Updated Skin Retouch with Dodge and Burn, SUPER EASY TO FOLLOW

hey guys Irene here welcome back to my youtube channel today I'm gonna show you an updated skin retouching tutorial I'm gonna show you how I retouch the skin using only dodge and burn technique this is a sort of a more high-end technique it's a little bit more complicated than some of the other tutorials that I showed you guys previously on my channel but I'm gonna try my best to explain this in a very easy way I'm gonna split this into a few sections and show you guys step by step how I edit this skin so yeah let's get started so the first step is understanding how the Dodge and burn works for skin retouching and it is quite simple all we're gonna be doing is trying to even out the skin tone by adding lightness to areas are too dark and adding some darkness to areas that are too bright I want to show you guys a different picture just very quickly because you can really see some of the imperfections here especially on her cheek so I want you guys to pay attention to this area over here if I get a little bit closer you'll notice that she has some of that imperfections in this area on her cheek the way that the pimples work is that they're usually erased a little bit more above normal skin so if we look let's say at this spot right here you will see that we see a little bit of a highlight right in the middle and then some darkness all around it let me zoom in even closer again there's a highlight at the very top of the pimple and then we see some of the darkness around it this is where dodge and burn comes into the picture to correct the skin I want you guys to pay attention to the red circle that I outlined so first I'm gonna take away the brightness with some of the shadow and then I'm gonna take away some of the shadow with the brightness and as you can see that evens out the skin tone right away and we no longer see the pimples the same thing happens on the bigger areas on the face as well a lot of people have sunken in under eyes which makes that area a la darker than the rest of the face I circled up that area right here all I did is added a little bit of highlight in the area and look at the difference look at before-and-after we are able to correct that sunken-in area with just adding a little bit of highlight and we do not have to compensate with taking out some of that skin texture if we zoom in we're still leaving all of that skin texture that was there and making it look super super natural and we're just really correcting the skin with balancing out the darker and the lighter areas the step two is going to be making some Photoshop actions that are gonna help us speed up the process of this retouch we're gonna be making an action for highlighting an action for adding shadows and another action that's gonna let us see the skin a little bit better and see those differences between the lightness and the darkness a lot easier to create your own actions you're gonna go into Windows then actions and if you've never played with actions before you're gonna have all of your default ones open you can just click this button to hide it in the folder and I'm gonna create a new folder by clicking this red here and I'm gonna call it dodge and burn skin okay you can call whatever you want skin retouch I'm gonna press ok and that created our new fold the first action I'm gonna make is gonna be a very contrasting black and white layer that's gonna help us see those differences between the bright and darker parts of the skin really really well so to start the recording of the action you're gonna press this button right here and I'm gonna call it the contrast layer and then you can press record you're gonna see this red button go off that means that we are starting to record all of our actions the first thing I'm gonna do is click on the adjustment layers and I'm gonna choose solid color not here you're gonna choose something that's grey white or black and white and then press okay and then on the blending mode we're gonna choose color the next adjustment layer I'm gonna choose is brightness and contrast I'm gonna press here use legacy and I'm gonna make this image quite contrasting can increase the brightness a little bit as well just about that so that looks really good and now all I'm gonna do is make a group and I'm gonna put both of these and a group just like that and then kind of bring it up so that I can easily toggle between them so I'm gonna stop my recording and there is my contrast layer so I'll show you guys if I delete this and I go to the contrast layer I press play it automatically plays everything that we've done and again I can just kind of bring it back into the group and I can toggle between both of these I always like to have this option bit of toggling between my contrast layer and the background layer so I can see what it looks like in real life the next action I'm gonna create is a highlight action that's gonna help us brighten up some of the darker spots so again I'm gonna press this and I'm gonna call it highlight and press record the red button is going that means that anything that we're gonna be doing right now is gonna be recorded so I like to do this highlight action with curves so I'm gonna create an adjustment layer go to curves I'm gonna grab it in the very middle and pull it up just a bit like that now we're gonna press ctrl I to invert the mask and after that we're gonna change the blending mode to luminosity I like changing the blending mode to luminosity because now it's not going to be affecting any of the colors this layer is strictly gonna be affecting just the lightness or the darkness