just guessing, and that will also give me a judge for having a true black point and wait point. So if in this case you did have a color checker, this is where you'd be able to take a look, turn on those clipping and be able to see if I have a good exposure. Right now, it's going to be just a bit of guessing, but let's say I go. You know what I did? Go ahead and photograph on a grey background. You could go ahead and grab your white balance. I drop her when I click on that gray background, however, you'll notice that it goes probably a little bit too yellow, and that's what it comes down to is even if you think something is neutral, like a black shirt or a gray background, often times it has a little bit of tint to it. That's why having a color checkers always going to be best to get the best quality when you're retouching. So I'm just gonna back off this and kind of go a little bit more by. I hear all right looks good, but I also see that a lot of her skin tones are pretty bright. And if you look, if I bumped my exposure up just even a little bit, they start to go really, really bright. But it does take it a while before it goes completely over exposed. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to bring down the exposure just a little bit now. It's nice when you're working with Raw is raw. You have all the information that you want right there with that file, and I have something that it's available both in light room as well as photo shop, and what it's called is a localized adjustment brush. So let's say that I'm looking at her cheeks and her forehead. And you know what? I think they're just a little bit too bright. What I could do is it could go ahead and I could grab a localized adjustment brush. And if you look, I have all these different values exposure, contrast, highlight shadows, clarity, all of that. What I can dio is I consent my brush and I'm gonna right now, just reset all of it. And you can do that by double clicking on the center. A slider there, Everything's going to reset. Um, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, let's say that those highlights are just a bit too bright, so I could go ahead and I could pull down the exposure a bit. And then I could come over to the portrait and selectively light and down those highlights on her cheeks and on her forehead. Why would I want to do this? Let's say that you took a photograph and you were using a really contrast the light source and you take that image and she had a slightly greasy forehead or slightly greasy cheeks. And what will happen, or really shiny cheeks what'll happen, is you could completely lose the detail really have overexposed highlights in the forehead and her cheeks. So if you go ahead and make the rest of the image look correctly exposed and then open that up and Photoshopped well, you don't have access to that information anymore. You don't have access to that raw file. So now trying to bring down those highlights is going to be a lot more difficult. So one approach that you could take would be right here to come in with your localised adjustment brush, which is lightning down exposure just a bit. And I could selectively dark in those areas down, and that's probably just a little bit too much. Go ahead. I could bring down the highlights a little bit, but a similar approach would be if you're familiar with smart objects, they're not going to go into that right now. But you could use smart objects to be able to go ahead and bring back that information once you have brought it into Photoshopped. So just know that if you have a file we have blown out highlights, now is a good time to save them. You don't have to bring them all the way down. Just make sure they're not overexposed with no detail whatsoever. All right, so right now, I think that's all that we really should do at this point. Just make sure that you have close to your white balance that you do have close to the exposure that you wanted. Now, if you go ahead under this adobe camera raw dialog box to the bottom where it says Adobe RGB 1998 I'm going to click on that. And so it's going to bring up some workflow options. Now, when you're retouching, I recommend that you work in 16 bit because what you're doing is you're giving yourself the most color information, the most total information. You can possibly work within your file. So if you're making a lot of changes with an eight bit file or a small file, as you start messing with color and pulling it one direction and and drastically making changes to curves or to the overall exposure in the image when you have less information with an eight bit, the photo starts to fall apart a little bit. You start to see banding or or your grade. Ian's aren't smooth, so when you're in 16 bit. You're just giving yourself so much more information to work with. So you do at this point. Want to make sure you have that checked. Something else you want to be aware of is on the bottom where it says open and photo shop smart objects. If you wanted to work with smart objects, this is where you would change that setting. Now, all of these engines that I'm talking about, all these options. If you're working in light room, they still exist. They're just in different places, so you'd have to look that up. All right, so when hit. Okay, I'm just gonna open this image up. Now. I have the image open up in Adobe Photo Shop CC. And so what I'm going to do is the very first thing that I want to remove are really undesirable. Blemishes or wrinkles are really major glaring imperfections. So that is where you often want to start. