My TOP 10 Photoshop Hacks for Portraits

hey guys Irene here welcome back to my youtube channel today I'm gonna be sharing some of my favorite Photoshop hacks and tricks these are my top ones I use them all the time on all of my pictures so let's just get started with the first one and it is my stretching technique if you followed my YouTube channel for a while you probably already know this one but it's just so good that I have to share it again and it obviously is number one in my top hacks so it is great to change the aspect ratio of your image without cropping it it's great to fill your images for Instagram and I use it a lot to make my images more symmetrical just like in this case right here so I'm gonna take the crop tool and I'm gonna move it just a little bit and now as you can see the model is right in the middle of the image makes the image a lot more pleasing to the eye so I'm gonna crop this image like that now to stretch this corner right here all I'm gonna do is take this marquee tool right here I'm gonna select the background I'm making sure I'm not selecting the models arms or her face because we do not want to stretch that that would look really odd but we can definitely select the background now I'm gonna right click on our selection choose free transform right click again just distort now this is very important do not drag the selection itself only drag it by this tiny little square right here okay do you see I'm just taking the selection and moving it to the side and then I can apply the transformation and deselect it and here we go we stretch the image this is before and after this works great if you're shooting pretty high apertures like 1.2 1.4 1.8 and so on this might also work with low apertures but it works the best with high apertures now another little tip here do not drag the selection itself because you're gonna cause this right here you do not want to move the selection you want to wretched hack number two you're gonna be using the stretching technique again but in a little bit of a different way whenever you're shooting full body shots with portrait lenses something like 85 millimeter 100 millimeter 135 millimeter lens it tends to make your model look a little bit stubbier and shorter especially if you're shooting from above which I do a lot so I use this technique to make the models look a little bit more proportionate again and kind of correct the lens distortion so what I'm gonna do here is again I'm gonna take my crop tool and stretch the image lengthwise just a little bit more now I'm gonna take the marquee tool and I'm gonna take the selection that's I would say in the middle of the models thigh so a little bit higher than her knee but not too high yeah something around this now again I'm just gonna right click free transform right click distort and this time I'm just gonna move it down this way so this is it this is all I did and as you can see the model looks a lot more tall elongated and just a lot more proportionate in general this is a super easy way to correct the lens distortion hack number 3 is about the hair I'm gonna go into filter and liquify I'm gonna make my brush just a little bit bigger and I'm gonna go ahead and make the models hair more voluminous this is something that a lot of photographers don't do forget to do or just like neglect and trust me this makes the biggest difference ever making the hair just a little bit more voluminous a little bit more big and maybe even adding a little bit of a curl into the hair you see how I'm pulling where the curl naturally is and I'm just kind of exaggerating that curl makes the image so much more magical and perfect I also follow the rule of rounding up thanks so whenever you see a flat line make more round on the hair and again that will make it seem a lot more luscious and voluminous now be careful here only small tiny adjustments if you go too much it's gonna look very unnatural so you just have to do little tiny strokes little by little okay let's see the before and after so here is the before and after on the hair as you can see it makes such a huge difference again the rule that I follow straight lines become rounded that's all you have to do when it comes to hair continuing with the liquify here's hack number four and by the way all of the images that I'm showing are unedited and raw I'm gonna go into filter and liquify again this is something that happens for me a lot because they shoot from the angle that's above the model sometimes their neck might look a little bit shorter than I want so a very easy trick to fix that is to take your liquify my brush is usually almost the size of the models face and I just go ahead and likely move her shoulders down just a little bit right by her neck right like this now you want to be very very delicate here very tiny little motions okay and if your distorted anything else around the model make sure to fix that as well so I'm just moving her hat over here just making sure that the braid looks just fine only focusing it on the shoulders and this is it so it seemed like such a tiny little thing but look how much of a difference it makes I can't stress enough how this just changes the whole image little tiny details always do such a big difference hack number five is about skin retouch I use this trick whenever I need to edit quickly or if I have a lot of shadows on the face this happens a lot when you should it and they are a lot harder to remove than blemishes so I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate my layer I always do this whenever I'm editing skin but really you should do this whenever you added anything just to make sure that you always have the original in case you messed up so I'm gonna get a little bit closer here and we're gonna be using this tool right here the sampling tool now the whole trick is that you are sampling the skin color and then you painting it back