5 Step Next-Level Skin Retouching in GIMP

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you five steps for skin retouching in this will be using gif version 2.7 point 18 which at the time of this tutorial is the latest version of but of course before I get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com as always I have tons of and Inkscape tutorials on here as well as my book of layers and and Inkscape help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy you can enroll in any my skill share classes by visiting school calm and you can get more with a premium membership to Davies media design your premium membership includes access to things like my Help Center app ebooks like my book of layers and exclusive content not found on YouTube you can start your Premium Membership off with a 7-day free trial and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so I'll be using this free photo from pixabay in today's tutorial you can click the free download button here and I went with the nineteen twenty by twelve eighty version and click download so here is the final result obviously a major difference if I shift click there's the before shift click here is the after and something you guys will notice about this is that she still has her freckles and a lot of the details on her face so it doesn't look totally fake here it doesn't look totally airbrushed and that's what I'll be showing you guys today in this five step process for retouching skin in so the first step is going to be spot removal using the heal tool and to start with this we're going to of course need to open up the original photo to do that I'll come over here and go to file you guys go to open and in my case I'll go to open recent and I'll just click on the original photo once I have the original photo opened up I'll come over here and duplicate the original image I'll rename this one original and this one will be retouch if the Enter key next hit the H key on your keyboard or come over here inside your tool groups click and hold the tool group which will probably have clone by default and just select the heal tool so the heal tool is a great spot removal to which means whenever you have a problem area that's pretty small so usually it's in the shape of a small circle or just any small shape inside of your image you can use the heal tool in order to just remove that spot and blend it in with the surrounding pixels so what I'll do is I'll hold ctrl and zoom in and you can adjust the size here and the tool options so I'm going to decrease the size of this until it's about the size of the area I want to remove which is going to be this acne here I also recommend going with a pretty soft brush so turn down the hardness to about 32 or somewhere are usually between 20 and like 35 and I also have the force turned down pretty low so right now it's around 24 and then you'll need to hold the ctrl key and click somewhere on your image for the source area so this is where the heal tool is pulling its pixels from and it's going to use an algorithm to pull pixels from the source area paint them on the destination area while also blending pixels from that destination area that's what gives this a believable result so now I'm just going to paint the destination area on the area I want to get rid of in that case it's going to be the acne and we can also paint it on the surrounding red skin but you'll see that that's not going to do much of anything you can still tell that this is red skin so we're not going to use the heal tool for that portion but we will move on to other items in here that we want to erase so again control and then click on the area where you want to source from and then you're just going to click and hold while you paint and that will erase that spot hold ctrl click and we'll do the same here and I'll just do this throughout the image anywhere where you see really a pimple or any sort of spot acne that can be removed so hold ctrl click for example this area right here we can paint that out hold ctrl click paint that area out so this is working on small areas and it's not going to work very well on larger areas we'll use a different tool for that so I'll hold ctrl and click here's another small area we can get rid of and I also recommend using this tool for things like wrinkles you can use a different method which I'll show you later on in this tutorial but I personally prefer using the heal tool for this if there isn't too many other colors in the path of this wrinkle for example so you can see that as I'm moving my mouse across it's doing a pretty good job there of erasing that wrinkle all right so that was step one in this process step two is going to be using a similar tool which is called the clone tool I know all of you have heard of the clone tool it is pretty much the same tool as the heal tool except instead of using an algorithm it's going to paint the exact pixels that you copy from the source so I'll hit the C key to grab my clone tool or you can click and hold the tool group here in to point ten point eighteen or newer and click on the clone tool I'll hold ctrl and zoom in just like the heal tool we're going to hold ctrl and click to grab a source and then we're going to paint on the destination area you can probably make this tool larger but be careful not to select anything like freckles that you don't want copied in the area's you're painting because the clone tool will directly copy the pixels