Lessons

Lesson Info

Quick Retouching: Skin

I wanted to include in this. It's kind of a little bit outside of what we were talking about cause up till now it's all been like Let's be artistic and, you know, kind of creating things of a different nature. But to me, one of the things that I do gory often as a finishing touch to some photos is some basically touching, and I want to make sure I emphasize the word basic and quick. This is not intended to be obviously a full born won't course on retouching, because if it was, I'd go into a lot more detail on some other areas. Some of you out there may have heard people talk about this thing called frequency separation, which is a big way to retouch. I'm not gonna talk about that and talk about ways where you don't have as much time in frequency. Separation is a good example of probably one of the better ways to retouch skin, but it's not fast. And if you're doing a portrait for someone where there's no you not put any dollar amount in for covering retouching, you don't want to spend h...

ours doing it. So I'm gonna show you methods that I like to use that are. I never like to use the word quick and dirty, but it's that it's closer to that. It's fast, efficient, and guess you'd end result pretty quick, but also goes back to my number one philosophy of Even in this case, I'm trying to do things in a way that is at least as flexible as I can make it, because we really haven't talked too much yet about things like printing. But one of things that happens, people all the time, is they create something in Photoshopped and they look at and say That looks great. They print it and there's something they don't like about it. Maybe it's too dark or too reddish or whatever it might be. Well, if you've prepared your filing photo shop in one way, you might be kind of lucked to do any further adjusting. So just like we talked about things like Adjustment Layers, I like to do my retouching in that same means using adjustment layers and smart objects and smart filters so that I could do what looks like a fairly significant change with a lot of changes made to my image, but know that if in a pinch, if I need to, I can still get back inside that and make some changes to it. So the way I look at something is there are certain things that need to be done first. Most things when I'm doing retouching. I'm not terribly concerned about the order in which I do things. For example, if I wanted to look at someone's teeth and their eyes where I do, that doesn't matter. But one of the first things I would look at would be anything that's blemishes or things that need to be removed because everything else sort of builds on from there. The other thing that that means, though, is before even talking about blemishing are removing blemishes. I'd want to make sure that my image overall from an exposure color standpoint, looked the way I want, because in this example, here I have an image, which is a, uh, think it's a camera smart object. Let's just check. Yes, it is OK, so it's camera raw. I've done some initial adjusting and I click OK if in this next step, I now do blemish removal and do that as well see in a moment, and then I decide. Now I look at it. I think maybe I want to change the white balance little bit. We'll all that work I did on blemish removal is useless because blemish removal techniques do not automatically update when you change any setting with one x possible exception. But within photo shop, it doesn't. So I want to make sure. Yes, this photo is the way that I'm going to keep it in terms of color, balance, toning, exposure, all that kind of stuff. So we're gonna assume for a moment that is the case here. So get a little closer here. So the way I when I'm looking at something, I'm still trying to do this relatively quickly. But the thought process going through my head is dividing problems that need to be dealt with into two different categories. Things that are temporary. I e. Blemishes, pimples, little scratches on someone's face from their cat. Whatever it might be, that's not part of the person than that's, ah, 100% removal. If there are other things that's part of their face, maybe dark circles under their eyes. I mean, if you remove those completely. It might not look like that person anymore, So by the same time you might want a lesson them. So I'm always right away dividing into pieces. Complete removal make it less obvious. If it's something that is unique to that person, for example, maybe they have a birthmark. Then I would ask them, Would you like me to do anything to that or not? Because, I mean, that's part of who they are, so they might be expecting it to just be that have it there. And that's the way they look. And other people like, Oh, yeah, if you could make it a little less obvious. Great. I don't know. Too many people want, Ah, photograph that doesn't look like them anymore. I always tell this story about retouching because it still bothers me this many years later, when my daughter was graduating from high school, we moved to from the Canada to the US We've been there. So the whole senior portrait thing was kind of a unique thing to us, because in Canada, and call them seniors is just you're in high school and you're about to graduate. So