Total Photo Retouching for Photoshop Passionates.

Professional Retouching Tutorial: Healing (Part 1)

Welcome to the first in a series of tutorials on professional retouching. Ever wondered how commercial and fashion photographs have that beautifully flawless look?

 

 

Final Image

This two part tutorial will work towards creating this professionally retouched result:

It takes a while to master, but here are a few things to consider;
• Keep as much texture as possible, this means keeping your brushes small and avoid any tutorial that tells you to blur huge sections of skin!
• Develop an eye for what is and is not a blemish. Beauty spots should in most cases be left well alone, keep the character of the model as well as the texture.
• Know when to be subtle, know when to stop. It’s disturbingly common to find beginner retouchers who absolutely will not stop until their 40 year old subject looks like Megan Fox.
• If you’re hoping to retouch photos professionally for other photographers, respect their work. This means not making changes for the sake of it, always remember that the model was chosen for a reason, as were the clothes, backgrounds, lighting, only make major changes on request. Be invisible.
For examples, feel free to visit my own beauty retouching portfolio.
With those points in mind, here is part one, and the easiest in the series; healing with minimal evidence
And here’s the starting image I’m using for demonstration;

Always start with a high resolution image. Politely ask a photographer if you need starting images, large JPEGS are fine for now (if they’re less than 1Mb in size they’re probably too small). Photography forums are a great place to find portfolio work when you’re starting out, try not to use the same photographs as a thousand other people on the web. Develop an entirely individual portfolio
When you’re retouching professionally, remember that your client might be using their images for large print, imagine every eyelash out of place or stray hair on a bus shelter poster. It may not be noticeable in a web-sized image, but just imagine dozens of people idling at that bus stop every hour. Your perfect work might go unnoticed, but any flaws will certainly be picked up on!

One of the fundamental parts of the retouching process is the healing stage, and we’re going to look into that with this first tutorial. Open your image in Photoshop, and drag your Background Layer to the New Layer icon to create a copy of your image. This new layer will be our working copy, saving the original so we can always pull parts of it back if we need to.

Here I’ve decided to retain these beauty marks, but it’s always up to you to decide which to keep or remove, or even move slightly to improve composition;

Select your clone stamp (C) and zoom in to 100%. Use the Lighten blend mode to remove darker blemishes and Darken blend mode to remove lighter distractions. This way your clone tool will ignore the ‘good’ texture and only alter the problem pixels. Keep your brush as small as the blemish and use a hard brush (around 90%) to avoid blurry edges, Alt-click to select a local sample of good texture of a similar tone and carefully paint out any major blotches.

Zoom to 200% and deal with any smaller imperfections, including stray eyebrow hairs;

Once you’ve imperceptibly removed all major distractions and stray hairs you’ll start to notice the next problem to tackle; shadows and highlights that betray wrinkles and deep pores, skin depressions and bumps, and even tonal variations caused by digital compression.

This is where we’ll start off in the next PSDFAN professional retouching tutorial, using Dodge and Burn to achieve flawless, magazine cover results. And absolutely no blur filters!
In the meantime, keep practicing, I want you to come back for Part Two as clone stamp ninjas Pride yourself on every seamlessly perfect removal and every pixel rescued from the fate of large-brush slap-dash cloning. Remember the bus stop and make sure Mr. Eagle-Eyed waiting traveller never even knows you were there…

Professional Retouching Tutorial: Dodge and Burn (Part 2)

If you’ve completed the Professional Retouching – Healing tutorial with your chosen image, you’re ready to jump into the next step in your professional workflow, Dodging and Burning. This is an advanced retouching tutorial, so stick with it and keep practicing!
You may know the Dodge and Burn tools (O) alter local exposure, lightening or darkening your image in brush strokes. By using Dodge and Burn we’re going to smooth and perfect skin while leaving texture intact, which is of critical importance in professional work. If you’ve ever followed those blurry skin tutorials on other sites, this is definitely the article for you. Some may have refined their understanding of blurring to a high level, which is fine but it’s like spending years becoming so good at pitching a ball you can hit a batsman right in the face 95% of the time. It’s a skill, sure, but unless you change your technique you won’t make the pro team
Here’s an example of skin retouching using dodge and burn;

