Professional Skin Retouching in Photoshop

what's up guys Eric Vasquez here from teach me to design calm and I've had a few of my subscribers reach out to me as of late and asked me if I can do a tutorial on photo retouching so ask and you shall receive today we're going to be doing a portrait retouching workshop where I'll be sharing with you some of my own personal favorite tips and tricks for getting more out of your images in Photoshop alright guys so today I'm going to be showing you how you can do some basic skin retouching in Photoshop and all I'm going to do is open up a stock image here that I grabbed from the positive photos but you can really use any image at all that you want to retouch the first thing I'm going to do is make a copy of my original layer by pressing command J on the keyboard from there I'm going to hold down ctrl and click on the layer and choose convert to smart object alright and let's just call this layer arty for a retouch going to double click on the background layer and name it original now the reason I'm creating a smart object here is so that I can double click to go inside of it and I can make a lot of my adjustments in here all right and you'll see why I'm doing that a little bit later but once you're inside the smart object go ahead and make two more copies of the layer and I'm going to name the top layer texture and my middle layer blur okay so this is basically going to be like a frequency separation kind of approach where we basically want to take this middle layer and we're going to come up to filter blur Gaussian blur and blur it a little bit maybe around 10 to 12 depending on your image you don't want it to be completely blurry but you also don't want to see too much detail in the skin so maybe somewhere again 9.5 should do the trick alright then I'm going to turn back on my texture layer come up to the image menu choose apply image and we need to change a couple of things here so where it says layer you want to change this from merge to blur and then we're also going to make sure that the blending mode is set to subtract alright and you're going to leave the scale set to 2 and offset to 128 and it basically looks like a like I passed filter has been applied to this image so go ahead and hit okay and then the next thing we have to do is change the blending mode of this texture layer to linear light all right from there hold down the shift key and click on the blur layer so that you've got both layer selected and then press command G on the keyboard just to put these together into a group folder all right I'm just going to call that skin and now if I turn that layer on and off you can see that it's basically no difference at all okay but this is where the fun part where the magic happens so you want to zoom in a little bit here and basically before we begin I'm going to select my lasso tool and just make sure that I feather my edges a little bit so for now I'm going to set it to around 12 pixels which should be okay and I'm going to start by just coming in here and the goal being to kind of even out some of these skin tones here you see there's a few areas where it's just a little bit you know blotchy and bumpy and things like that and we're going to try to fix that so I made a selection with my lasso tool and I'm going to come back to the filter menu and blur and we're going to start to blur some of these smaller areas okay so again filter blur and you may want to play with the blur setting a little bit more here to just see the different kind of results that you get you don't want to be too high but you also don't want it to be too low where there's there's nothing happening so somewhere in the middle to just kind of go over small sections at a time in order to start to even things out and you know this technique it works really well but you know it's not going to fix everything it just kind of gives us a good jumping-off point for for starting to fix the skin so this is a really useful technique if you are doing a lot of retouching you know a portrait or anything like that either for yourself or for a friend or a client but you know there's going to be a you know a few other things that you'll want to do here all right so again I'm just kind of looking at the blur settings each time addressing it individually each time that I apply the filter as opposed to you know repeating it with the exact same setting every time you know in some areas you'll probably notice it a little bit more than others but it really works well for areas like this that are just you know kind of bumpy and uneven it's going to help us get a more even in consistent look throughout our photo and I've had you know a few people reach out and say that they wanted to learn a little bit more about photo retouching in Photoshop so that's part of the reason why I want to share this technique with you guys it does get a little bit repetitive so you kind of have to you know you get in a rhythm as you do it um but you know just be you know patient and and take your time with it as much as you can and just know that you know it's all kind of building up towards a much better final result alright so again I'm creating my selections I'm going to do the same underneath the eyes here and you should really notice it on the eyes by applying this you know it's going to make it look a little bit more even unless um kind of sunken it will you know make the eyes look a little bit less sunken in and you know help to diminish some of the wrinkles there you don't want to get rid of them and obliterate them completely because then you'll end up with a face that just looks kind of unnatural you know and that's to be honest you know that's one of the most common mistakes that people make when they're retouching is they will retouch something so far to the point where the skin just looks like plastic you know it looks like like a mannequin they've they've gotten rid of all the texture of the skin and then it just looks kind of fake so usually when you're retouching I think you know the goal should be to find something in the middle where you know it doesn't look super fake but it also retains some of the original texture and that that tactile feel that you get from from pores in the skin and everything so once we do this you know I'll show you guys the before and after just so you can kind of see what's happening here so I'm going to just turn this folder on and off and you can see already our original and then what we have now so there's still a few problems with this but for the most part you know things are off to a good start alright you can continue to do this if you wish or come to the next step here where we're actually going to focus on covering up some of these blemishes so now I'm moving from my blur layer to my texture layer and I'm just going to grab my clone stamp tool with an opacity of around 50% and I have a pretty soft edge brush here if you have a hard brush selected and you want to toggle or change it just hold down the shift key and use your left bracket to make it soft or your right bracket to make it more of a hard edge and you'll see that kind of a changing right before your eyes so the last thing is that you want to make sure you have current layer selected up top now the way that this works is you're going to kind of move your cursor over a good area of skin or skin texture and then hold down the alt/option key to sample it and then come down here and click on top of the area that you want to to cover or to fix right and you can zoom in pretty far to do this part change the size of your brush as well and you just want to cover up any other you know blemishes or things like that that we may have missed in the in the first pass right and I usually like to sample from above and then move down or from left to right I usually try not to go you know from the bottom up it just kind of gives you a more natural-looking result I think so I'm just going to spend a couple of minutes here going over this and trying to smooth out any remaining bumps or blemishes that are here on the skin all right so now you guys can see that we haven't smooth smoothed out every little thing but we've made some more progress here with the texture of the skin and getting rid of a lot of those little blemishes and pimples and things like that and I just wanted to come back in here to do a little bit more work on the neck with the first step that we used by blurring on the middle layer here just to give it a little bit more finesse and you know you don't want to neglect any areas that you may have missed the first time all right and I'm just going to kind of alternate between doing this and kind of sampling until I can get this to a little bit better place before we move on um now the this or this nah alright guys so now you can see pretty much our finished product here with the frequency separation technique now as I turn off the before-and-after you can see all those problematic areas and blemishes and imperfections that we've been able to correct so now what I'm going to do is press command s to save it and then I'm going to close this window because it is a smart object so now when I come back into my main document you'll see I still have my RT smart object layer and our original layer so part of the reason why I wanted to create a smart object in the beginning so that we can keep everything inside of this image so I can double click and come back in here at any point that I wanted to do a little bit more work on the skin otherwise I can just now work in this main file here so what I would like to do now is kind of a little bit of dodging and burning so I'm going to hold down the ctrl key and click on the new layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette and then you'll be prompted with this little dialog box here and it's going to ask you to name your layer I'm just going to call it D and B for Dodge and burn change the color to gray change the bloat the mode to overlay and then check off this box it says fill with overlay neutral color so all that's doing is basically creating a new layer of 50% gray and we won't be able to see any difference initially because it's exactly right in the middle of our black and white spectrum so now what happens is we can just use our brush at a low opacity again maybe you know a soft brush preferably around 20 to 30 percent opacity and anytime we paint white now we're going to be pulling out some highlights from the image or basically doing what we would do if we were dodging the image all right and if I use black it's going to kind of you know enhance the shadows or make things look a little bit more recessed in the image all right but you can again you know kind of take your time with this and see how things look and kind of alternate back and forth between the black and white and you really want to try to use what information is already in the image so by that I mean you know go to areas that are already you have shadows and then just kind of enhance them and push them a little bit further all right and you can do that just by kind of going over it with with black at a low opacity right and it's good to zoom out sometimes and kind of check your work and see where things are headed but I usually like to do the basically the burning is what we're doing with the black brush I like to do that more unlike folds and clothes and things like that and shadow areas like a little bit here under the neck just to give it a little bit more depth now as for the hair I tend to go over this with the dodging or the white brush to bring out some more detail like you can see I'm doing here okay you can do the same thing on eyebrows a little bit if you want to get a little more detail out of that it works pretty well and I'll just do a little bit here down on his piercing maybe a little bit of shadow just above it and now if i zoom out and turn that layer on and off you can see how the Dodge and burn helps alright but because this is a smart object just below one other great feature is that we can apply filters to this image that we'll be able to adjust that means they're non-destructive filters so let me show you what I mean come up to the filter menu and choose sharpen unsharp mask we're going to sharpen this up a little bit so by default you know I kind of have these settings here but you may want to play around with it just to kind of see the kind of results that you can get but something around here I think looks okay and you can kind of check the preview on and off to see how that filter is affecting your image but if I decide that I want to change this you know I don't have to undo or go back I can simply click this arrow here on my smart object layer and then double click on the smart filter to come back and change the parameters later so that's what I mean when I say it's non-destructive none of the changes that you're making on a smart object are permanent okay so from here what I want to do is select both of these layers my arty layer hold down the shift key and select my D&B layer I'm going to make a copy by pressing command J and then command II to merge them together so we basically have a copy of those layers merged as one now what I want to do from here is just zoom in a little bit and grab my clone stamp tool which is just s on the keyboard and I'm going to clone some of the background here to cover up some of these stray hairs so this is another thing that you want to pay attention to whenever you're doing some retouching is to try and clean up any of these stray hairs that you're going to see in your image right and you may want to use a hard hard edged brush for this again just hold down shift and then tap the right bracket a few times to get a harder edged brush and you don't have to get rid of all of the hairs because you know there will still be some but any of that just kind of you know stick out it and look a little bit odd or anything glaring that you may want to fix and generally this occurs a little bit more on women I find you know with long hair but there's a little bit of it happening here too so it gives us enough to to work with that I can kind of demonstrate the the technique and in areas like here you may not want to use a hard edge brush because you want to kind of make it you know blend with a softer edge that you have you know where you can see parts of the image around the ear and the side of his head are a little bit softer right and that's one other thing to to notice is that in photography anytime you have you know an image you're going to have what's called the depth of field right so you will have certain parts of your image that are more InFocus than others like it for example if you look at you know his shirt down here or the edge over here it's a little bit blurred so we want to emulate that a little bit in our photo and you may wish to push it a little bit further but let me show you how I would do that I would press command option shift key to make a copy of all the layers that we have below and then what I would do is just come up to the filter layer blur Gaussian blur and we'll set a blur setting of somewhere around you know five between five and six and then hit OK and now what we can do is come down here to the layer mask option but instead of clicking it to make a normal mask I'm going hold down the alt/option key and that's going to invert the mask so instead of filling it with white we are now filling it with black so what that means is that you know with that with a typical mask the way it would work is if we painted black we're going to be hiding certain areas of our image but because we inverted it we're now going to paint with white in order to bring in the areas that of that image that we want to show so basically anything that we want to blur now we just kind of paint over it with white and I'm just going to go over the edges a little bit more around the the hair and the neck and things like that so hopefully you know if I turn this on and off you can kind of see if you look around the edges how that blur is affecting it and now I will put all of these layers in a group folder so I'm going to hold down the shift key and click on this top merge layer then while holding the shift key still click on the RT smart object layer and then press command G to put them into a group folder now I'm just going to call this the same thing RT and turn it on and off so that you guys can see the before our original image and after so there's a couple of ways that you guys can kind of start to do some retouching I've given you a few really handy techniques from frequency separation to sharpening to using you know blurs for layer masks to play with the depth of field and also dodging and burning so there's really a good amount of stuff that you can do here we've brightened up the eyes we've you know brought out detail in certain parts of the images like the hair you know and we've also corrected a lot of things and smoothed out the skin tones here so I hope that you guys found this useful and I hope that it answered some of your retouching questions if you have any more comments or questions please leave them below and if you enjoyed the video give us a thumbs up also I would encourage you guys to sign up for our email list as we are currently doing something called the design better contest and that will give you guys the opportunity to do a Q&A and ask me any design related questions that you have in addition you can tell me any project that you're working on that you may feel stuck on or want some help with and I'm going to be picking three to five people each month to help out on these projects in one of my videos so I'll put the link for that below it is the design better contest check it out and let me know how I can help you design better thanks for watching guys and we'll see you next time

Channel: Teach Me To Design

Views: 590,018

Keywords: professional skin retouching in photoshop, skin retouching photoshop, skin retouching in photoshop, professional retouching photoshop, skin retouching frequency separation, skin retouching photoshop tutorial, skin retouching photoshop tutorial cs6, photoshop tutorials, photoshop video tutorials, retouching tutorial photoshop, photoshop retouching tutorial, teachmetodesign, TMTD, Teach Me To Design, design better, designbetter

Id: IMdl4133Bow

Length: 19min 30sec (1170 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2016