she got her her portrait. Don and we got the little package that says, Would you like package A or Package B and click here to take out a second mortgage to pay for it all that kind of stuff? So we were looking at all the packages, and the photo of her was quite nice. It was quite a nice photo on. One of the options in the package was retouched. Yes. No. So I looked and I thought looks pretty good to me. So I said No. So we weren't. The package came so many weeks later was opened. The first photo was like, What is what's wrong here? It doesn't look like her. Well, in our family, a lot of us have a little darkness under our eyes. Will they? First of all, I said, don't retouch, but they did, and they removed it completely. So now it didn't look like her anymore. So now we had these photos that didn't even look like the person that the photos were taken off. And then their mind partly. Well, we've We've reached us. So we made it look better. Well, no, because now doesn't look like her. So I sent the back and said you know, a I said no retouching and be Let me tell you how to actually do it next time because he did a really rotten job. So And if I can, I'm gonna involve the subject. You don't want to point out to them All things you have to touch up same time, you know, That's kind of the approach to take is look at lessening things. For example, on this lady here, there's, you know, whatever under with the technical term for a line like that from my cheek in her lips. If I remove that completely, friends of hers might kind of go Well, we're at the same time. There's a couple of blemishes that I could remove, and I could probably lessen some of these other things. So one of the challenges that we face if we're not thinking about the fact that this is a smart object, is how can I, um, do things like hell and clone everything? Because if I try to use the healing brush, I get that little symbol going. You can't do that. So and I've kept this deliberative, smart objects. I want to show you another alternative at some point, but that means I'm going to add a new layer. So this is gonna be my I don't have to label them. But for the purpose of demonstration, I will buy 100% removal layer. So anything I do on this layer, it will be taking things away completely. So I got my spot healing brush set on content aware If you have this option, use it. Another rule of thumb I mentioned the other day that if you see anything Photoshopped, it's labeled smart something. Use it. By the same token, if you see anything in photo shop says content aware, use it because it's really good compared to the alternative. And I got sample all layers turned on. That's really important, because if I don't have that turned on, it won't work. Sample all layers means whatever you're doing, like trying to fix this little blemish here. Paint over it and it fixes it. But it basically just put a little tiny patch of skin on that separate layer. So technically, the underlying layer is still untouched, and I continue working. I like to personally use the spot healing brush first because you don't have to do any extra clicks. You just paint over wherever you see issues, and it fixes them. If you're ever doing this and it uses an area where it doesn't look very good, you may have to undo and start again. But you can usually do it fairly quickly. And I'm not doing things like any slight Nosal wrinkles on her eyebrows because those I don't want to remove completely. So I'm looking through the things that I think I want to cover up completely, and I'm using the space bar so I can scroll. I probably normally zoom a little bit more closely if you find you get into an area where the spot healing brush isn't doing a great job, and all it's doing is it's effect cloning a blemish from somewhere else and covering. Trying to cover up the other one than the secondary choice for me would be the healing brush, because on this one I can option all click and say, use this area to heal this pat this area over here so I would make that my second choice. Try the spot healing first, and then if you need to use the healing brush just takes that extra little clique. So just to illustrate the point, I have now made a whole series of little blemish removals, which hopefully looks pretty reasonable. If I hide, you can see some of the differences. But just to illustrate why, I said, make sure you adjust exposure anything first. If I now said, You know now that I think about it it, I should make her a little brighter and maybe make the color balance look more like this or the white balance and whatever. It makes some changes, and I click. OK, when I do that, it's probably even more so. You can see it make even more obvious now that I would do this. But just to make the point that you'll notice that all the blemishes don't update. So this is something That's why you have to do it kind of in that order. Make sure that everything's the way you want, then do that removal of everything. So once I've done that and again the order in which you this doesn't really matter, but I tend to deal with the obvious things first, then make another new layer and call it something else to remind me this is the layer that I'm gonna use to lessen things. So, for example, she has