Rather than use the standard tools, there is a better, more controlled and less destructive way to dodge and burn by using Curves, and we’re going to use that method in this second part of the tutorial.
• Open your chosen image and start a new Curves Adjustment layer and pull the middle of the RGB curve up as demonstrated below.
• Name the layer ‘Dodge’, click on the white mask tab and press Ctrl+I (Cmd+I on a Mac) to invert it, turning it black.
• Start a second Curves Adjustment Layer and pull the middle of the RGB curve down as demonstrated below.
• Name the layer ‘Burn’, click on the white mask tab and press Ctrl+I (Cmd+I on a Mac) to invert it, turning it black.
Alongside each Curve below I’ve added blocked in red how each layer should look in the Layers palette when you’re finished, named and with a black mask tab.

I’ll reopen the image I began in part one to demonstrate.
Select a soft Brush set to around 1-4% flow, with your foreground colour set to white.

On the black masks you’re going to paint with white, showing the effect beneath gradually.
Click on the Dodge layer’s black mask and paint an area lighter, or click the Burn layer’s black mask to paint an area darker.
Remember the dark area at the side of the mouth from the first part of the tutorial? Simply paint it out with the Dodge layer;

With your Flow set to 1% you won’t see a huge change with every mouse click, it’s a gradual, controlled build-up. Gently stroke your brush across all the problem dark and light patches, switching between Dodge and Burn until you have a beautiful, uniform skin texture.
If you’re having trouble seeing what needs dodging or burning, open a Black & White Adjustment Layer and pull the Reds down far enough to add contrast;

See them now?
The rest is just time, a keen eye and practice. Here’s the original side by side with what we can achieve with heal, dodge and burn;

It’s subtle, it takes a lot longer than quick-fix blurring, but remember the bus stop analogy from part one. Good retouching is invisible, cut corners and every waiting traveller, driver and pedestrian on the high street will find out about it.
Professional results take time, but it’s worth it. Web-sized images only tell a small part of the story, but in print, you need to be perfect.
If you have any ideas for future tutorials, please comment below and let us know, I’ll be happy to explain the techniques behind any popular suggestions.

Using Curves in Photoshop

If you’ve ever struggled to get your head around curves adjustments in Photoshop, you found the right tutorial. We’re going to look at using different points on the curve, what they represent, and using the different RGB channels to make specific colour adjustments.
This tutorial is part of a PSDFan series on professional retouching, and as a digital retoucher I spend most days using curves in one way or another. Once you have a grasp of the basics, you’ll have at your command a seriously powerful tool for editing your photographs.
First, here’s what your flat, basic curve looks like before adjustments;

I’ve marked the curve to show what each point represents. It’s a scale that represents the starting exposure level of your jpeg or RAW conversion. the bottom left point is the blacks in your image, the top right is the whitest point and a gradual scale of everything inbetween. The middle point represents the ‘midtones’.
If we raise a point on the curve it becomes lighter, or more exposed. Pull a point down and we decrease exposure. Clicking the middle of the curve and pulling the midtones up or down will lighten or darken the whole image, but will keep the black and white points where they are;

If we pull the black point higher, we lose the pure blacks;

And pulling the white point down we lose the pure whites;

You can experiment to add more points, for example you can increase midtone contrast with an S-curve;

We don’t just have to stick to luminosity values, we can use the dropdown menu in the Curves dialog box to affect the individual channels of Red, Green and Blue (RGB).

Be aware that each of these channels has a friend in the CMYK colourspace; decreasing blue will introduce more yellow for example. These relationships are;
Red-Cyan
Green-Magenta
Blue-Yellow
So if we remove green, the same thing happens as if we increased the magenta curve in CMYK mode;

These relationships exist in CMYK mode of course, so if you’re working with CMYK curves for print, you can simply decrease Cyan to increase Red.
You might see a lot of this kind of processing in magazines at the moment;

Notice how the black point isn’t completely black? And how there’s a lot of blue in the shadows? I’ll let you experiment with it
This is the third in a PSDFan series of professional retouching tutorials aimed at teaching good practice for advanced photo editing. Please also see the other tutorials in this series: