This tutorial is one that I go over taking a full half hour in realtime in the Discover Photoshop: Retouching DVD but right now I want to show you a few quick things.

There’s lots of little techniques and fundamentals that you should have in your Photoshop arsenal to do a great retouching job whether it’s on a consumer/family level or for professional ‘income earning’ use.

Taking a look at this image, there is actually quite some damage if you look at the forehead.

To go ahead and try to patch that might be worth a shot but because you are changing pixels when doing that, it’s not going to be the most professional resolution.  One thing you can do first is create a mock-up by looking at your project in hand and creating a blank layer using a brush tool and marking up the areas that need some work. You can always come back to this layer for reference.

In this tutorial I’m going to go over just a few of these areas.  Here is a near final comp as taught in the video training.

First go ahead and create a duplicate by dragging the original to the new layer icon. Now you can carefully begin to construct a retouched portrait off of this layer and do custom adjustments above it.

Remember I started talking about the forehead pixels. If you have an area that REALLY needs work once you go in there and take a closer look at it (your job as a retoucher), it might be safer instead of trying to find a good source for patching in this case (if you have a good area, great) to do a more global improvement.

Go to filter: blur: gaussian blur and create a blur like this with a fairly low radius.

Here you’re looking specifically at the problem area because we can mask or hide the now ‘blurry’ areas that we don’t want to affect anywhere else.

Adding this blur not only smooths out the problem area but just creates a nice softer effect anyways (for that area) so it isn’t as harsh. This will often help solve lots of your problems.  Now you’ll still need to go in with your ie. clone stamp and alt click on good point and ‘clone’ over any (ahem) zits, imperfections or whatever you can call them.

You can go ahead and clone right on this blur layer if you know that you want to change these pixels, otherwise create a blank layer and make sure ‘use all layers’ is selected in the options bar.
 

Now I’m going to show you how to do some highlighting or what’s sometimes referred to as ‘airbrushing’. There’s a few ways to do it. The basic principle is to create a new blank layer, use a low opacity brush on one of a few blending modes (either on the brush options....)

or on the layer blending modes itself.

Make sure you have a really low opacity and you can also turn on the airbrushing option. This will allow your ‘paint’ or ‘job’ to help soak in or drip the more you keep holding it down. When you keep holding it down on a lower opacity it will start ‘building up’ so you can keep it over and keep dragging over an area that you want to build up highlights on and just swipe it less often over other areas.

The key is the low opacity and the magic is all in the blending modes. You’re not painting in WHITE (which is your foreground color by the way), you’re simply highlighting what’s already there by adding white or light b/c it’s the blending modes that interacts with the layer beneath to still allow the texture to show through. Now you’ve learned one of the great secrets of retouchers.

Just go ahead with white as your foreground color and with the low brush opacity, gently airbrush over areas that are already showing some more light; this should be a natural decision for you...areas such as the cheekbones, nose, and forehead..whties of eyes and lips.

Remember you can adjust your brush size to work on finer details such as adding gloss/highlights to the lips and using a larger brush for the cheek bones. Make sure that you’re using a brush with a soft edge.

and for a stronger effect you can raise the brushes opacity but I recommend keeping it low and having the airbrush option on.

You can change either the brushes blending mode or the layer’s blending mode (one OR the other...your preference). Use either soft light, overlay or lighten for airbrushing highlights. You can switch between them to see what will work best for your project but soft light or lighten will do a good job.

You can use normal blending mode (the default) as long as you have a really low opacity if you want to see what you’re doing but you’re still in this case painting white so you’ll want to switch to a blending mode such as Lighten.

Airbrushing on already good quality images will start making it look a lot more professional.

So how do you emphasize shadows instead of highlights? Easy; just switch to black or dark grey using the same method. It’s the blending mode and the low opacity that will do the magic for you of accentuating your shadows or highlights, whichever foreground color is selected for your soft brush.

Oftentimes you’ll want to accentuate and embellish areas that could use a little more vibrance such as whitening the eyes and adding lip gloss and lipstick (I teach this in the photo retouching dvd’s as well as applying digital makeup).

Make a selection with the magic wand or lasso of the whites of the eyes. Note that I am on ‘add to selection’ in the options bar.

Now that you have made a selection on the working layer itself you can create a custom adjustment layer by going to the pop-up menu and choosing ie. Levels.

Simply bring the white slider over to the right to brighten the selected area without blowing it too out of proportion or getting those funny color bars (try it by going too far). You’ll know how much is too much; you want it to look natural but you can always lower the opacity later, just don’t go more than you need to.

You can also make a selection of the teeth (magic wand or lasso) and use the same exact method by creating another separate custom adjustment layer to whiten the teeth.

Hey it looks like braces when we had the teeth selected with the marching ants.

Here I still want some of the shading to show in the recesses so I'm not doing as strong of an adjustment.

If you didn’t want to make another adjustment layer, remember that we already have that custom adjustment layer of the whitened eyes. You can also use that adjustment layer to apply to the teeth. The reasoning behind this is because..remember you made a selection first? While that entire layer actually has that Levels effect retained across the entire image; it’s just that it’s only applying to the selected area. When you create an adjustment layer, a mask is created to show or hide the rest of the adjustments. Black means the adjustment is hidden and white means it’s visible.

Because you created a selection of the eyes first, this is the area that (is ‘custom’) the adjustment is applied to and the rest of the adjustment which is there is automatically masked. If you look at the adjustment layer mask you can see a white area where the eyes’ adjustment is ‘visible’. The rest of the area is masked.

Adjustment layer masks are treated like regular layer masks (which I cover in depth in my Basic Photoshop training). So get your selection back of the teeth (alt click on the new adjustment layer you create to select it) and now click on the adjustment layer mask which was made for the eyes. Remember that the rest of the adjustment of lightening is still there...just masked where there is black.

And because you can treat these like regular layer masks, now that you have your selection of the teeth and you are on the adjustment layer mask ( \ to show the rubylith) go to the color picker and choose White as your foreground color and press Alt Backspace or go to Edit: Fill: Foreground color of white.

This will reveal the adjustment for the selected area of the teeth on this layer. Now you have applied the adjustment layer to the teeth as well as the eyes. This worked out because they were at the same brightness level that you wanted (of course you could fill with grey to get the teeth to be less bright from the adjustment). That’s it for this tutorial. Be sure to check out my DVD training on Photoshop Retouching.

You can also browse the Discover Photoshop catalog for Photo Retouching tutorials.