a couple marks under eyes here by take mine. Go back to the regular spot healing tool. This, by the way, is we're having a pressure sensitive tablet is really nice because I'm not having to change the brush size. I'm just changing the intensity of my pressure, and I've removed it completely, which again she might like at first glance. But then, that's where it's not necessary looking like that person more probably not as much on someone like this of her age, but I'll show you another example in a moment where it would look really obvious. So what I would tend to do is do one of these lessening things to make sure it works and then lower the opacity to about anywhere from 50 to 60%. And what that does is now. There's still a mark still, but it's less obvious, as opposed to gone completely. And now I can continue doing that on any part that I see and in each case, gonna do the same thing where you're gonna be less as opposed to taking away completely and even this area here where I still want to remove it. But I might like to make it less obvious. See how the difference is just making things more subtle. So anything that you feel might be something that if I was this person, what I like this to be not quite so obvious. Where it becomes challenging is someone like this guy. I mean, let's face it, he's an older gentleman. If I took all his wrinkles out completely, he would look like really bad ad for plastic surgery. That people was a that's not realistic at all. So in a case like this, right away, I'm gonna know I want to be at a lower percent opacity. So when I start making any kind of adjustment to try and deal with wrinkles, I'm this lessening, as opposed to removing completely. So we still gonna be happy because it's gonna be everything is still there but looks less obvious. Unless he's a character actor where he wants to be like, Look at me. I'm this older gentleman that plays these roles. I mean, that's part of the conversation and probably want to have with them as you go, so we'll come back to that a little bit later on. So now I'm at a point where I've got the skin looking the way that I want in terms of overall blemish removal and, uh, the other things a little bit less. And now I want to move on and do something else, like maybe smooth skin a bit or something of that nature. This is where I think many people would either merge or slightly better merged or stamp visible where they do this thing where they say, Now I got a new layer, That's all of that. Yeah, you could. My only concern with that is, if I now move on and do some effects to her skin and I look at it again, I think her right eye I wish I had done that differently than all that work I did on Fixing the skin is pointless because I have to delete that layer and start over again, and I'm going to pause for a woman to say sometimes you'll do this. What I'm about to show you of using smart objects, and there's actually no reason why you ever needed again because you've done a good enough job the first time that there is. Nope. You don't have the necessity to go back a step, but I'd rather have that option so that if I print it and show it to her and she kind of goes, I like it, But something about And she points to something I would rather have the choice of getting back to that and tweaking it, then kind of going to my head start all over again, and I never on any project. If I can avoid it, ever want to start over again. So even though one out of 10 times I might have to access information, I'd rather have that opportunity. So I would take these three layers that I've created, the 100% removal, the less obvious select all three, right click and choose convert to Smart object. So now that's package that together. So I've protected those retouching layers. But now I can move on and do something, whatever that something might be. So, for example, I might do ah, filter. And this is where the fans of frequency separation shutter and go. Oh, no. He's going to blur her skin. Well, yeah, I am, but in a way that hopefully is a little bit better because we're doing a smart filter. So I like to start off with a surface blur, and my goal here is to temporarily taking advantage of smart objects, blur some things and that make sure I can see what I'm doing. So I'm going to use values that are higher than I'll end up with, because I certainly don't want to look like that when I'm finished. But the reason I do that if you we're watching before, remember I taught but one. The advantage of an adjustment layer is you can deliberately over a just something to see where you're masking and then pull it back exact same theory here, instead of doing a very subtle little blur and then try and mask out the detail areas like her eyes and go can't really tell. Instead, I'm going to say I want to make sure I can tell So in this case, because it's all on a white background, I could probably just mask out her hair, but typically, especially if the subjects in front of something else I would apply this blur. Take the mask for the filter and inverted to fill it with black. So now I have this retouching skin filter ready to go. So I've got the surface were over applied more than I actually want more than I want to end up with I guess I could say And then