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in and you're often told to zoom in 200 pixels. That's something that I do recommend. But if you're working with massive files like, maybe you're shooting with a file from a phase one. Sometimes it might not be necessary. All I can say is, if you know an image the most it's ever going to be reprinted is going to be, say, an eight by 10. You don't want to zoom into 200% because then you're gonna be spending time retouching a lot of things that you're never going to even see. So just keep in mind what the final output is going to be. That's in the save you time. So you don't have to focus on details that are unnecessary. All right, so let's take a look here. And I'm just going to look around my image and and I could see she has some blemishes on her chin. She has some rough texture underneath her eyes. So I do have a bit of area that I'd want to work with, and the photo is a little bit bright, so something that you could could consider doing, and it depends on what you're comfortable with is a lot of people will go over and open up an adjustment, uh, adjustment layer here and just dark and down the photo a little bit, so they can see undesirable textures just a little bit better, and that's that's kind of a checking layer, and that's something you might consider doing. So I am going to delete this when it's all said and done. But this is going to make it a little bit easier on my eyes as I'm looking around. You don't want to go too far because an old bring up detail that you're not going to be able to see anyway. All right, So to get started, you could create a new blank layer and work in that. Or you could duplicate the bottom layer. Just know the more you duplicate that bottom layer, the more information it takes up. So when you click on that layer and drag it into the duplicate layer, which is next to the trashcan, and I am going to zoom in, all right, so the first tool that I usually start with is over here, and it's called the spot healing brush and how the spot healing brush works is that you want it to be slightly larger than whatever blemish you want to remove. And so I'm going to use my left in my rat right brackets to make that brush smaller or larger. Okay, so now I have it selected over top of a blemish. Now, when I click, what is going to do is going to be okay. This blemish doesn't belong. Let's look at all the skin around it, and then it's going to gas and replace. And sometimes it works really great. Which is nice, because all you do is click all the way around. What I've found is up here where you're looking at it says Proximity Match Creek texture. The option that I found works the best is content aware Now. This is relatively new in the last few photo shops that have come into existence, but it just seems to take a look at the textures and give you a better blend and a better guess of what texture should be there. All right, so now we're ready to get started with this retouch, and as I click around, I'm going to try to get rid of any undesirable textures, and it needs to be textures that I know that I could actually see in that final print. Or however, the image is going to be viewed and So as we move around here most of the time, it looks like this is working pretty well. But sometimes it does not work great along areas of contrasts. And so what I mean by that is let's say that I'm trying to get this blemish right here. Notice how it didn't actually go anywhere. Well, it kind of got rid of it. Had to go over it a couple times. Sometimes what happens is when you're around an area of contrast, like hairline or near an eyebrow or the edge of a lip. Sometimes the problem that you'll get a little either smear or it'll give you the wrong texture so you know if you've ever had it, and I'm clicking around still working here. But I don't know if you've ever had it, where maybe in your hairline and you go ahead and use spot healing, and it just gives you another piece of hair, and it's clearly not what you were intending. So sometimes you need to step it up a notch, and it's a little bit more accurate to use another tool. So the next tool that I recommend that you check out because we're going to click and hold where you saw that spot healing, and I'm going to grab the healing brush and the healing brush is just giving you a little bit more control. It's not that it's any smarter, but it allows you to enter the equation with spot healing. It's basically just the entire thing is up to the computer. You click on a blemish, you're telling it. This is what's wrong. Remove it. Okay, The difference with healing is now. What I do is I tell the computer what skin texture is good, what I like. So let's just take a look here kind of a cross between spot healing and clone. But it's it's better than clone. Often it's a lot faster, so let's take a look at, say, this little blemish here. We'll spot healing. I just click. But let's say it's not working or it blurs a little bit. What healing allows me to do do is I can use the ultra option key. It's what I'm hitting right now, and if you'll notice it gives me a target. What that target allows me to do is set the sample area, which is a fancy way of saying, I'm telling the computer this skin is good. So when I click, use that to replace, so I'll click. OK, and now I click over the blemish and intends to give you a better result, so it does take one extra step. It's one extra click each time, but it really is. It's allowing you to enter the equation. It usually gives me better results. So right now I'm going to zoom in a little bit more, and I'm just going to do that, clicking around, getting rid of any unwanted blemishes. And you could spend a long time on this. It really depends on the quality of the texture of the skin, I would say in general, on an image from start to finish, I definitely spend less than an hour on an intensive beauty retouch. So it's not that I spend a massive amount of time in most of the time. What I try to do is really aimed between 20 and minutes. Something else I wanted you to know about both the healing and the spot healing brush. If they don't actually have to be just circles, you can't actually click and drag, so if you notice? Let's pick maybe a larger area, maybe this area on her neck when a sample and I want to click. And I kind of made a larger circle. Or if there was a long wrinkle, I could also trace that area. Um, so I could click from here circle, click and drag. So just know, even though it's spot healing and healing, you can actually do more than just a spot. All right, so let me click around this just a little bit more so you can get an idea of what I would remove. Now, unfortunately on, everybody's always looking for shortcuts for retouching, and I have a few that work pretty well. But in the end, the best quality retouch is often do take a while, but by a while, I'm not talking about, you know, 68 hours. You don't need to spend that to get a good quality retouch. All right, clicking around here a little bit more. She does have a lot of rough skin near her nose. Um, I wanted to show you another tool while while we're at this blemish removal, bad texture removal stage. Another tool that you might be familiar with is something called the Patch tool. So let's take a look at that when a click and hold on the healing brush again. I was going to allow me to select the patch so it looks like a patch. So what Patch tool is great for is larger blemishes or long wrinkles. So let's look, for example, maybe I wanted to remove that wrinkle on her neck. I'm just warning you, it doesn't always work, but this might be an example where she had a wrinkle, or maybe a long line across their neck or a scar. This might be an area that I would use the patch tool for, so I can select a large area like I am here. And then I can click and drag it to the area of skin that I wanted to be replaced by and says he move around. You can kind of see what's going to blend a little bit better, so maybe that be selected there. And so if you notice from a distance, it looks pretty good. But let's zoom in. When I zoom in, you do see right there a bit of artifact ing so you could say, Well, I guess the patch tool didn't work. I'm going to have to use another tool. But instead, what I could do is just go over this again with the patch tool and tell it to blend. And so I just It takes me a little bit extra, but it actually did a pretty darn good job with that neck. Wrinkle so fundamental with the patch to allows you to do is make a selection of what you don't like. Click and drag it to an area of skin that you prefer, and then it blends the edges in for you. So what do you might have noticed is one of the tools that we haven't touched on so far, which is probably the first tool that you learned for retouching would be the clone stamp, the closed Sam. There's lots of great uses for it, but it is also the tool that is most commonly messed up. To be honest, because what happens is let's say that you're cloning at a really low opacity and keep cloning over. It's basically cut and paste, and you're picking how much you're cutting and pasting. Let's say you keep cloning over and over and over again. And as you do, this skin starts to look plastic, or it starts to look blurry and unreal. And so that's what often happens when people are using the clone stamp. But there are some better ways to use it. So let's compere, for example, and take a look underneath her eye, so looking underneath her eye, it's a little bit dark. And normally, you know, if you go ahead and clone, you know that it might start to look fake. So one thing that you can dio is when you're using your clone stamp. What you do is you have the altar option key and it gives you a target, and that allows you to say, I want this area to copy and then when you click again and paste. But one thing that you might want to do instead is change the blend mode of this tool. And if you don't know about blend modes, this is something that you want to add to your to do list something you definitely want to take. A closer look at blend modes exists for both all of your tools and your brushes, as well as layers, and basically what they do is they change how a tool interacts with the layer or changes how lair interacts with a layer below. It changes how they see your image. Okay, well, what does that really mean? When I changed my blend mode, which by default on the clone stamp is normal? When I changed my blend mode, toe lightened. What it will do is when I clone it on, Lee fills in shadow areas, and it leaves the highlights alone, so it gives you a more realistic clone. So what you want to remember is, if you want to fill in the shadows, you want to lighten the shadows. You change your blend mode to lighten. If you want to dark in a highlight, you change your blood mode to darken. So can you see how, instead of just cloning, which is just like cotton paste? Basically, instead of just cloning, you're making it be a little bit smarter, a little bit more targeted, so I could, for example, now coming here with Clone on Lytton and go ahead and fill in underneath that I if you look before and after, it's just a little bit more realistic. So as you can see, she does have a bit rough skin. I could continue to go around and remove textures like Let's take a look down here without blemish underneath your chin. Get rid of this in a number of ways they could start off with the patch tool, see if that works with a click and drag. It doesn't work so great I could go ahead and try spot healing. If not, I could try my clone stamp unlike and to try to blend it in. This brings me to an important point that I wanted to touch on. And this is something that I didn't really understand for a long time until I looked it up on and its a difference between capacity and flow. Um, opacity and flow are similar, but not quite the same. One way to describe this without doing a whole bunch of in depth demonstrations is often when I do opacity. What? Sam Cloning. If you've noticed, when you select an area and you clone over, you can keep cloning and until you lift up your pant or you lift up your finger in your mouth, it won't increase the opacity it stays the same, so if you trace over an area, there will be no change. Whereas flow every time your brush or your clone moves over the same area, it keeps leering the effect and multiplying it in general with retouching. It's actually recommended to use flow instead of opacity because it gives you more realistic blending. It's a lot more realistic to how you would actually paint, for example, and it gives you smoother transitions. So what you would really dio is leave Europe Ass City at 100% and then change your flow. You could have a very low flow, and it would just keep layering each time that you move your cursor over an area, and that's whether you're painting or that's whether you're using clone or whatever other tools that you're using. So if you'll notice right now, I have a passive 100 I'm going to be adjusting my flow instead of a pass ity. But it again, like it will make a difference. But whatever tool you choose to use it's not going to ruin your retouching just tends to make it look a little bit more natural. All right, so Let's take a look at a couple more areas here. Anything else major that I want to get rid of. I mean, I would definitely probably spend another 10 minutes removing blemishes. But since we only have an hour to go over this, let's talk about some other tools. Okay, so I run into a problem here. Let's take a close look at this area of skin on her cheek. Okay? Well, yeah, kind of kind of blue machine got some bad texture, but to be honest, it's more. It's more blotchy. And and even if you look, it's it's darker. So what do you do about that? Okay, well, there's a couple things you could do. One option is you could dodge and burn and really, what? I want you to think of it. Let's, especially if you've never worked in a dark room and dodge and burn. It just sounds like fancy words. Honestly, just think darken and lighten that that's really it. So one thing that you could dio is you come over here and click on your adjustment layers and I'm going to go to curves, and I'm just going to grab the center of that curb and click up. And what it does is it lightens everything up. You could also go to where it says preset and click on light, and there's a preset that lightens everything up. That's another option. And even if you don't understand curves basically grabbing the center up, you can see what it does Lightning it up. All right, So if I hit command, I What you see, you see how that mask now turns black? It was white and it turns black. What it means is I have no hidden that effect. Okay, So if you don't know about lair, maths and adjustment layer, is that the whole other conversation? But basically, when you look and you see a mask okay, that square, when it's white, it means the word nest next to it. The change you made is visible when it's black, it means you've hidden it. Okay, Well, since I've gone ahead and I've removed the blemishes that I want, I should also probably get rid of that tops curves. Let's delete it that I was using before to be able to take a look at the blemishes I have, so we don't We don't want to do that. We want to just take a look at the actual photo. So before I go to dodge and burn, I'm going to leave that real quick. I just think this photo overall is just a little bit bright. So I'm gonna grab my curves just dark and everything down just a little bit. Just more pleasing tonality to me. I just thought it looked a little bit washed out, So right there is fine. OK, but let's go back in. Let's go back into the problem areas that I was talking about. And it's just just really dark there and really blotchy. So one thing that I could do is go back. Like I said, we're gonna grab that curves gonna lighten it up a little bit. But now the whole photo looks light. That's not really what I want. So what I do is a hit command I and it hides that effect. OK, so this is what dodging and burning would mean. I'm going to name this and I'm gonna call it lighten, OK, but these are the areas that I want lightning. I'm gonna grab regular brush, and I wanted to be white and wherever it paint on that map, it's going to show that word next to it. So wherever I paint on that mask white, it's going to lighten. What I want to do is just really soft, subtle, like ending up those dark areas. And so I'm going to make my flow really, really low. But each time I go ahead and I go over that area of skin that's too dark, it'll light ended up, and every time that my cursor goes over that area, it adds up and it's going to give me nice, smoother transition. So it's gonna grab a small brush, and I'm just going to kind of go over that area. So notice, even going over that area at 9% flow just two or three times. It lightened it up a lot, so it's great is if that's too much. You grab your black brush, you can paint over it and it gets rid of that effect. So, in fact, I'm going to grab one or 2% flow really, really low, that weight brush and just try toe. Try to lighten up some of those areas that were just a little too dark and What's nice is you can just go subtly take a look and see if any event see how it just, like end up some of that watching us just a little bit. So when you look at professional retouching houses, what they often do is they will often go ahead and try to fix a lot of problem areas like that first. So if it's too dark underneath the eyes, they will use dodge and burn light and dark and using curves just to try to get rid of some of those problem areas they're using slow, low percentage. So it's nice and subtle. Take a look again, like ending up just a little bit right here next to her eyes. The makeup is just a little bit too dark, so we're gonna go in there like ended up going to blend it a little bit more So again, freshener retouching houses will definitely use this top control different areas on the skin that are too light or too dark. A lot of times will spend many hours doing this, and that's going to give you non destructive retouching, so nondestructive retouching. If you're noticing not actually touching any pixels whatsoever. All I'm doing is lightening and darkening them to make them look smoother, to make the imperfections in the skin a little bit less noticeable. All right, so let's take a look when you zoom out and let's take a look what we've done so far, All right, We smoothed up, gotten rid of some blemishes. But you know what? I want to take it up a notch, and I want to go a little bit more intense. So what we're gonna do is we're going to jump over into a more advanced retouching technique called frequency separation. So for the sake of this tutorial, one of just flatten everything for a moment so you can take a look at how this works, right? Frequency separation. So, yeah, there are some areas of texture that if I had more time, which I would I would get rid of just some of these rougher textures, but really was bugging me is just these assistant blotchy nous around her face. But what happens if I clone? It's just it's gonna get rid of that texture and we're not going to look realistic. Aiken Dodge and burn. But sometimes that might take forever. So what can I do to give me a nice, more even transitions between the tones and the skin and just make it look more realistic without blending or without damaging texture? OK, that's what frequency separation is. Frequency separation. What it does. It takes your photo and it divides it into it. Takes the top layer where it sucks out all the texture, and it saves it there. And then the bottom layer saves all the colors and the tones, like the right lightness and darkness of the picture in the color detail and what it has got texture up, top color and tone in the bottom. And so what you can do is you could retouch them separately and then sticks them back together in the end. And that's what they do with really high end beauty, retouching and beauty photography, because they can make all those skin colors and tones perfectly blended together and then add the texture back end. So it is just beyond perfect, and so that's what we're going to do right now. And so there are a lot of different actions out there, so you don't have to do this time and time again. If you go to my blogger, go to block that Lindsay out of photography dot