Improve people shots with these simple techniques and unleash a portrait’s full potential.
With fashion and portrait retouching, the devil is in the detail. You might want to enlarge the eyes a little, remove a few spots, lighten the skin, or even reduce the size of the feet! It’s all work that requires you to get up close and personal, which means the potential for mistakes is high. This isn’t work you’ll be able to accomplish with just a sweep of the brush at 50% zoom, and this is what makes the use of layer masks crucial – if you make a mistake you can easily delete or edit the layer and have another go. In this guide we cover body slimming and reshaping, skin smoothing and colouration, and background lightening, all on different layers.
What You’ll Need
: Photoshop CS, or above
It’ll take:
30 minutes
1: Instant slimming
We’re going to start with an old trick to slim the girl a touch – not that she needs it, but just to show you how it’s done. Open retouch_start.jpg in Photoshop CS and duplicate the original background layer by pressing Ctrl+J. Next press Ctrl+T to initiate a Free Transform. In the Options Bar at the top of the screen type 97% in the Width box and hit Enter twice.
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2: Crop out the left edge
We need to crop out the left edge, as the chair now looks skewed – the right side is fine because it’s just white background. Press C for the Crop Tool, zoom in using Ctrl and + and line up the bottom left edge so you don’t lose more than you have to before extending the crop around the picture. When you’re happy, click on the tick.
3: Select the rear
Next we’ll slim down a part of the model’s body. Take the freehand Lasso Tool (L) and draw a rough selection around the back and bum, as shown. Float this selection to a new layer by pressing Ctrl+J and then go to Filter>Liquify. Adjust the brush size until its about a sixth of the size of the selection.
4: Liquify the body
Now carefully work down the edge of the dress, using your mouse to drag inwards from the very edge of the clothing towards the body. Try to get the back looking straight and uniform, switching to a smaller brush to iron out little kinks if required. Hit Enter to finish when you’re happy.
5: Check the joins
Zoom in close to check that any reshaped fabric patterns line up with any areas of the dress that we didn’t liquify. You can blend those that don’t by adding a Layer Mask, selecting it and brushing over the join with a soft-edge black brush. Next zoom in 200% and hold down to the space bar to drag over to the face. Add a new layer (Layer>New>Layer).
6: Clean up the skin
Now work around the face clicking on blemishes with the Spot Healing Brush Tool (J) and using a brush size just slightly bigger than the blemish at hand (make sure the tool is set to Sample All Layers in the Options Bar at the top). Switch to the Clone Stamp Tool when near edges of the mouth and nose. In the options bar, set Sample to CurrentAndBelow.
7: Smooth out rough areas
Click the Create a New Adjustment Layer icon, select Curves from the drop-down menu and drag the curve up to lighten the shadows on the skin. Click OK and press Ctrl+I to mask out this adjustment layer. With the foreground colour set to white, use a soft-edged brush to paint over the neck to lighten the shadows. To smooth the skin a touch, select Layer 3, then press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E to create a new layer that merges all of the existing layers. Go to Filter>Blur>GaussianBlur and set Radius to 3 pixels. Hit OK and add a Layer Mask by clicking on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers palette.
8: Paint in this smoothing
To turn the mask black, and hence mask out your new blurred layer, make sure the mask is selected and then press Ctrl+I. Now press D to switch the foreground and background colours their default white and black. Using a soft-edged brush (B) of around 50 pixels, paint onto areas of the skin that look a little rough, to effectively cut a hole in the black mask and reveal the smoother blurred layer below.
9: Lighten the skin
We want to tone down the girl’s tan, so to do this, click the Create a New Adjustment Layer icon, select Curves from the drop-down menu, then click and drag on the graph as above. Click OK and then press Ctrl+I to mask out this adjustment layer. With the foreground colour set to white, use a soft-edged brush to paint over the skin, cutting a hole in the mask to apply the Curves adjustment to these areas.
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.Adjusting skin colour
Holding down the Ctrl key, click the Curves Layer Mask to load it as a selection. With the selection still active, click on the Create a New Adjustment Layer icon and choose Selective Colour from the drop-down menu. In the new dialog, select Yellows from the drop-down menu and set Yellow to -100% and Black to -100%. Click OK and save your image as a PSD or TIFF to preserve all the layers for future work.