the filter with black So now I take my pink brush Changed my form Garda White get a smaller brush And now I start painting with white over I paint with white I'm gonna be revealing that filter in this way I can avoid I don't want to paint on her eyes or her eyebrows or anything that has lots of detail on because that's one of the biggest giveaways for doing a blur is when you blur the wrong parts. So the reason I'm doing this again is because now it's really easy for me to make sure I'm blurring the correct areas and not getting areas that I shouldn't. So I'm trying to avoid detailers like lips and teeth and earrings and all those kind of things. I'm trying to do all the other areas, but things like hands. I would probably still do it, but use a lower percentage of white because I'm starting to see some detail in her hands, and at a certain point I would look and say, Well, how am I doing on her face? I didn't go high enough up here, so I'm a bit more for forehead that and at a certain point I want to see how I'm doing. So I would pause, hold down, option or alter and click on the layer mask and see what the mass looks like. And if I see obvious areas that I missed, I would just paint those in not as much around things like eyes that I want to get the wrong place. But that's a nice weight. If you're feel like you might have missed something, you can do that pretty quickly. And as an added bonus, you have, like really weird pop art. If you want to sell that on eBay or something, you can do that, too. So now I'm at a point where, OK, I think the massive pretty good, but it's still over the top in terms of how much I blurt it. So now I can come back and say, Well, let's try more reasonable numbers that are a lot lower because I want to be just a very subtle little effect I usually find as a combination of lowering the settings and then coming over here and also lower in the opacity. So this is kind of like duplicating her skin onto a separate layer, blurring it, then lowering opacity. But I'm doing it in one place. Okay, now, now that I'm at that point, I'm starting to look mawr the way that I had in mind the detail areas, air still looking pretty good. If I did miss anything, I could zoom in closer and you know, paint. And I was doing it zoomed out just for the purpose of demonstration. But I normally get it nice and close like this and make sure I didn't miss any areas. And now I want to sharpen the areas that need to be sharpened, like her hair and her earrings and things like that. We talked about this earlier. One of the problems the challenges of smart filters is there's already a mask on there, so that's not really going to help me, because if I applied sharpening, it would on Lee Sharpe in her face. But I just blurred a little bit to make it look softer. So in a case like that, I might duplicate take this mask, inverted and then throw away. Throw away. He said, the surface blur and add my sharpening. Whatever I'm gonna do, I still have to duplicate the mascot is realize, because the way I did it, so I might do the same thing over Sharpen to make sure it's in the right place. And then I can take this mask, Drop it on there. Say yes, please replace it and then inverted. I've got a sharpening layer, I'm saying Don't sharpen her face. I got a softening layer saying Onley soften her face. Now some people look and say, Why would you do all that with all those layers? And it's for the simple reason I mentioned before. I feel like now I've got something that I'm ready to go with. But if I printed myself and make the decision that I think I sharpen a bit too much or I think I missed a bit there, I've got all these various pieces I could go back to. So if I look in and say, Oh, I'm now that I've done all that. I realized I missed a blemish somewhere. I can come back here and say Get back to this point and do further adjustments and then save that and have an update. Is it absolutely necessary to do it this way? Of course not. You could do stamp visible to your heart's content, but just on that off chance that that's the day where you miss something glaring and someone else's. What about that mark right there? And you realize you just did 10 other steps, kind of like now. So you know, one of my colleagues said when we were discussing said, Yeah, When I feel like when I'm retouching, I just go through enough of a process. I never feel like I'm going to make a mistake. I want to change my mind in my responses. Well, I suppose. But is there any downside to doing it this way? I don't think there is. I'd rather have that just in case, because I might feel like I've done a perfect job and I might show it toe this woman and her husband and her husband goes and like that part, so I'd rather have that opportunity to go in and adjust it if I needed to. One of the main things I would like to be a take away from this was when I did the what ended up being a slight blur. But I initially over blurted to see what I was doing. That to me, is such an important Photoshopped technique. And whatever you're doing is when you can take advantage of the fact that lots of times the photo shop, you can do exactly that deliberately over. Do something to make sure you're seeing it properly. And then at the end, pull it back in this gentleman over here, I notice he had some very obvious red areas in his face and I might like to lessen those a little bit. So in order to do that, I might do that by using adjustment. Layer is gonna let me make that change. So let me give my standard warning to say at first you're gonna look, think like Dave. You're doing a horrible job while you're doing that. It's for exactly the same reason I want to make sure I don't miss anything, So I'm gonna deliberately overdo the red removal to the point where it will look not very pleasant, but there's a method to my madness. So I would go hue, saturation and then say Onley want to get into the Reds and I want to lower the saturation of the Reds. You see, Now I get to the point. We're like, OK, now it looks like it is Everything's saturated, that's just too much. Well, it is if I left it that way. So now same idea. I invert the mask, I take my paint brush and I start painting over the areas that are to read, and at first you're like, OK, so now you're changing set of red. It's like gray, but that's because I deliberately have overdone it so I can see very clearly what I'm doing. And again here I would normally zoom in even closer, but I was trying to show you the quick version of it. Obviously you want to avoid areas that are supposed to be read like lips, but anywhere where you see those areas that are have been too much red in them, I'm not gonna go everywhere, but certainly the parts that are more obvious than not and I'm trying to do it in such a way that varying so it's not just I'm not painting a huge big area, but I'm doing little taps with my pen of different sizes because it's like little spots more than anything else. And once I feel like I've got a pretty good shot of them and this is what my mask looks like. Then I come back here and say, Okay, now that I've done that, let's go back to the Reds and put it back to square one for a second and now just ever so slightly start to nudge it and see if I'm getting a better result. Can you see that on the screen? I think that looks natural enough. They're still. I'm not gonna move it completely because, let's be honest. He has readiness in his face. Unless he said, Can you Something about that. I want to remove it completely, and I have to get the clone stamp tool. But I'm trying to do a realistic portrait of someone and just make the things that are perhaps a bit of a problem, not quite so obvious now. You could apply that theory to almost anything if someone had a facial feature, they had very obvious blue veins. For some reason, then you could do the same thing, using the blue parts and that kind of thing. So there's lots of ways in which we could approach that theory. This as I met before in this case, now I could. So now that I've done that now, I could start saying, Well, now let's do on top of that do some blemish removal to see if we can't remove some of the really obvious red areas. But I did that first cause I want to make sure I kind of removed some of it. Then I go to the spot healing brush and start toe. Try and move. This is where we might need to go to the healing brush because all the surrounding areas are pretty much red. So because the healing brush looks at surrounding areas, I'm I need to do it with the healing brush. So Aiken sample from this area and do a bit of painting this way, and I realized I still have to have all layers turned on this one, this one and why nothing was happening at all because you should seemly something happened. Now we can deal with some of the fact that there are some areas that are worse than others. That's kind of the approach that I would be taking is to try toe, do it in stages and think about the fact that what is the most challenging or the biggest issue have to do with this case. It was the fact they had red areas because I'm not gonna look before. I just say, Well, I've got a lot of wrinkle removal to do because I wouldn't remove all his wrinkles. I would lessen them using that method we talked about before. Now I do want to take one step back. So just reminded myself of something else I wanted to mention. Remember, back in this one, I mentioned that you want to make sure you do your adjustments first and then do the healing. There is another possibility, and I'm leaning more towards this for a certain situations because light room and camera have got better, because in the early days of camera on light room, they're healing ability was somewhat limited. So let's take a look at this, so I'm going to make a new adjustment that's not the greatest in the world to make a point. And then maybe that's a little bit too close. And instead of leaving out that instead, I'm gonna do the healing in here Now, In the earliest versions on the up, until recently, when you used the healing tool inside photo shop or light room, it was a circle, always a circle. And then it would pick another circle over here somewhere as the place from which it would heal. So it was OK, but it didn't really help for things that was not a circle. Now the healing brush works more like a photo shop healing brush where you moving around in any shape, and now you can decide. I think maybe this would be a better place to heal from, so you'd go ahead and do your bits