on with the brush here I'm gonna show you and it's gonna seem a lot easier so I'm sampling this skin right here on her forehead I want a sample the color that's the most prevalent in the area so as you can see if we go a little bit to the side it's a little bit more blue here there's a lot more of that shadow that I don't really want so I'm sampling this area where the skin looks the most smooth so now I'm gonna take my brush and I'm gonna make it a lot smaller now I'm using a tablet which means that the pressure that I apply to the tablet that's the kind of pressure I'm gonna get on my image but if you are using just your regular Mouse I highly recommend switching up your opacity to like 10% you can play around with that but I would say around 10 to 15% you can also play around with your flow as well I'm gonna keep it at a hundred because again I'm using a tablet so I'm gonna go ahead and lightly start painting on top of her forehead that color that I just chose also I'm using a soft rounded brush always a soft rounded brush with no harsh edges so I'm just slowly painting on very very likely if you feel like you've painted too much you can always lower the opacity here as well as you can see and look at that look at that difference already just me lightly painting on top this color by the way I really love that it also still leaves some of the detail in the skin so it looks very natural and it is super super fast to do now I'm gonna choose this color right here because I want to get rid of some of this darkness underneath her eye again I'm gonna take my brush and then lightly paint it on top of the darkness the biggest challenge here is to know which color to sample again I'm just trying to sample the color where the skin is smooth and flat here's another sampler here and I'm gonna take away this color right here by her mouth and even a little bit over here I'm gonna sample up some color here and then apply it to the cheek the more you do it the more you're gonna be confident in this so here on the nose is a little bit harder because you don't want to overdo it so I'm gonna sample this area right here that's pretty flat and very very likely I'm gonna brush it on top of her nose very very lightly and then just this area right here alright so let's look at the before and after that looks already really great now what I would normally do to finish this off here's another before and after this quickly I would go into my patch tool and then get rid of whatever little blemishes I have here and again going with that collar on top that I just did also helps whenever you're doing skin retouch like on blemishes because it makes them a lot softer and a lot easier to take care of I absolutely love doing this trick it works so so well and it makes the skin retouch go super super fast this is not ideal for like high-end skin retouch but this is great for quick fixes it just works wonders so quickly hack number six is using your camera raw on a layer mask I've been using this a ton lately and it is such a time saver I love to edit my model separately from the background and in Camera Raw I can do a lot of different things at the same time and then apply them all in just one click it's very very simple so I'm gonna duplicate the background I'm gonna go into filter and Camera Raw filter now I'm gonna do things that I would usually so lighten up the model just a little bit add some contrast add some clarity a little bit of D haze playing with white balance just a little bit shadows White's I'm also gonna take the Blues out just a little bit so that the white doesn't look as blue okay that looks great so I'm gonna press okay now I like what it did to the model but I don't like what it did to the background it made it a little bit too sharp a little bit too obvious I want my model to stand out and I want the background to kind of fall in the back I did all of this on a layer copy so now I'm gonna add the layer mask just like that now all I have to do is invert the layer mask I can go into image adjustments and invert you can also just click ctrl I to do that and now I can take my brush I'm gonna make it a little bit smaller and again I'm on soft rounded brush I'm gonna go ahead and paint what I just did only on top of my model so here's before and after as you can see now the model stands out from the background the image looks a lot more 3d all of our focus goes straight to the model and we did that super super quick with just some Camera Raw adjustments I could do this all separately with like separate exposure layer and then selective color layer and then all that but I did it really really quickly with just Camera Raw on a layer mask we're gonna stay within the Camera Raw for the hack number seven I'm gonna duplicate the layer as usual filter Camera Raw now this is the teals and oranges hack I've seen a lot of people on Instagram do it Brandon waffle does it a lot I don't know if he does the exact same thing but this is a way to achieve that look so I'm gonna go to the calibration by the way you can also do this in lightroom doesn't have to be Camera Raw we're gonna use the blue primary over here and we're gonna move it this way right here now you can move the Greens just a little bit as well you can really experiment here and see what kind of look you like you can also then go back to the hue/saturation and maybe change your green more to the aqua and then here on the green scale more to the green that's the look that I personally really like and then I'm just gonna press okay now if you do not want this to be applied to the model you can always take the eraser tool and just literally erase off of that you will be able to do this if you duplicate a layer just like I did so I'm just gonna go ahead and now erase that off of the model alright so now that it's erased off of the model here's the before and after super super easy and it really dramatically