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Day 15: Retouching II (Fixing, Portrait Retouching)

well welcome back this time we're doing sort of the second part of retouching yesterday we talked about retouching from the standpoint of moving and replacing and all that kind of stuff and we're still doing the same basic concept but now specifically talking about approaches when we're retouching photos of people because it's a little bit different than taking a wire out of a photograph when we're talking about facial features and things like that so a couple of things before we get too far into this and I touched on it briefly yesterday in the first session on retouching even mohr important when we're talking about people is the hole before and after thing you definitely don't want to show someone that before found photo that that you've taken especially made some major adjustments like whitening their teeth and slumming their face and all kinds of things the other important note is just a reminder we touched on in a previous lesson about the fact that even though photoshopped let's ...

zoom into a really close percent on what a very high quality photo we have to keep things in perspective and remember that you might be looking at the eyeball up really close but ultimately if this photo is going to be used quite small as we talked about in that previous lesson we wantto consider that very carefully the other thing is it's likely that you don't want to make adjustments directly on the image unless it's something like ah blemish so here's the approach that I take when I look at a portrait of a person after doing an initial step that all describe shortly I also then kind of looked closely at the let's call them issues that I want to address in their photograph and to me I separated into two categories one is blemishes and things that they will not have any issue at all if I remove so anything it's temporary it's not part of their facial makeup it's a blemish it's a pimple it's dot you know something something of that nature then I'll remove it completely and in those frankly I'd be okay with doing it directly on the background layer because I don't think they're going to change their mind and say no let me have the version of me with the pimples on it having said that I still use layers just to give myself a bit more control then there's other facial features that are part of the way someone looks that you might want to retouch but there's a big difference between removing completely and adjusting and making it look less obvious so I always tell this story because I think it's a vory it's personal to me but it reminded me of what's important when you're retouching back when my daughter was graduating from high school we did the standard senior portrait and got back the proof and there was a little check box when you ordered to say retouch or not and we did not check that and when the photos came back something just didn't look right to us and that's because a lot of us in the cross family have a little darkness under our eyes will the people first of all they retouched it when I asked not to but perhaps equally importantly or more importantly they didn't do a very good job and they removed that completely and didn't do the greatest job so now it didn't look like her because that's the way she looks that's the way I look so if you have a photograph of a sixty five year old person and they've got wrinkles around their eyes and you remove from completely it's gonna look odd is gonna look like bad hollywood plastic surgery and we've all seen celebrities that have gone way overboard with their real plastic surgery we don't want to do the same thing in photo shop either so one of the techniques will talk about in a lot of detail during this session is how to do things so that you can lessen someone's facial feature rather than removing it completely and then we'll also touch on ways where you can really kind of tweak and adjust and do all kinds of things give you lots of ammunition for those sorts of things so first of all here's a photograph I've opened very attractive girl nellie she's uh kind of a cool story for you was working here in tampa florida and then has been so successful now she's in new york and is in tv and all kinds of things that sweet girl great to work with and overall it's a very nice photo there's a few things that I would adjust right away but one of the first things I do almost every photograph very few exceptions and this is a technique that rita cher's tell us that they use all the time is I just before do anything else just a couple of steps first of all select all you can do it on the menu or the keyboard and then commander control tea for free transform already was take the wit the side of this and drag it in and up here where it says with we're going to be somewhere around ninety seven to ninety eight percent nothing more than that and all we're doing is squeezing the photo in by that much and then we go to image and choose crop now when you look at this photograph if I was to show you that before and after in this case would say oh you went like this well the concept behind this is that whole theory of the camera adds expounds whatever excuse her ten pounds whatever people say this is taking a photograph and making a two percent to three percent skinnier not twenty percent not so much they look at it and go wow that looks like a really overly squished photographed this is taking two or three percent now later on in this thirty days we'll talk about actions and how you've been pre record something this would be an example of something you could automate so instead of every time doing the same steps you do it once and then press a keyboard shortcut and goes and now you're