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Lightening Wrinkles and Shadows

Let's dip back into the retouching room for just a couple of things. I want to show you a pro level technique for softening wrinkles. Really? We're gonna be lightning wrinkles and for reducing the effects of a double chin or any other shadow shadowy areas. It's a great hand lightning and hand darkening technique. For any time you need to do any kind of darkening or lightening. We're gonna close this image and we're gonna open up number 19 faux Dodge and burn. I think a little Valentine image from Istockphoto. So this is the original image, and I'll zoom in just a little bit so we can see her face a little bit better using my space bar to turn my cursor into grabby hand. So this is the after image. I'm gonna turn on the layers that I created for the retouching. So here's our before Here's our after so all I did was I lightened the wrinkles and I darkened the edges of her irises because if you look at an iris, younger people, as we get older, our irises fade. It's just a fact of life, so...

if you on an older person they won't have that darker outer rim on the iris, and you can take about 5 to 10 years off somebody real fast just by doing that one thing. Okay, so this is a great technique for lightening or darkening anything. It does involve a lot of hand painting, so it's another great excuse to buy a wake on graphics tablet. Forget technique for that. And if you think about what wrinkles are, always turn off the the layers that I created. If you think about what wrinkles are, they're just dark spots, okay, their shadows created by the fold of the skin. That's all a wrinkle ISS, so it makes sense to reduce wrinkles. You don't want to do a lot of re remaking of the pixels that make up a face. You don't really want to do a whole lot of manipulation of that. You can reduce wrinkles simply by lightning decreased or the shadow that you get from that same thing on a double chin. What's the double chin? Mainly, what you notice is the shadow, the shadow from the folds of skin so you can lighten those shadows and reduce the look of a double chin really fast. which is a heck of a lot easier and, I think more realistic than trying to rebuild somebody's neck. You know, like using the liquefy filter or something like that. We're actually moving pixels around and you're in the risk of really destroying the pixels. You know when you're doing that level of manipulation. So this is a good technique to have in your bag of tricks instead. Now you older photographers out there or those of you had spent time in a dark room may be saying to yourself, Well, by Lisa, why couldn't we just use the Dodge and burn tools to do this? Lightening and darkening? That's a very good question. You could, but they're extremely destructive. Okay, if you were to use them, you can reduce their opacity or their exposure. Rather of what the change is so so little that like to 10% from 100% so that you could actually paint paint paint with our that the Dodger burn tools and eventually get to the effect that you want. But there's no way to undo that at different steps. You know. He could use the undo button, that it would be hard to get you back to that point where you want to change your mind. So what you can do instead is trick the brush tool into behaving like a dodge and burn. And we're going to do it all on a whole nother layer so that we retain the ability to back off of the effect. If if we go overboard way, get it a little too crazy and we get rid of all the wrinkles because you want the person to still look like themselves. So my mom is always after me, least k. Did you take those wrinkles out of my picture? And I say, Mother, no, because then it wouldn't look like you. You know, I like them, but I'm not gonna get rid of him. So yesterday, the retouching techniques that we looked at involved the healing brush is so we actually did zap the wrinkles from under eyes. But if you were watching, we lowered the layer opacity on that. So we brought a little bit of the dark circle in the wrinkle bag because everybody has that. So that makes the retouch look more realistic. So you always want to be cognizant of remaining true to the person that you're retouching. Unless they're paying you to make them look like plastic, then by all means have at it. Okay, so let me show you what we're going to make here. I'm gonna go ahead and throw this away so we're starting from square one. So what we want to do is we want to create a new layer onto which we're gonna do our hand lightening and darkening. And we're going to do that in a way that I haven't shared with you yet. We're gonna do it with the keyboard shortcut, and it is shift command in or shift control in for new on a PC. The reason we're doing that is because we want several things here. We want the ability to Neymar layer. Yes, we could double click the name after we created, but that's an extra step. So we wanna work fast and smart and efficient. So we're gonna do it like this. So we're gonna name this layer foe Dodge and burn. We want to make a change to this layers blend mode and blend modes. If you remember from yesterday, simply control how color on one layer interacts or cancels out color on other layers. So we want to choose a blend mode that lives in the overlay category because the blend mode in the overlay category, I think of them as my contrast most. They do a little bit of lightning in a little bit of darkening, so I'm gonna choose soft light. As soon as I make that change in that poppet menu, I get a little check box underneath it. That says, Would you like to fill this layer with a neutral color for that particular blend mode, which happens to be 50% gray? What this is going to allow me to do is I'm gonna fill this layer with gray, and because gray is the neutral color for that blend mood, you're not going to see the gray. It's gonna have absolutely no effect, but it's going to give us a swath of paint that we can use to do our lightening and darkening. So once we get this layer filled with gray, if we paint with white on that grey layer, it will work like a dodge tool. It will be lightning if we paint with black on that grey layer is gonna work like the burn tool. It's gonna be darkening. Okay, Sounds a little bit convoluted. And this is one of those techniques that you would never know unless you ran up against a pro and they taught it to you, and then it would take you. You know, you'd have to really incorporate it into your repertoire to be able to go to it quickly. But once you do, it's going to be an amazing way to find tune your images. So again we chose soft light from the blend mode pop up menu, and we're gonna turn on fill with soft, light, neutral color. Now, when I click OK, you're going to see that new layer appear in the layers panel. It's gonna be solid gray interview, see, absolutely no change on image. See, I can toggle the visibility of that layer off and on all day long till the cows come home and you can't tell the difference because for that particular blend mode, it's like Gray wasn't even there. But the gray is going to give us a canvas onto which we can do our lightening and darkening with the regular brush tool. So we're gonna go over here. I have a honkin big brush. My goodness, press the left bracket key to go down and brush size and my foreground color chip is set to Why? So if you paint with why you're going to be lightning, if you paint with black, you're going to be darkening, Okay, so we'll just go ahead and leave it set toe light so we can, quite rather to do our lightning. Now we're going to make one more change to this set up before we actually start painting with my brush tool active. If I hop up to the options bar and get rid of the Dagan told him, I can see that my brush opacity is 100%. That's all well and fine. But what's gonna happen if I come over here and I decide I want a light in that dark spot right there? If I pain across it at 100% opacity, I get way too much lightning. I want it. I want to reduce the capacity that brush so that I can paint paint and paint to create a build effect. I want to build up that lightning cause I don't know how much lightning I'm gonna need, And I certainly don't want to go too far because I don't want to start over. So I'm gonna press undo the very top right of your screen to undo that brushstroke. So before you start painting, when the brush you want to set the opacity to somewhere between 10 and 20% Yeah, split the difference and go with 15. Okay, so I'll go ahead and say, actually, I'm gonna do 10 here. Excited 15 Maybe a little bit too much. So brush tool sets paint with white for lightning. Change the opacity of the brush to somewhere between 10 and 20% depending upon how much lightening or darkening you've got to do. Now, when I come over to that one spot when I paint across it, very little happens, which allows me to continue to go in and precisely control where my lightning is happening. Okay, now, you wanna be careful not to lighten too much or you'll introduce some odd color changes in their same with dark. Me don't want to go too overboard with any of it, but using our keyboard shortcuts here space bar to move around. I can quickly come in here and lighten these crevices. That's not a very friendly word. Lighten the sweet ladies tiny, shadowy areas. Now it is time consuming to do this kind of thing. But it makes a huge difference, and you'll probably find that you don't have to go too far with it to bring about a subtle change. And again, since I'm doing all this on a separate layer, if I do happen to go too far, all I have to do is lower layer opacity. And then I'll save myself from having to start over. Now I've been working with the wrinkles. I'm so far. Let me just toggle the visibility of this layer often on so you can see how far we've come. See how that just took a few years off of her face? You don't wanna do anything drastic. This technique is also good for lightning eyes. So let's say, um, this lady, maybe her eyes were a little cloudy. You wanna brighten them up just a little bit so you can paint with white over the eyes over the white part, and so I'll toggle that off and on, see the difference that made now we talked about darkening the rooms of irises. Let's flip flop are color chips who were painting with black, which is gonna be our foe. Burn tool. And I can come in here with a very small brush and I can darken the rims of her irises. This technique is also great for getting rid of any shiny areas or hot spots on Portrait's. Because what's a shiny spot? It's a light spot, right? This needs to be darkened. Lisa. Last question. So here's our before in our after they really took about 10 years off of her. Her face so subtle takes a little while very worthwhile on certain portrait's. Did you Started it? As factor would like to know, Is there an advantage to this method as opposed using soft light for the whole layer and then applying a layer mask to select the areas to edit? I think this way is much faster. Really? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, if you're at all adept with the painting metaphor and I went to art school, but I'm no fine artist by any means. If you're all adept with painting, metaphor is such a easy and natural to feel to go in, especially if you've got a graphics tablet in a stylist. This this kind of thing is really, really wonderful to use that additional tool with Okay, so let's see what else we can do to this picture. We could also darken her skin ever so slightly because as we do get older, our skin is thinner, okay? And we can get a little bit of a shine going on there, too, so we can increase our breast size a little bit bigger here. And while still painting with black set to a very, very low opacity on our foe Dodge and burn layer here we can come in and darken her skin This a little bit in the areas that it appears obviously lighter than the other areas. Okay, so you can also even out skin tone with this technique and again fix any kind of shiny spots that you've got going on. So let's just take a little look at our before and after with what we've done so far on that. So there's the before, and there's the after. See how it's evening out her. Her skin tones a little bit. Any course you could keep going as far as you want. You could darkened eyebrows ever so slightly, just all kinds of thing. And if we could see her teeth in there, you could use the lightning toe whiten the teeth. You know, just tons of different things you can use with this technique. And if you want to be really persnickety about it, you could create two of these layers. Use one for Foa Dodge and one for Foa Burn. And that would give you a lot of control over exactly what you're doing. Because if I decide that I've gone a little bit too far with this layer, you know, I could lower opacity. But since I've done the dodging and burning on the same layer, I'm lowering the opacity of all of it. And I may not want to do that, you know, So you can always do that on two separate layers. And if you wanted to do that, let's just take a little look at that. I'll go ahead and throw this layer away so we'll use our keyboard shortcut again to create the new layer, because that brings up that dialogue box that lets us change those different settings in one fell swoop. Yes, we could do those settings individually. We could create a new layer. Come up here, change the blend mode, go try to find 50% gray and fill the layer with Great. That would take way too much time. So instead, it's faster to do it all with a keyboard shortcut. Shift command in on a Mac or shift control in for new on a PC will name this one faux dodge and again will change the blend mode. Too soft light. Turn on the police, fill with a neutral color, then click OK, and then we could turn right around and create another one so burn and do the exact same thing. So then you would have one layer for your darkening, fixing shiny spots, darkening rooms of viruses, things like that. Evening out skin tone and you'd have the other one for lightning wrinkles and shadows of double chins and that kind of thing. So this may be one of the most complicated techniques that we're gonna go through in this workshop. It's definitely a pro level one that, um you know, I learned from the gurus at Photo Shop World, so I'm happy available. Share it with you guys because it's so very useful. And portrait's when you can't when you just want to add that extra touch to them and really make them look as good as they possibly can. This is a great, nondestructive way to do it. I see a lot of folks who will try to do this technique, and they'll end up duplicating the image layer 15 million times and using the Dodge and burn tools on those different layers to try to come up with a look that they want when you could end up with only three layers with this technique. And that way you don't have a ah honking big file, you know, because the more layers you have filled with paint, the bigger your file size is gonna be. And the more layers you have, the more difficult it can be unless you're really good organization and layer naming to figure out what the heck is going on on any of those layers. So if you keep it simple like this, it's very easy to pop this file open six months from now and say, Oh, you know, all my lightning or on my dark innings happening on the faux dark burn for full burn layer, and all my lightning is happening on the faux Dodge layer. It's very simple to see what's happening and, of course, to go back in and fine tune with other more painting or capacity adjustments on that question from D. H. I 12. How does this technique work on brown skin tones? It works the same way on any color of skin. Really? Cause all you're doing is you're very softly lightening or darkening whatever color pixels that are already in the image. Okay? The key, though, is and and one of the things that I even forget about half the time when I do this technique is when you switch to the regular brush tool, you have to lower that opacity or else you're going to go way too far with your first brushstroke. Okay, so always remember to do that, and you may even find that at lower opacity is more comfortable for you to use. That just means you're doing a little bit more building, you know, we're doing a little little at a time, Teoh, get to the point and it looks good to you.