from that area also you can see my size over here the hardness and the force are set the same as my heal tool and if I scroll down the source is set to image and the alignment is set to none and I also have sample merged turned off that'll be important later so I'll hold ctrl grab a source and you can see here this won't do a perfect job because it is just duplicating pixels from this area its cloning those pixels but it does do a pretty good job of getting rid of problem color areas so anywhere where we had some major red areas are now being blended better so up here I'll hold ctrl and we'll paint out that red area there and we will expand on this later so don't worry if it's not looking too great right now on your end all right so now you can see a majority of those large red areas have been removed all right we've removed the larger areas with the spot removal heal tool and then we've also removed the red coloring in the skin using the clone tool the third step in this process is going to be to smooth out the skin tones using something called frequency separation so this is a very commonly used tool in skin retouching although a lot of people tend to use it on its own and I think that's kind of a mistake I think it is a quick way to be able to retouch skin but it's kind of an incomplete picture so that's going to be the third step in our process and to use this I'm going to duplicate the retouch layer and on the copy so make sure we're clicked on this to make it active we can come over here to filters enhance and wavelet decompose is built in here with 2.10 point 18 this used to be a third-party plugin but it became really popular so they just built it directly into so click on that it's going to ask you how many scales you want five is a good place to start for beginners if you are familiar with this tool you can just go with something like seven but I will stick with five here make sure this is created in a layer group by checking this first option so I'll click OK so what this does is it creates five different layers here scale layers and it's going to set each layer mode here to gray merge and the top scale layer is going to contain the finer details the smaller details the bottom layer is going to contain the larger details if I come over here and increase the preview size of my layers so let's go with gigantic you can get a better look so here you can see there are much larger details in the scale five layer than there are in this first one you can't even see what's going on there really let me just come back up here and change the preview size back to large then you also have the residual layer so this pretty much contains the colors as you can see and it's going to also be a slightly blurred layer and all of these layers all six of them are going to be placed inside this decomposition layer group so I can hide the layer group and that will hide all those wavelet decomposed layers so let me unhide that and shift-click on this eye icon that will unhide all the layers in the layer group so what I recommend doing with the wavelet decompose filter when it comes to skin retouching is selecting large areas in the face and then using those large selection areas to smooth out the skin complexion make it look more even and most of this is going to happen on the first three layers here so residual scale 5 and scale 4 beyond that it gets to be a bit too much sometimes so I'll start with the residual layer and you can see here the layer mode of this one is just normal but I'll hold ctrl and zoom in slightly with my mouse wheel then I'll come over here and grab my free select tool and what I want to do is select large areas of the face but first make sure the feather edges option is checked here and I have this set to about 24 right now you guys can go higher and it is recommended to stay around 30 so I would say it's probably somewhere between 20 and 40 is going to work best for the feathering here so now we're going to draw the area we want to adjust so in this case we're going to select around the jawline the chin then we're going to go under the nose we're going to stay off the nose and go under the eye and then go around the eye like this so we're gonna stay off of the eyelashes and then we're going to stop right above the eyebrows there like so and then we're gonna wrap it around stay off the ear and we'll close that off so I hit the enter key if you missed large areas you can hold the shift key that will add the key modifier to add to the current selection and then you can just draw the areas you'd like to add to the selection you've already drawn hit the enter key hold the shift key and once again I'm gonna grab these areas at the enter key just do one more area there all right once you've selected the area you want to adjust making sure we're still on the residual layer now we'll come up to filters blur Gaussian blur and this time on the residual layer we can crank this up quite a bit so I recommend going to something around 30 and you can see that as we do that it is smoothing the complexion there it's making it a lot more even there's less blotchiness in the skin but it's also keeping all the freckles and little details here that's the purpose of these layers here it's keeping all those finer details which makes this look nice and realistic still so we'll go with something around 30 and click OK and keeping the selection area now we'll hop up to scale 5 and we'll come back here to filters blur Gaussian blur and this time we don't want to go all the way up to 30 because now it's starting to look fake so we're going to go with something between 5 and maybe a little above 10 at the most let's go about right there there's before there's an after I'll click OK and that's already done a lot of work but if you want to do even more you can come up to the scale 4 layer go to filters blur Gaussian blur and this time do something very minut so probably something less than 5 is more than enough and I'll click OK so I'll hit control shift 8 to deselect that and you can see now the skin tone is much more even in my opinion I kind of overdid it here but I think for the sake of demonstration you guys can see how this works so now we will do the forehead area so I'll come back to the residual layer hold ctrl and zoom in slightly grab the free select tool and will outline the forehead area that we want to edit so we'll stay off the eyebrows and try to go as close to the outline here as possible and connect so I'll hit the Enter key once again I'll go to filters blur Gaussian blur and we'll turn this up and just to match the other settings here I'll stick around 30 even though I thought I maybe overdid it there you can probably go with about 25 and be safe and I'll click OK I'll do the same to scale 5 so filters blur Gaussian blur something around the 10 mark here click OK and lastly we'll do scale 4 so filters blur Gaussian blur and we'll do something probably below 5 and click OK control shift 8 to deselect that so the reason you want to feather the edge and also get as close to the outline here as possible is you don't want there to be a harsh line between the edits you've made and the original image because it will create sort of a line there which is kind of happening here it's not too bad but now I'll move on to the nose which is going to be the last area so coming back to the residual come over here to the free select tool and now I'm just going to select the nose here and connect that and then I'll hit the enter key and now we'll go to filters blur Gaussian blur and I don't want to turn it up too much here because it is grabbing some of the color from outside and bringing it in which is making our nose dark so that doesn't look great so we'll keep this pretty minimal here move up to the scale 5 layer filters blur Gaussian blur do something very minimal here that is actually helping to get rid of some of that gray click OK and go to scale 4 filters blur Gaussian blur and luckily that is getting rid of that gray so I'll click okay control shift a to deselect that hold ctrl and zoom out so as you can tell her skin is looking a lot better so some of you are wondering if we're only using the residual layer and the scale 5 and scale for layers what are the other layers 4 well those layers contain the finer details so if there are things such as bumps in the skin or even sometimes wrinkles you can use those layers to get rid of those small artifacts in the image so for example if I hold the shift key and click on the scale to layer and hold ctrl and zoom in you can see the finer details that are displayed on this layer so you can start to see some bumps you could see a lot of hairs on this layer let's hide that and go to scale 1 so it's even more of the hairs and even smaller bumps here and then if we go to scale 3 now we can start to see some of the larger parts of the bumps as well as some of the freckles so if you wanted to get rid of the freckles for whatever reason you can get rid of them here so let's say for example we want to get rid of this bump right here what I would do is grab the paintbrush tool so I'll click and hold on my paint tools and click on the paintbrush tool hold the ctrl key and then click on here that's going to grab a middle gray color or you can come over here to your foreground color make sure you're on the 0 to 255 scale and if you want this to be totally middle gray go 128 128 128 click OK and anytime you paint middle gray on any of these scale layers because we're on grain merge it's basically just going to completely erase those pixels so it'll get rid of those artifacts and now I'm going to decrease the size of this using the left bracket on my keyboard I think it was this bump right here so let me come back to my scale 3 layer make sure that layer is selected otherwise the paint tool won't work and then we can paint that out with the middle gray and we can do that with any of the details in here so there's another bump here we can paint that one out and let me hide that layer and unhide scale 4 so you can see now there's less of those finer details in here scale 5 same thing so that is the use of those scale 1 through 3 layers so now I'll hold the shift key and click on the residual layer to unhide everything hold ctrl and zoom out alright so the fourth step in this process is going to be using the high pass method in order to make the skin look softer this is probably going to be more commonly used with female models or anytime you just need the skin soft and maybe like baby photos so what we'll do here is come up to the top right click and go to new from visible so we'll click and drag this to the top so now everything we've done to this point is on this visible layer so now what I'll do is duplicate this visible layer and I'm going to rename this one High Pass and hit the enter key next I'll come over to colours invert so that'll invert all the colors in our image