off to the next step in this particular case I started with just a regular j peg I could everything you see that I'm doing here could be done with a raw file and there's one little issue we'll talk about that that is connected with raw in a moment all right so now I start to look at it and here's an example of what when I was talking about temporary issues I can see there's a couple little blemishes on her skin so those I wouldn't have a problem with removing completely but these other marks on her these air part of her this is unless she specifically said can you please remove those I would want to consider either leaving them as is or maybe reducing slightly by the same token she's got a bit of a mark on her I it's not like a dark circle through lack of sleep that's just the way she looks a little bit of a smile line rather than remove those completely I'm want to lessen them so here's the approach I would take now you confer many things like I said you can decide to just honestly for blemishes do it directly on the photo if you wanted to I like to do it on a separate layer just so that if I make a mistake I have an option on let me clarify what I mean by that if I work directly in the background layer and took the spot healing brush and went big ping ping ping ping ping and did a whole bunch of spot removal that would be fine the problem is if I then look back and go wow twenty five clicks ago I noticed I was that one who didn't work so well if I did directly on the background later I'd have a bit of an issue by putting on a layer even though I'm not doing it from a flexibility changing my mind standpoint it gives me an opportunity to correct any errors if I realize they went a little overboard or they the healing tool used the wrong area or something like that so in a case like this I'm going to take my spot healing brush I pressed j for the healing brush and I'll have it says content aware sample all layers and I'm just going to go in here and just try toe cover up the main little blemishes that I see now as a added tip that's going to sound like I'm kidding but I'm actually not make sure your monitors clean because I've had occasions where I'm clicking on my screen going why is the healing brush not fixing that spot then I realized it's on my monitor it's not on her face so hopefully that won't be the case and we'll talk about other things later on like shyness but right now I'm just looking at all the kind of little blemishes that we see I'm using the spot healing brush and as we talked about on the previous lesson the spot healing brush just automatically picks a spot for me and I like that because I'm going to say in the majority of cases it picks a good spot that works just fine and all those spot removal stuff that I did and here's what my layer looks like and see a whole bunch of little spots that I've addressed they all picked the right spot if you find as you're doing the this healing that there's a spot that's so close to another feature like her eye that is picking the wrong spot then I would switch to the healing brush which is the one where you can identify the spot from which you want to heal so I'm using the spot healing brush everywhere if I decided okay I need to now have more control then I'd switch to the spot healing brush I still have a kind of the same way sample all heirs all that good stuff and then the difference is that now I'm choosing the spot that I want to heal from so my suggestion is use the spot healing brush as much as you can because frankly it's very fast and it does a fine job on occasions where it doesn't work quite the way we want then you might use the regular healing brushing we'll see some occasions where I might want to do that now let's look at the area around her I this part underneath and the little smile line while I couldn't remove it completely my feeling is if I did that again it wouldn't look like her and I want this to look like her and just be a really good image of her so what I would do is make a separate layer and just for the sake of clarity I'm going to name this layer one hundred percent and then this layer we're gonna call it less now that's going to make better sense in a second because what I mean by that is this layer is a one hundred percent capacity so everything I do on this layer healing cloning etcetera is going to be one hundred percent opaque this layer is or I'm going to do things that will be less obvious so for example let's get a little closer and you see really see what's happening here I'm on the layer I've called les and let's try first of all this using the spot healing brush and see what it does now it has a little bit of a glitch in there so let's undo that and try the regular healing brush because this one I can decide okay optional click here and then I'm gonna paint in there now if I hide that you can see it's removed the smile lines completely but it to me it looks artificial so by putting this on this extra layer from the one hundred percent one this one I'm gonna lower the opacity and it could be anywhere from fifty to seventy percent and you'll see what the difference is let's put it at fifty ish to see the difference now you can still I kind of see the smile lines but they're a lot less obvious so now that this layer as that in this case forty eight percent now I continue working and say take that feeling brush and go over this part of her eye and everything I do now is going to be the same way where it's going to use that kind of fifty percent see through method and be less obvious I'm still taking away some of the problem but I'm not doing in such a way that looks really really obvious and even in here this line in her face that's part of the way she looks but I might try to make that a little less