of the image I'm gonna also lower the opacity just a little bit I usually do around 75% so we're gonna leave it at that and I'm gonna change the name of this curve to highlight just so that it's gonna be easier for us to understand which one is the highlight and which one is the shadow layer so I'm gonna stop this action and here we have our highlight action so if I'm gonna delete this right now and I'm gonna play the highlight you can see it played everything that we've done and this is what it does if you grab the brush you can get a little bit closer and let's make it bigger see I'm highlighting the area so the darker area I'm making it a lot brighter so this is what the highlight does and now I'm gonna make the action for the shadow so the same thing I'm gonna press this right here and I'm gonna call it shadow and I'm gonna press a record now I'm gonna use the curves as well so I'm gonna go to my adjustment layers press curves but now here I'm gonna go not in the middle but a little bit lower so right over here about there I'm gonna press again ctrl I to invert the mask or it's command I on the Mac if you are using Mac I'm gonna change the blending mode to luminosity and again I'm gonna switch my opacity to about 75% and I'm just gonna change the name to shadow all right there we go so we can stop the action and there's our shadow so if I click on it and I want to darken any of the spots let's say that this is a little bit too bright for me and I want to darken this spot as you can see it's applying some a little bit more of the shadow to that spot these actions are very very mild sort of actions and that's the whole point we don't want to go too harsh on these adjustments it's all in the little tiny adjustments that makes the skin look so so natural and so good now that we have all of our actions we're gonna go into the phase 3 of the retouch we're gonna be actually applying those actions and doing some of the retouch all right so the first thing I'm gonna do is play my contrast layer so you're just gonna have to click on it and press play and I'm just gonna bring it back into the group layer now I'm gonna click on the background again then highlight and play my highlight and make sure that it is under your group the contrast layer if it is on top of the contrast layer it's gonna have slightly different effect but make sure it is under the contrast layer pretty much all of the highlight and shadow actions have to be under the contrast eye here okay take a shot everytime I say conscious layer also whenever you're choosing your brush make sure that is always set to some sort of round soft brush I'm using the soft round pressure opacity brush right here because I am using a tablet I'm using Wacom into a small pen and touch it's a really cheap tablet and it works really really great I highly highly recommend you guys get some sort of retouching tablet if you are gonna be using this technique if you are using just a mouse or your touchpad on the laptop it is gonna be like 100 times harder for you guys to make this very seamless and very smooth you can definitely try and with a lot of practice you probably will be doing this pretty well but it is so so so much easier with the tablet another tip that if you are using just your mouse you might gonna have to play around with your flow reducing it to something very little like maybe 10% or also playing with the opacity again reducing it to something like 20 or 10% if you are using a tablet you don't really have to worry about those all right I'm gonna start with that highlight I'm gonna zoom in quite close and I'm gonna start painting where I see darker spots so I'm gonna start right over here where I see dark spot right by her eye another quick tip here is to keep changing the size of your brush I'm using brackets to change the size so the bracket to the left side makes the brush smaller the bracket to the right side makes the brush a lot bigger I always keep my hands on the keyboard on those brackets to keep changing the size of my brush the reason why we want to keep changing the size of the brush is because if the area do we are trying to lighten is very small you want to make the brush small if the brush is bigger than the area that we're trying to lighten you might spell into the areas that are normal that we don't need to brighten up so always make sure that your brush is small and it is the same size as the area we're trying to brighten a good rule for this would be to keep with the smaller brush rather than the bigger brush all right so I'm taking my time here really sort of getting in those little tiny areas and brightening them up you can always toggle over here and then kind of seeing what you've done see back and forth see if you've gone a little bit too much or not enough again I will just turn back on that contrasting layer and I'll keep going with the under eye another thing that I like doing is going in and out of the image just to see the overall effect so if I go a little bit further here I can see the bigger area that needs to be brightened so I can make my brush quite big and just brighten the areas that are bigger and once those big areas I are brightened I can go zoom in a little bit more and work on the smaller areas even more once I'm done with some of the bigger smaller areas I can zoom in even further and work on the really really tiny areas like these ones over here you I think one of the important things about this technique is kind of realizing of where we need to take the darkness out and where we need to still keep it we do not want to make that image completely flat we still want to keep some of