then I'll come over here and change the layer mode to vivid light and lastly what I'll do is I'll come up here and go to filters enhance high-pass so here you can see it's going to convert our image or revert our image back to looking somewhat normal but keeping the contrast set to 1.0 if I turn up the standard deviation that's going to add a soft glow to the image if I turn it up too much it's just going to way overdo it and it's not going to work as we want it to work so what I like to do is keep this somewhere around 30 20 to 40 range is probably the best so the lower you go you could tell the softer it's looking there so maybe I'll go with about right there around 30 and then I'll click OK so then obviously is way too much what I need to do is right-click on here and go to add layer mask and we'll go with black fold transparency which will hide everything next what I'll do is grab my airbrush tool so I'll click and hold the paint tools group and grab my airbrush tool or it's the a shortcut key and now I'm going to increase the size of my airbrush and I also want this to be a pretty soft brush so around 30 or so and you can adjust the force as you go I'll keep the opacity to 100 for now so what this is doing is airbrushing your photo but instead of just airbrushing a color and covering up all the details of our pixels now we are able to add a softer look while still maintaining those details the last thing I need to do here revert my colors back to black and white and make sure white is my foreground color and so now painting on the black layer mask here for the high pass layer I'm going to begin painting here and I'm only going to paint on the areas of the skin I don't want to paint on anything like the eyes or the eyebrows or the lips anything like that so this is softening up the complexion and also perform this down here if that's too much in terms of the softening effect you can always turn down the opacity here so you can see as I turn the opacity down it is lessening that effect so let's just add a tiny bit here and you can also switch these colors so that black is your foreground color and paint on the hair and anywhere where maybe you see some of the softness spilling over so the eyebrows is another good example here so decrease the size of this using the brackets and just paint on those eyebrows I don't think we really have this problem right now but just an example there aren't the fifth and final step of this process is going to be contouring using the Dodge and burn tools and we're also going to make some adjustments to the final color of this to make it all come together but first what I'll do is right click on here and go to new from visible again so now we have everything on a single visible layer up to this point so I'll double click on this to rename it and I'll name it contour hit the enter key then I'll come over and grab my Dodge and burn tool and you can see I've adjusted the opacity of this so it's somewhere around 50% I'm also going to increase the size and I unchecked the incremental option I just don't like that option so we have two options Dodge and burn and then with the Dodge or burn settings you can adjust the shadows mid-tones or highlights so the Dodge setting is going to lighten the area the burn setting is going to darken it and if we turn up or down the exposure it's going to basically intensify that effect so what I'll do is I'll lighten the areas that match the contours of her face and so for example over here I'll also lighten the jawline I did her cheeks and we can also do some parts of the forehead here maybe by her temple and right now I'm on the highlights I can also do the same for the mid-tones and shadows which I'll skip for the sake of time but if I hold the control key that will switch over to burn so now it's going to darken the highlights by the same exposure amount and what I like to do is just darken right under the highlights there so not too much and same right here so really anywhere close to the highlighting I've done I like to darken it a bit and that accentuates the highlighting if you decide you want to lessen the contouring slightly all you have to do is click on the contouring layer and decrease the opacity and that allows you to adjust how much is going on there the final step I'll right-click and one more new from visible and then I'll come over here to colors color temperature increase the color temperature here in this case this helps to bring out some of the warmth in her skin there a quick okay that might not always be the case for you guys but for this particular photo I thought it looks pretty good alright so coming down to the bottom layer shift-click there's before shift-click there's the final alright so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did you could subscribe to my youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davey's media design don't forget to click the little bell icon to be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial you can also check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 57,934

Rating: 4.9643068 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2020, skin retouching, GIMP retouch, clone tool, heal tool, frequency separation, wavelet decompose, high pass, airbrush, complexion, fix acne, pimple, zits, smooth skin, portrait editing, contour, dodge and burn

Id: jJSDvxYwCOU

Length: 22min 26sec (1346 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2020