changes the hack number 8 is about sharpening I use this particular way of sharpening my images all the time I've tried so many different ones but I think this is the best one that I've ever tried so I'm gonna duplicate the layer as usual I'm gonna go into filter other and high-pass filter now for the radius here you can just kind of play around the bigger the radius the sharper the image is gonna be so it really depends on how sharp you want it to be I usually go by the rule of if I can see the models features right here then it's fine if it starts to look a little bit too crusty then it's probably too much I'm gonna leave it at around like 6.4 for this image but again it's gonna be different for every image I'm gonna press ok and now I'm gonna go ahead and put it to soft light so this is my favorite blending mode for the for this filter but you can play around with the hard light or with the overlay so overlay is your middle ground soft light is obviously a lot softer and then the hard light you're gonna really sharpen that image up quite a lot so yeah this is my favorite way of sharpening the image if you also would like to apply the sharpening to only a specific area of the image super easy all you have to do is apply a layer mask right here and then again you have to invert it so image adjustments invert or ctrl I on your keyboard and then you can pick up your brush and let's say that I want to only sharpen her eyes so now I'm gonna paint it only on her eyes maybe just her lips so here we go now we made it so that only the eyes are super sharp and this is still an hard light again you can change it to soft light you can also change the opacity to be a little bit lower if you feel like it's too much sharpening so yeah this is my favorite way of sharpening the images hack number nine is about selective color and I use selective color all the time it can really change the whole tonality of the image so here's a finished picture of Payton I'm gonna go to adjustment layers choose selective color and let's start with the black now I can move it to different sides and it's gonna give it a different color here's with the blue here's with the yellow completely different here's with the red I really like what the red does to the image it gives it a very vintage look again you can just kind of play around and see what color you like you can mix the color combination here's a little bit of red and purple together looks pretty cool in my opinion another thing I like to do is play with the whites so I'm gonna choose the whites and I'm gonna make them brighter so here on the black scale I'm gonna bring it this way so here's the before on Payton's face as you can see it gives it a little bit more life a little bit of luminosity I really like what it does now what we can also do is add a little bit of color there because it is very white bright now again on the white maybe I'm gonna move it a little bit here to the yellow side and pinkish side that looks great so here's the before and after just on the white selective color alright so my last trick is about using the Dodge and burn technique and specifically burning some of the details into the image so I'm gonna go ahead and do the adjustment layer and curves and I'm gonna pull it down right here I'm gonna pull it down quite a bit something like this I'm gonna go into image adjustments and invert or ctrl I if you like to use the keyboard now again I'm gonna take my brush I'm gonna zoom in on the picture quite a bit again my brush is a small rounded soft rounded brush sorry and again in here if you are using a a mouse I recommend lowering the opacity to maybe like 20 percent 15 percent again you can play around here because I'm using a tablet I don't really need to worry about the opacity so all I'm gonna be doing is with the really tiny brush mimicking the strokes of her eyebrows and her eyelashes contouring around the eye and eyelash okay so here it is so I'm gonna go ahead and lightly put more strokes in the eyelash hopefully you guys can see maybe I'm gonna zoom in just a little bit more over here all I'm doing is following some of the eyelashes that she already has making some of them darker adding some more in kind of following her natural shape but making it a little bit more dramatic making it stand out a little bit more now you might think that this is excessive that it's not gonna really do much but trust me if you pay attention to these little details it's gonna be so amazing in the end okay now I do the same thing on the eyelashes when I'm finishing this stroke I go really light if you messed up you can always just erase your mistakes alright here we go so nice strokes I'm adding more eyelashes I'm lengthening her eyelashes I'm making them darker this is also great for the lower eyelashes sometimes I'll even darken the lash line right over here all right and let's do the same on this I all right so I'm done here so let's back up just a little bit all right so here's what we did let's see the before and after before and after if you feel like you did a little bit too much you can always lower the opacity here and then it's a lot more natural but still very effective so this is it I hope you guys enjoyed this video let me know which one was your favorite hack and if you would like me to make more videos like that subscribe to my channel and like this video and I'll see you guys in my next one bye

Channel: Irene Rudnyk

Views: 583,257

Keywords: photography, model, irene rudnyk, photographer, professional, tutorial, canon, 85mm 1.2, photoshoot, session, photoshop, hacks, hack, trick, easy, portrait, color grading, liquify, stretch, distort, hair, skin retouch, beautiful, tips, how to, learn, teach, photoshop 2019, ukrainian, canadian, calgary

Id: F5XJkArWIC8

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Mrsparklee]

Thank you! Saved so I can watch and practice later. :)