the important shadows like the shadows around her nose for example here let me just zoom out and show you so for example the shadow over here around her nose it can be fixed a little bit like this shadow over here is not needed so we can go ahead and brighten this area right over here but this shadow just around her nose is needed because otherwise it's gonna look like the nose is blending into her cheek completely so it's very important to understand the areas that we actually should not touch and the areas that do need correction I'm gonna again as you guys can see I keep zooming in and out in and out constantly changing the size of my brush and that is the most important thing about here is to make sure that your retouch is very organic that are you changing the sizes your going in and out to kind of see how the whole image looks alright let me zoom out just a little bit to see what we've done here on the under eye so I want to brighten this area even more so I'm gonna make another highlight and I'm gonna keep working on this area right here I want to just brighten it up just a little bit more it's definitely good idea to create multiple layers of the highlights so that not everything is done on one separate layer you can create multiple ones for maybe some of the closer up details maybe some for further away details it's definitely good idea to separate some of the layers and not don't put everything on one layer that's why it's so easy to just create those actions and then just play them and you don't have to worry about doing the whole thing all over again with like you know creating an adjustment layer and inverting the layer and then putting it to luminosity and then lowering the opacity and things like that it's this is why I love using Photoshop actions all right so there's our little area that we were just working on so let's take this out and then let's take this out so as you can see that really really makes this area look a lot smoother and I didn't do any of the patch tool or the Spot Healing Brush I didn't do any of that the only thing I did is added some highlight to the areas that needed and that just evens out the skin tone so so well so this whole under-eye area was done using only the highlight action but let me show you the area where I would use both highlight and the shadow and it's this area right over here as you can see it's pretty patchy we have some dark and bright areas and if I toggle back onto my contrast layer you can see it a little bit more so I'm gonna go ahead and just create another highlight layer and I'm gonna work separately on that I'm gonna start with some of the dark spots first and then when I'm working the area and I see some of the bright spots like right over here there's a little bit of a brighter spot I'm gonna go ahead and play the shadow action and make sure that it is selected on to the layer mask instead of here because see now you can't paint but if it's selected over here you can so I'm just gonna go ahead and darken this spot I really hope you guys can see what I'm doing I remember when I started using this technique it was kind of hard for me to understand where the lighter and darker areas are but the more I use this the more evident those areas where for me so if it makes little sense at first just you know keep on practicing and I'm sure you will be able to see those areas better in the future with more practice all right so again I kind of keep switching between the brush sizes because there are some really tiny areas and some bigger areas that need brightening and darkening and then again I'm gonna go into the shadow and where I see a little bit of a darker spot I go ahead and do darken it I'm just gonna go a little bit closer into some areas and again I'm just gonna keep on working on them and just kind of switching between the shadow see like this spot right here is such a perfect spot to showcase what this does so I added quite a lot of shadow there and look at that do you see how it just disappears that little tiny spot and if I want a little bit too much I can go into highlight and then correct some of the darker spots again I just love also watching how these areas just disappear and kind of blur into one seamless color I just think it's such a great technique another tip I can give you guys is to not go too crazy here obviously we want to make the skin look very smooth but coving going overboard with some of the smoothness might look really fake as well so again I always recommend kind of scaling back on that image and seeing what progress we've done to see if we went too far or not enough look at that look at that highlight over there and look at the shadow it's just I love watching it disappear like all the imperfections and again when you go a little bit further you can work on the bigger areas like I am right now and then again you can toggle between the contrast layer and the original to kind of see if we need to do more work like after I've tog 'old it back and forth I realize that this area right here needs some brightening as well I think you really have to just kind of train your eye to see those imperfections and see where the light is falling in the wrong places this area right here is a little bit darker as well just a bigger area overall so yeah I would definitely first go bigger areas and then work on smaller areas I think that works really really well all right let me go a little bit closer in over here and add some shadow as well see those little tiny areas where we can see the texture peeking through we add a little bit of the shadow on the top of those raised areas and it just disappears and