com. And if you go Teoh, I believe it was if you skin one of one of my blog's, I have a set of actions that will actually run this for you. So you don't have to do this step by step. But you will want to keep a pen and pad beside you if you want to be able to do this yourself without those actions or to create your own action. So what you want to dio is you want to duplicate that background twice. You could hit Command J twice as well. I usually avoid too many shortcuts when I'm teaching because then it just add something else that you have to remember. So I'm going to do is I want a name, that middle layer, and I'm gonna call it low, which is color and tone, because that's what's going to be on that layer. And then I wouldn't name that top layer high, which is texture. OK, well, right now I haven't done anything else. I've done this. Name them. So we're gonna do is going to turn off the top layer. Click on the low lair and I have to make it on Lee be color and tone. So to do that, it is totally counterintuitive. But you have to blur. And I'm sure if you know anything about retouching you were told, do not blur. But you have to blur because what you're doing is you're getting rid of texture. In this latest, you can separate the color and the texture. So what we're gonna do is we're going to go up to filter, blur Gaussian Blur. All right, so what I'm gonna do that we use that little square there to pick an area where I see a lot of texture, So I think right there on the cheek is going to be good. Now, what you have to decide is how much to blur. And this is one thing you have to know whether you have an action or not. What you need to know is you want to blur to the point you want to drag the radius to the point where you don't see any more skin detail. But how do you decide what that is? First of all, it's usually between for me. I usually find it between one and three pixels. I've done it a little bit higher than that. Done it a little bit lower, but honestly, one in threes where I can usually find it. But one of the ways you can tell is if you zoom in, you want to go to the point around doing it at 100% toe, where you can't see individual pours anymore. The poor should blur together like you can't actually see the differences between them. So let's say for me I pick Topic 2.4 on this one. I do have a way for you to tell if he did it right or wrong, but it's gonna take a little bit for you to tell that. So let's just say for now I picked 2.4 and I hit OK, all right, well, now I've got a blur layer, but I need to suck out the texture. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna turn on my heiler perfect. And now there's a series of steps that, honestly, you don't have to remember the series of steps. If you have an action and it doesn't really mean anything, but you've got to do it. So you click on the top, Heiler, you turn that layer back on in a good image, Apply image. All right, So now this is the part where it's a whole bunch of different numbers and stuff like that. You just have to put it like here. So lair should be low. Lending should be add. Skills should be to off ships should be zero and invert should be turned on. And when you did it right, your picture will go great. I just said a whole bunch of numbers and think Just take a look at my screen just as it exists right now. Lairs, low inverters checked blend mode is add scale is to offset a zero. The thing I want you to know is that these numbers are the ones that you should use for 16 bit. There's actually different numbers that you would want to use if there's eight bit, which is why I have a totally different action for that. But okay, so I'm gonna hit OK, it went grey and that if you played with high pass before this might look a little bit familiar, to you. So as I zoom in, what I'll see is all of that textures now sucked up onto a different layer. I'm looking around, and that's pretty cool, because now the texture separated from the color. If I did this incorrectly, what I would see is a lot of skin color on this layer as well. If I did it wrong. Also, I could see almost no texture. So here's what you want to remember. I'm just gonna go back a couple steps real quick. This is the rule of thumb that you want to keep in mind when I go to blur, Filter, Blur, Gaussian blur. If I blur too much, I suck up too much texture into that top layer and actually starts the pickup color. Because if you think about it, if this picture needs to have the texture on one layer and the color on the other, if you blur a ton that textures got to go somewhere so it goes into the top. But if you blur two months, you start to blur. The colors of the color goes up top and then opposite. If I don't blur enough, the texture stays there and So then when I go ahead and I try to retouch and smooth things out, there was too much texture on the lower layer. Then all of a sudden I had my texture back in in the end and it's not there. And so you can tell that I retouched and it'll be overly smoothed. So just try to keep these things in mind and remember, you can If you have an action, you can always just redo this. So let me just go back to where we were. Image apply image. Like I said, I always use actions on this point. OK, so we did good. We picked a nice number, a 2.4, but this is probably gonna be a little bit hard to retouch. You can't see anything. So this is the stage where you need to change a blend mode. And like I said, if you don't understand blend modes, go learn them. It's amazing. But all you need to know right now is that that highly air you need to change your blend mode to linear light. You just dio that's just how it works. All right, so now when I can do is I can start cloning or it can start painting I concert, smoothing out skin, skin in abnormalities blotchy nissen the skin. So what I could do is I could create a new blank layer, or I could duplicate my bottom layer. Depends what you're more comfortable with, and I'm going to grab my clone stamp, and what I'm going to start doing is just start lending, start blending areas of skin, and I'm going to do this on low flow and then grab my clone stamp on normal and you're going to watch. And I'm just going to do it a little bit of time, so it's going to be subtle, but I'll show you before after you can start to see how this allows me to even out my image. So I am just Let's go toe like it's gonna like 12% flow still low, but not so low that will take me forever, and I'm clicking and dragging with my clone stamp clicking and dragging, all right, and then let's go over here and get click and drag and smoothing out the side of her cheek and underneath her eye. And how bout between her eyebrows here and I'm clicking and dragging. And then I'm going to click and drag, and I'm trying to just smooth out some of the uneven area of skin. So I'm kind of clicking and just blending it around like this. So let's see someone just do this for another. Maybe 20 seconds on the forehead here between the eyes. And of course, I would spend a lot more time on this. But I just want to show you the change that we've made so far. All right, so let's just take a look real quick before after, Do you see how significantly better that texture underneath her eye looks and the evenness of the skin? Now, I didn't actually touch the texture, but if you think about it, what texture really is is you see kind of highlights and shadows right when the light rakes across the skin. So as I started to fill in a little bit of the shadow areas and gotten rid of some of that unevenness, it actually before and after smooths out what that texture looks like. And so let's let's go down here to some of this rough area down here and we do the same thing. I'm cloning on low, and I'm just trying to even out some of these on even areas clicking and dragging low flow. Evening this out. Now the key here is twofold. I can make her skin beyond absolutely, positively perfect, Really, like I can make it beyond perfect, but that's the whole point. If it's beyond perfect, it's not really so. It depends. What is this photo? Is it a beauty image like I have here, where I can go ahead and make it surreally perfect? Because it's meant to be an advertisement? It's not meant to represent reality, Or is it a portrait where you probably want to keep it looking riel. So when you're using frequency separation, what you have to be careful of is there you just fixing flaws? Or are you taking it to the point where it's just not realistic anymore? Something else that you want to be aware of as well is when I'm going ahead and I'm clicking around here when I'm cloning, I am changing highlights and shadows a little bit right. I'm messing with the colors and the tones. What you need to remember is you don't want to change the shape of someone's face. So let's say, for example, she's got this shadow here beneath her chin. If I go ahead and I are beneath her cheeks, if I go ahead and then clone over that and I remove it well, now it looks like she didn't have any cheekbone. So it's actually working a against me. It's not actually what I wanted to do, so you just need to pay attention to the highlights and shadows that already exists in the face. You want to work with them and not against them. All right, So let's say I clicked around here for what minute? Two minutes or so. Resume out and let me show you before and after. Okay, so right now we're 86% and I start to just smooth out everything on faith. Um, generally, what you would want to do if you really want the best quality retouch, you would try to get rid of the textures first that are undesirable, and the light and dark areas with burn and dodge that are undesirable. And then what you really want to use frequency separation for is to smooth out blotchy nous or uneven areas of the skin. You don't really want to use it to try to just fix everything at once, because then it tends to look unrealistic. So that's kind of the order that you would actually want to do things in. All right, so there's other areas like I know, for example, of these textures over here I would have wanted to get rid of in the beginning, but overall, that really made a huge change pretty quickly. Something else that is nice is, let's say in her cheek here, I wanted to smooth out, and I wanted it to be brighter. I could actually start to contour in, shape her face and lighten things up in darkened things down at this point, if I wanted to. But we're gonna wait on that for one second before we leave frequency separation. I want to show you kind of a cool trick here. Let's say that there's an area of skin that just, you know, it just didn't have enough detail to it. Like it. You went ahead and you smoothed out, and it just looked like it's a little bit too smooth or maybe looking at the eyes you love them hop a little bit more. You love them to have just a little bit more detail. So your top layer there, this high layer, the texture layer. This is holding all the information to the texture of your photograph. Kind of like High Pass of Europe played with that. So if I go ahead and command J or I drag it down and duplicate it, do you see what just happened? Look at all the intense amount of texture that just appeared to this layer. It's amazing. Well, I don't want to appear everywhere, but maybe selectively wanted to apply it to the eye or certain areas of the skin. So what Aiken Dio is, I can click down here where you have that layer mask and I'm going to hold the altar option key. And what it does is it gives me a black mask, meaning hid that entire lair. Well, it's nice as I can go ahead and I can grab a white brush put flow at like 10 or 15%. And now, wherever I go ahead and paint, watch this once, you quick before and after watch how much sharper that I isn't it really pops out. So this is going to be an area where in this process, where you can go ahead and grab ahold of more detail so I can grab an even lower flow and just lightly paint back just a little bit more texture to the skin. A little more detail to the lips, for example. And so I could actually use this to bring more detail on my photo, Not even just to sharpen, but actually to give the image is a little bit more depth in that case. All right, so this looks good. Like I said, I would still spend a little bit more time, but I think that's a pretty strong change. Okay, so let's take a look at a couple other things that I would do if this were my beauty image, which it is. But if our retouching it for for a client or trying to make it perfect, okay, so something else that I see let's come down here to see how our lips have these uneven areas. I could go ahead on the low lair with a low flow, try to smooth out some of these these darker areas and just try to make that blend in just a little bit better rights. Let's improve that a bit. Okay, that looks good. As I said, I could get rid of some of this, and I actually would have cleaned this up a little bit more in the first step. Um, I could try to go ahead and blend in this transition and the makeup. The makeup was just really, really to crisp here, so I can kind of blend it in. It's a little bit more realistic, all right, Also this makeup over here. See how there's an imperfection. Could try to fix that a bit at this step as well. And overall smooth out transitions. Okay, so let's say that I got all of that taking care of. The image is looking pretty good. How about this Really bright highlight on her nose? I could go ahead and play with dodging Burn. Let's think of look at one other thing that I can try. I'm going to go ahead and create a brand new layer empty, and I put it above the color and tonal er, but underneath the texture layer, I'm going to zoom in and I'm gonna ground my brush and notice that would have my brush Just regular, plain old brush at a really low flow. If I hold the altar option key, I get a color picker and I get one of those little eye droppers. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pick a color right next to that highlight cases really, really paled hand. And now what I can do is I can lightly pain over that highlight area with a really low flow. Okay, So pain over just a few times. So watch my before and after, See how it toned it down from a bright highlight just a little bit. But it did so in a realistic way because I grabbed the color tone right next to that highlight. So when I zoom out noticed it's giving me a much more subtle highlight, but it didn't get rid of it. I still want it there. So wanna highlight on her nose? Same thing. If I was like, No, I think perhaps that shadow on the side of her nose was actually make up just a little bit too dark. I could paint that same color tone over it and just try to lighten it up just a little bit. So notice how have softened out the highlights and shadows. I could actually use this to completely change the shape of her nose. If I wanted to, I could make the highlight wider and bring the shadows in and I could change things. Just know that this is something I could do with this process. All right, so let's say I'm happy with frequency separation. What's next? One of the other things that I'm looking at. So what I'm going to Dio is I am going to take all these layers, merged them together and put them in a top player. Well, why? Why do I want to do that? But I don't want to get read of my frequency. Separation came a case that changed my mind. I want to go back and work on things, but right now I have the texture and the color separated. So if I'm making changes that affect both, it could be a problem. So the short cut is not so sure. It's actually the longest shortcut. Like ever clicking on the top layer, its command option shift E command option shifty takes everything below the layer you've selected squishes it together, puts it on a new top players. That's what we have here. All right, So what would I do at this point? To be honest, a lot of things that I would probably do. For example, how about this? I love doing this with eyes. I am going to grab the lasso tool and select her eyes, and I'm just going loosely doesn't have to be close, and I'm going to feather. What feathering does is it takes the selection and it says, Okay, over, Let's say, a feather by 20/20 pixels. It goes from full selection to know selection, and it just kind of softly transitions the selection out. So let's do select modify. Let's do 20 pixels. Just give me a transition there if I, um if I then go ahead and hit command J what it does, turn everything off. It gave me selection just of her eyes, but you can see here, and it put it in a brand new layer. So for getting more detail out of the eyes, something that I love, too. Dio, as I love to go to image adjustments and shadows and highlights, okay, So did you see what it did there? And when she before and after it light induct the eyes a little bit, and it brought more texture to the eyes. More detail. And it does depend on the color of the eyes, for example, with very dark eyes. It doesn't do much, but this is great with green hazel blue eyes. I'm sure before and after I could go even further on that layer. Go into image adjustments, levels increase the contrast, bring out even Mawr, like even darker in the shadows, brighter in the highlights. But when I see here is, I don't want it to be too bright, because then you start looking a little bit twilight. You know the glowing hazel green eyes so I could mask or I could erase. So this is subtle, but I still just want a little bit more of that detail. So I have my eraser, my flow, my flow to maybe 20% and I'm just going to make sure those weights of the eyes aren't too white and tracing over, and it's just going to allow me to blend it and make it look a little bit more realistic. but still have gotten a little bit more detail out of those eyes. Alright. Looking pretty good. E did again. Great. Okay, so that looks pretty decent. Um, one other trick that I learned as well is at this point, you can use a tool that I don't use for anything else. On the left hand side, it looks like a triangle. And it's called the sharpened tool. And if I zoom in with my strength at 50% and I just traced the iris, watch that before, after, See how learned you one more time. See that detail, pop? It just brings out a little bit more detail. Now, if I go too far, watch this. If I go too far, get insane. Horrible artifact ing. But I usually just go over the Irish just a couple times just to bring out a little bit more in detail. So that looks nice. All right, so let's see before and after their eyes. A little bit brighter eyes with a little bit more detail. Okay, Well, the last thing that I know that I need to show you how to do before we finish this up is I definitely want to go ahead and lighten and darken different areas of the picture selectively. I'm dodging and burning, but this could be so much more than that. What you can do is you can be your own makeup artist. You can lighten up areas of the face to make the cheekbone higher, dark and down areas to make it more defined. Uh, in a full length or daylong tutorial, you could go into this in depth, but it's basically what we talked about before We're dodging and burning. But now I can just shape and control the face just a little bit better. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to curves made adjustment layers down there and this one I'm gonna dark and down, all right. And I'm going to call it Ah, darker. And if I click on that layer mask and I hit command, I it puts a black mask in there, so that hides it. And I'm gonna grab another one, and I'm gonna call it, grab another curves and lighten it up, and I'm gonna call it lighten and call that late in there and same thing. Click on that mask command. I fills it in. So now what I can do is I can grab a brush, really low flow, and I can shape the face. I can lighten and darken things. So, for example, let's see what I want to darken down. Like looking around. Her eyes here wanted dark and down just around her eyes a bit, so they popped just a little bit more. How about her eyebrows? Make it a little bit more dramatic. I'm just tracing over her eyebrows lately. It's good. How about underneath her lips underneath her lips make her lips look fuller. And, of course, because I am working with masks, adjustment layers and layer mask, I can always undo anything I'm not happy with. So let's take a look. So, so far. So our eyes were popping out a little bit. Her lips. Look how much fuller her lips look there. Okay, that's looking pretty good. But where I've taken a lot of lessons from its makeup artist, if you've ever if you're a woman, never put a makeup or guy and you've contra the face. What you learn is that shadows go underneath the jaw underneath the cheekbones around the outside of the face underneath the lips, whereas highlights go in the top of the cheeks, a little bit of the center of the forehead, down the middle of the nose and just above the lips and just a little bit on the chin so you actually learn how to shape a face. And if you look up something called makeup contouring, you can see this. I absolutely. If you want to learn more, recommend that you either watch my creative retouching class at a three day on that as well as my skin. Wanna one class? If you want to learn more about contouring and shaping the face these ways, I get much, much, much more into death on retouching and all of the things that I briefly touched on here in those classes. So I recommend that you check it out, especially some of these terms. Don't sound familiar to you, but let's take a look. I can switch over to light and now and let me just lightly like enough her cheekbones just a little bit more of the top of the cheeks. Good. A little bit more here and I would switch back to dark in the dark and down a little bit underneath her cheeks. Good. How about dark? And where I sat around the outside of the forehead. Hey, looks good. There went dark enough, the forehead just a little bit in general. All right, let's show you. Before and after that, I was tiny. Bits do. Here's before, and here's after, so I've starting to shape her face. And so again, if you want to learn more about that, definitely check out one of my other classes on that. But what's great is I could even go in and pop out the highlights on her lips selected on light and make them look a little bit fuller. So you're actually kind of changing. The lighting in this photograph were fundamental. You're doing what a makeup artist would be doing and painting onto the face to give the illusion Ah, brighter highlights and darker shadows to make those cheekbones look higher to make underneath. The cheekbones look darker and more shaded, so watch this before and after, so I can give more shape and more drama. So I just covered a whole bunch of different things, and this is kind of what I recommend you do kind of follow it in this practice. Go ahead and get your overall color, your white balance and your overall exposure. Right. Then start by removing slightly blemishes, pimples, wrinkles, really bad textures. And you're just going to do that using your patch tool, your healing brush, your spot healing brush and your clone stamp, and you're going to go ahead and try to get rid of those really bothersome things. Okay, well, then, from there, if there's areas of skin that are too dark or too light to go ahead and use dodge and burn, which is just use, lighten and darken and curves and try to smooth those areas out. But when it comes to blotch in this, an unevenness in the skin, if you go ahead and use those other tools the normal way to try to even them out, you're gonna ruin texture. You're going to be destructive to your image, which is what you don't want. So instead, what you do is you use something called frequency separation Frequency. Separation will suck the texture out and put it on one layer. You have the color and tone on another, and then on that color and tone later. What you can do is you can even everything out. You smooth everything out in the face, and then you can add that texture back in. Once you've done that, you can then go ahead and lighten and darken, burn and dodge to shape the face to contour to focus the eye. Then you fix other things. You can fix more selective color changes here at this point. This is when you would maybe liquefy change the shape of if I want to lower her shoulder or move in her ear or change a little bit of her face structure. You could do so at this point, so you want to start off by giving thing rid of things that they're most bottled. You want to get rid of things that I most bothersome, but you don't want to get rid of things that are just going to be a waste of time. If you won't be able to see it in the final product, perhaps you don't want to spend two or three or 45 hours on an image, but instead what you want to do is analyze what's the final outcome going to be and you want to make it look rial. You want to make it look perfect, but not too perfect, because then the retouch is just a little too obvious. So let's take a look at where we came from. This is what we've changed since frequency separation, smoothing things out and since our very beginning image. That's where we came. Quite a dramatic difference. And I would likely on this particular image start to finish not talking to a camera. Spend just about one hour perfecting the skin and getting it just right. Maybe a little bit more. If I really knew this is going to perhaps be a beauty campaign where I'd need to zoom in and have every little texture be just perfect. So perhaps you've heard all these things, and maybe this is a little bit too beginner for you. Well, you could definitely check out a more advanced retouching class I've taught. Or perhaps this is just a little bit over your head. Well, you can check it out, and I've also taught some more beginning classes. But hopefully, and watching this, he picked up a few tips and tricks along the way to help make your images look even more perfect from when they started