of healing like this. It also has opacity. So that means if you were doing something like this kind of thing and you thought that was a little much, you could lower the opacity. It actually that was seen with that did. There was really interesting. It decided in order to fix the bag on her. I I'll use the other bag on her. I thanks. That's awesome. But the difference is, now you click OK and back in photo shop. It already has got those little adjustments made to its I continue, but the difference is now I look at ago. I think I kind of over exposed that little bit. If I have been doing this inside photo shop, I would have been, like start again because it's right is part of camera on. I'm saying Camera opposite would work the same way in light room. If I adjust the exposure, all the healing that I've done just updates automatically. So I'm now leaning more and more towards do that kind of work in the raw editing because it is a live nondestructive edit versus healing on a separate layer. And what made the difference was the fact that I can just paint any size. In fact, there's a feather and opacity before their what Those weren't on option. If you're working on, I wouldn't probably do this with a person because it might be almost a little scary. But if you had a landscape photo when you thought there might be some little tiny sensor dust up in the sky. This little button down the bottom or check box has visualized spots, lets you kind of see where the problems are on again. I probably would not do that in someone's face, because that would really scare them to think how many spots they have. But if this was a landscape photo, you might go. There's some little I didn't notice. Those can help you see where there's some little tiny kind of dots that you your eyes might not pick up. So with that someone's face, I would very quickly turn that off as quickly as possible, because that's just a scary thing. So two different options. This Onley works, however, and this is important if you have the latest version or two or calf camera raw. If you're still using what I call an older version of camera raw. This one is Cameron nine. So I want to say it was like 8.6 or something like that that this changed. So if you open your camera on it says seven or eight and you the most important part, if you look at hell and you don't see anything that says, like opacity and size and visualize spots still works, but not quite as effectively. So that's another option that I would suggest that for the most part, if you have that option, I would start there. So I think that's all I wanted to talk about. I'd be happy to answer any questions if there are any. Yeah, we got a couple of questions that came in here. I don't know if you have an example, maybe for this one. But we had a question about what do you do if the object behind the subject is not solid, such as If you had a crowd of people at a sporting event, for instance, Um, I don't know I having like that. I mean to me that if there's a crowd of people, that's still a resource that I can use. So if I'm trying to cover up, one area might say, Well, I could try and clone these these people on this part of the crowd and pull them over. I mean, it's like almost anything. It's it's almost better. In a sense, if you had that sort of out of focus crowd in the background cause then it's a lot more vague. The challenge to me is much more. There's a brick wall there, and those bricks have to match up perfectly. That's much more challenging to me than if there's vague information. Might be others people back there. What? I'm start seeing rough shapes. If you could see everyone everyone's face and focus that again, that would be a little more challenging. So probably a combination of cloning and using sort of that copy and paste meant that, like when we were talking about patterns at a certain point that at this point it's got a copy, one of those Candies, and slap it on there kind of you the same thing with trying to cover up back information a certain point. Just start using whatever resources you have. We have a couple of people vote on this question, and the original Post says I lose texture when I'm using the Content Aware Patch tool as it blends in with the background. Could you show an example of how to retain that texture? Um, I have anything that would do that, Um, well, I guess that obviously depends a lot on the photograph. I would look at it from a perspective of the content aware patching is to try and cover up challenges. And then once I've done that, I might try to reintroduce texture back in overall by copying some of the underlying texture. And there's a method you can use. How can I show this easily? Um, the high pass filter. If you play around with this, you can get some of the texture back again to end up with this kind of gray version. And then you change the blend mode too hard light or something like that, and that brings texture back in. So in theory, you could say, Do a bunch of patching or healing. Once that's finished, take that whole thing, make a smart object, do that high pass filter and then at a mask and painted back in Where you need it or something like that. That's something I can quickly think of as a possible easy solution to mention