blends into the skin all right so I just finished this side of her face so let's take the contrast layer and let's look at all of these all right that looks really cool just taking them out so I'm gonna quickly group all of these layers with highlights and shadow and show you guys the before and after all right so here is before and after for the skin retouch on the right side of her face so as you can see it really really makes a huge difference and it looks extremely extremely natural not no actually doing this I also realize that I need to correct a little bit more on her cheekbone right here and add some highlights let's do this right now actually I'm gonna bring back the contrast layer so I can see this a little bit better yes I'm definitely missing some of the highlights over here I'm just trying to even out this area I think in areas like this the important part is to make sure that the highlight is blending really nicely into the shadow because we have this contrast between her cheekbone which is higher so it is a lot brighter and then we're kind of blending into this kind of shadowy part underneath her cheekbone so you got to make sure that this transition between this bright color and the darker shadow is gonna be really nice in just a smooth transition all right I think that looks oh that looks so much better just look at that all right so I'm going to take out the contrast layer and let's see this again the before and after do you guys see what I mean I'm just freakin love doing it and then again just doing this more I'm noticing a few other little spots where I need to put some shadow or some highlight and again at first this looks like a very confusing sort of technique but the more you're going to be using them more you're gonna train your eye to see the areas that need highlight or shadow so I'm gonna continue the skin retouch on her whole face and then show you guys the before and after on the completed dodging burn [Music] all right so I just finished the face skin retouch and I could work even more on some of the details here but that would take just too long so I'm just gonna show you guys what it looks like right now so I just took off the contrast layer and here's the before and after of using just dodge and burn on the skin as you can see it already looks so so good and if we zoom in you guys can see that we retain all of that skin texture so it looks extremely extremely natural now I want to show you guys that this can be used not only on the face the same technique can also be used on the hands and specifically on the lips I love using this technique on the lips so let's put back the contrast layer and again we can just keep on layering these highlights and shadows over here I'm gonna create a new highlight layer and I'm gonna start with that so on her lips again where we see a little bit of a darker area I can go ahead and correct that you again I like to just toggle and see what we're getting here I think it already looks so much better and now I'm gonna make a shadow one and darken up some spots that are too bright like there is a spot over here it's just a little bit too bright I want a little bit of a nicer transition between that darker and a brighter spot we can make the sides of the lips a little bit darker just make them a little bit more even over here where we have these little spots that are a little bit brighter I would also darken them just a tad we do not want to make the lips too one-dimensional but again some of the areas that stand out a little bit too much we can correct all right I think that should be it for the lips so let me show you guys the before and after on the lips it was these two so there is the lips and let me take off the contrast layer so here's before and after on the lips again it just looks a lot more even and then we're still retaining all of the texture in the lips I just think it looks so much better I'm gonna do the same thing on her hands as well we don't need a lot but maybe just a little bit so again I'm gonna put back my contrast layer I'm gonna go with the shadow and just kind of make the transition between this bright spot and the darker skin on the hand a little bit more even just more of an even transition so just when the where those two meet the brighter and the darker I'm just gonna add a little bit of the shadow and then maybe a little bit of the highlight in some of the darker areas just make that transition a lot more even then over here we have the knuckles we can add a little bit of highlight maybe a little bit more over here you don't want to go too much on the hands again we don't want to make this look you know too plastic we don't want to make it look like she's a robot but we can soften some of the transitions so let's see what that looks like see that's so much better already let's add this back on and I'm gonna add just a little bit more highlight in the few areas over here and there's a little bit of a line over here I'm gonna darken it all right that looks great actually I'm noticing there is this one area right here that I want to darken just a little bit all right that looks great so let me show you guys the before and after of the whole dodge and burn retouch alright so here is before and after of the whole dodge and burn again it's such a simple thing but look how much better this looks just look at the before and after everything looks smooth and awesome and we still retain all of that detail so this is our dodging burn and now we're gonna move on to the next two steps we're gonna do some color correction and we're gonna do some minor retouching with the Spot Healing Brush alright so I'm gonna drop all the skin retouch into this group right here and then we don't need this contrasting layer anymore so I can go ahead and delete it so if we zoom in really close you'll see that there's some a little bit of a different skin in different areas right over here underneath her eye a little blur over here same here this spot and this area above her lip they have a slightly different color than the rest of her face they're a little bit more darker so we need to color correct those areas I'm gonna show you guys a very very easy way to do this and learn this from Anita sedov scam again I'll put her link in the description as well I highly recommend you check out her editing tutorials as well they're really good so all you have to do is create an empty layer right here and then on the blending mode we're gonna choose color now I'm gonna use this tool right here the sampling tool and we're going to sample the skin right over here the skin that we liked that it's nice and warm now I'm gonna pick up my brush I'm gonna make it a lot bigger and we can start painting it on the areas that are discolored so I'm painting it on top of this area that was a little bit more of an that ashy darker kind of color so look at the before and after do you see how it's changing the color it's a very subtle difference so you see the before and after I hope you guys can see it maybe I you zoom in a little bit more look at the under-eye area how it's changing color it's a very subtle difference but to me a good retouch it's in those little tiny little things so I'm gonna do the same on the other eye I'm gonna simple this warm area here and then I'm gonna paint it over this darker area to make it blend with the rest of her skin really nicely let's see before and after that looks so much better already and I'm gonna do the same around her mouth area so I'm gonna sample the skin here and I'm gonna start painting it just so it matches with the rest of her skin oh that looks so much better already so let's see the before and after you see how that just matches everything really really nicely and if i zoom out just a little bit more yes that's way way better I'm gonna add that layer into that group with all of the skin retouch oh look at the before and after it's crazy okay so we're gonna do some more finishing touches and that's gonna be using our Spot Healing Brush tool so I'm gonna duplicate the layer and I'm gonna take the Spot Healing Brush and we're gonna start with this upper lip area there's a few little hairs that I want to take away and everyone has hairs above their lip men or women some just have darker and some have lighter hairs that are more noticeable or less noticeable so the trick here and the tip that I want to give you guys using the brush tool is to make sure that your brush is small so don't use a big brush like this right use a small brush if the area is small we do not want to affect any of the good skin we only want to affect the areas that have an imperfection so I'm gonna make my brush really small and I'm only gonna brush it over the imperfection area okay so that way we're gonna again retain as more tech as much texture as we possibly can and that's the goal here we do not want to me the skin look blurry we want to make sure that we can still see a lot of the texture and another tip is to not go overboard we do not want to take away every single little hair as you can see I left a few in here because if we make this area to bare and too perfect again it's gonna look too plasticky because no one has absolutely perfect skin so the good idea is to delete some of the things but maybe leave some of the pores right so that's what I'm gonna do here again I'm switching between sizes of the brushes because different areas some areas are bigger some areas are smaller we want to make this look more organic by switching the the size of the brush like continuously so this is what I'm gonna keep doing another thing just like we did with all the others can retouch always kind of back it up and toggle between what you've dead so you can see if you went too far maybe you will need to do a little bit more so that's what I'm always doing any little things like these also we can just kind of correct them like little spot over here in her lip I can also take this out with the healing brush any little annoying areas I think this was a glitter over here but it's kind of distracting so I'm gonna take away some of this glitter from her lip as well you all right so let's see the before and after I think this is that I don't think I need to go more into correcting the stuff here I think that looks pretty good we could also go ahead and take out some of the hair over here but honestly I don't mind it I think it looks pretty cute so I like big bushy eyebrows and I think I'm gonna leave some of the hair over here on her forehead again we can go a little bit more in detail and maybe there's like few glitter spots over here that are a little bit distracting so I can go ahead and take them out but really I think her skin looks really good right now so I think I would just leave it at that and just yeah I think I would leave it at that for the healing brush all right we have few more steps left we're gonna do some more dodging burn but this time we're gonna do it not to correct the skin tone or the skin texture we're gonna do it to enhance some of her features so I'm gonna start with the highlight again I'm just playing my action and I'm gonna just concentrate on the highlights that are naturally see and I'm just gonna make them more bright so over here on the iris as you can see I brightened some of the highlights and I'm gonna do the same on the other eye one tip I have here for you guys don't go too much on the whites of the eye and don't go on the whole iris again mostly concentrate on the highlights only so same thing over here on her makeup I'm gonna brighten some of the areas that are already pretty bright I'm gonna brighten a little bit in the inner corner to make to make it shine make it Sparkle her nose bridge over here has a little bit of the highlight so I'm gonna intensify it be careful with nose highlighting you don't want to go overboard and you want to stick with thinner lines rather than thicker lines because if I make this line really thick if I highlight here I'm gonna show you guys quickly so I'm gonna make another highlight if I highlight her whole nose like this it's gonna make it look whiter than it is see it's making the nose whiter we only want to highlight and the areas or in a chiral EC the highlight so see I just made the highlight just a little bit more bright rather than highlighting in areas that you don't need it so I would say stick to thinner lines on the nose and only highlight where you already see the natural one I'm gonna highlight her lip a little bit as well just kind of where I see again the natural highlight I'm gonna repeat myself a lot because this is all it is we're just seeing where we naturally have bright spots and we're just making them brighter a little bit underneath her eyebrow to lift it up again maybe we can add a little bit more to her cheekbone area I like to highlight the chin a little bit as well very very subtle little changes we don't want to go overboard with this so this is before and after on the highlighting on the face and I would leave it at that I wouldn't go more I mean it is personal preference as well so if you like that very strong highlighting go ahead but I personally like to keep it more natural nowadays so now I'm gonna do some shadowing or burning and so I played my shadow action and then I'm just gonna go ahead and darken the lashline just a little bit and even paint the shadow on her eyelashes I also like to use the highlight and shadow on the eyebrows to correct them a little bit so over here you see this eyebrows just a little bit wonky so I'm gonna take the highlight and I'm gonna brighten up this spot right here this way it's gonna look very very natural so I'm just brightening this spot to make the eyebrow look a little bit more even and then with the shadow I'm gonna add some shadows over here and I'm almost mimicking the eyebrow hairs so I'm just kind of stroking this to make it look like there's AI brow hairs alright so look at look at that do you see how that corrected the eyebrow and it looks so so natural alright so let me zoom out and show you guys the before and after of this dodging burn so here's before and after of a little bit of dodge and burn on the face so that looks awesome I'm gonna add this into that second group as well just look at that before and after okay now final final step for my skin retouch I like to go ahead and play around with the colors just a little bit and it does improve the overall skin retouch as well I'm gonna go into selective colors over here on the adjustment layers I'm gonna choose selective color two colors that affect the skin is the Reds and the yellows I started with the red especially for people with darker skin color Reds will affect it really really well and you can make the skin look warm and more vibrant with the Reds so I'm gonna make sure that it's also an absolute and not on relative here so I'm gonna make it a little bit darker and I'm gonna give it some more red and a little bit more of a yellow color just a little bit like that I'll make sure that it's underneath oops make sure that this is underneath the group and it's gonna affect it a little bit better alright so again I'm gonna give it some more yellow and a little bit more of that red you can make it a little bit darker and look at that look at that before and after do you see how it just makes the skin look so much more alive and warm I love what it does we can go we can also go into yellows and also just kind of bump up the yellows a little bit more give them a little bit of the red yeah there we go and then another one that I'd like to do is White's I like to make whites just a little bit brighter and it kind of picks up some of the highlights and makes them pop even more so yeah I'm just gonna make it like this all right here we go so this is just what we added with selective color again I just think it makes the skin pop so much more and mix makes it look so much more alive all right so this is the finished skin retouch usually after this I would go ahead and do some more color correction brightening the image making it more contrasting and then sharpening it if you're interested to see how I do all those things I will leave some more videos in the description down below but this is it for the skin retouch I hope you guys enjoyed this video I hope it was easy to follow give this video a like if you liked it and let me know what kind of tutorials you would like to see in the future alright this is it and I'll see you guys in my next video bye

Channel: Irene Rudnyk

Views: 262,287

Keywords: photography, model, irene rudnyk, photographer, professional, tutorial, canon, 85mm 1.2, photoshoot, session, dodge and burn, skin retouch, color correction, color matching, imperfections, easy to follow, step by step, explanation, photoshop, how to edit, retouch, high end, natural skin

Id: rcPL7ev6NBY

Length: 43min 14sec (2594 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 06 2019