obvious and paint over that and just make it a little less than it was before now depending on a situation let's look at the different so far between the original and now and this magnification it's pretty hard to see the difference but let's go a little closer you could start to see the difference now you start to say depending on the circumstances sometimes I'll have two of those lesson layers one that's that say sixty percent and one that's a thirty percent because depending on the person and their facial feature again if it's an elderly person with a whole bunch of wrinkles if I remove them completely would look really artificial and maybe for some parts of their face fifty percent would be better and other areas twenty percent would be better so that's kind of the approach that I take now let's assume for a moment oh and that's also hold on one second let's address her beauty marks down here normally I would just leave them as is unless she told me to this would be an example let's do this let's take this layer and put it at ahh lower percent like around twenty five and then use our spot healing brush you'll see that the result is it's just lessing enough I put that now I could put the opacity up and say maybe around seventy percent so now they're still there but less obvious again that's that I would do based on the input of the person I would ask them specifically it's a frankly an awkward question to ask but say you have a couple of beauty marks would you like me to remove those completely or are you okay with them the way they are some people many people in fact are like that's the way I look so keep it there that's that's an opinion I would ask them so at this point I now have a couple of layers that are this retouching as we talked about earlier in our session on smart objects if now I was ready to move on and do some other work then I would take off of these layers and writer control click and choose convert to smart object so now I can start doing some other things like skin smoothing and all that kind of thing overall to me her skin looks really good I'm very happy with the way looks as a little bit of texture but that's good that's the way it should look but if we wanted to do like for example a bit of skin softening then by taking those layers and putting them in to this whole smart object concept that of course means I can also do a smart filter now actually let me pause for a second and talk about this there's a lot of chatter out there about the proper way and the not so good way to do things like touching people skin and I've seen discussions on forums and photographers groups that say you should do this method and if you're taking less than this many hours to retouch properly it's not proper retouching and so on well let's put this in perspective the people that generally make those sort of comments are the people that are getting paid to be a re toucher and take hours to do a magazine cover if you're a photographer or you're doing this as a hobby and just want to make someone look as good as you can in a short period of time that's the kind of methods going to show you here I'm not going to get into heavy duty retouching using frequency separation and all these high end methods I'm sure you can find lots of other lessons on how to do that this is cutting to the chase and getting things done fairly quickly and in a way that's as editable as we can because as we talked about multiple times what you see on the screen and what will print or what you see on the screen and what it looked like smaller I want to have the ability to tweak it if I want so the method I'm going to show you is by no means a high end retouching method it's a good method that I like that does a decent job of making improvements on people very quickly all right with that being said so I've got this smart object which contains all my retouching layers and we'll go and do a blur could do a variety some people would do surface blur or even a slight gaussian blur I kind of go back and forth between the two I'm going to do in this case gaussian blur now here's the next thing I want to say that about this is that just like we talked about that earlier the whole point of working non destructively and we did things like adjustment layers is take advantage of the fact that you can over a just some things you can see what you're doing and then pull it back and in this case what I mean by that is I might on ly want to blur this through our three pixels but I'm gonna blur it ah whole lot more so that in the next step when I go to a masque and decide where I want this affect to show I'm going to make it really easy for myself and then once I'm finished doing that then I'll pull this back to a more reasonable number so I'm not in any way suggesting we would end up with the blur of nine or ten pixels on a photo world like this because it's way too much but here's my mask for the smart filter it's white so that means that currently the filters applied everywhere so I'm gonna press commander control I to invert the mask and now I have a gauzy ambler that's completely hit now I can go to my paintbrush look at what I've got I've got a big brush that's probably too big let's go a little smaller passing one hundred I want my form color to be white so look at it this way whenever you have a smart filter with the layer mask you filled with black and then you loan your paintbrush operated paint in white one way to look at that is it's almost like I turned my brush tool into the paint with gazi and blur because wherever I paint with white I'll be revealing the results are the effects of this smart filter so if I start to paint you can see and at first it's gonna look horribly unrealistic it looks like worse than a barbie doll with plastic skin so I'm again remembering I'm not suggesting whereto end up or leave it this way but this is so I can see what I'm doing and go over all these areas now by the way I have seen photographs that actually look like this where they went up to this step but then may have just for gotten to kind of pull it back a little bit at the end I'm deliberately avoiding areas of detail like her eyes and her hair and around her lips and teeth this may be a bit up there and then come down here let's make a bigger brush to grab all this part really quickly as you can see it looks horribly blurry and really all to way too soft but if I look at my layer mask I have this very odd looking weird portrait could almost make this like weird avant garde art or something but really what that's doing is saying on lee these areas have the blur applied now once I've done that I'm say ok that now that I know I blurt all the right areas let's take this gauze in blur and knock it way down again so now if we hide this see the difference it's still a little bit too much for my taste I probably still double click on this and lower the opacity just a little bit more because all I'm trying to do is to a very subtle amount of sharpened and this is to your taste some people I've seen photographs where people post words a glamour type photo and they deliberately keep it very soft almost bordering on artificial I like to see a little bit of texture still in people skin because that's the way they look the reason I do it this way because some people say why why you do the whole smart object thing is at this point I would hate to do all this work and then suddenly realized either I missed a spot I should have healed or one of the places I hell didn't look very good to begin with so let's double click on our smart object here is all of my layers and I'm going to make an obvious thing happened here which I normally wouldn't of course but just so you can see what's happening is I'm gonna take my paintbrush and actually paint something on there and then save this you can see okay so that's my obvious bad mistake but food oh gosh how did they miss that well of course now I have the ability to go back to any one of these layers turn them on or off or adjust them or tweet them or change the opacity do whatever I want and as soon as I do let's just for the sake of argument let's say neli did come back and say can you please take out those marks on my neck than I would take them out completely save it and now when I come back here it's already updated and redone that smart filters on not having to do all those steps all over again now could you do this directly on layers and merging together of course you could and that's our ongoing discussion here is there I'm not even though it may sound like I'm saying don't ever fill in the blank like merge you of course you can I just like this method because I like the option of knowing that at any time my client comes back or I look at something at a later date and go I wish I had tweet this slightly that's why I like this and as I also mentioned before sometimes it differently what you see on the screen and how you print it you may decide oh I wish I had made this slightly different here I can course the this means that I say this as a psd file that includes all this other information now there's only one aspect of this that is a little challenging and let's see which one I can use well actually let's do this I'm going to save this as a different name just in case and then we'll close it up now in this case look at the difference if I forced this to open in camera raw so now it's going to be a camera smart object and I'm going to make an obvious difference so you can see it and this is the one thing you have to think about when it comes time to that whole clone and he'll onto a separate layer open and actually this time so here's the thing we have to be concerned about as I showed you before you make a new layer you take your healing brush should have used the spot healing brush and all this do a few spots here and there so you can see what's happening and doing a wonderful job making all these adjustments very subtle little changes all looks good this great school here okay so I've done all that work looks great and then all of a sudden I looked a second time ago maybe I maybe I don't like the exposure or the contrast or something about the camera settings well here's the one important thing to remember whenever you you sample all layers as an option with any of those tools healing patch tool all that kind of stuff is that it's at that moment in time what I mean by that is if I double click on this and say that was bad let me put this back there that looks better and I click okay you'll see we have a slight problem she has measles or freckles or something because what happens is the camera raw updates but this healing layer doesn't because it remembers at the moment used the healing brush this is the way it looked so at worst you know that means you'd have to redo that layer but I guess the real point I'm trying to make here is that even though one of the benefits of using camera raw smart objects is this ability that make ongoing adjustments in this case when you're talking about people's faces and things of that nature where there's toning issues and color and exposure and all that stuff make sure you get those set first cause every other that have work you do sampling from that will not update there's no way to make this alive healing effect I wish there was that pretty cool but there isn't now one thing that we might want to consider and this is actually more interesting me than it used to be is that if we're talking about camera raw smart objects then one of things that we might want to consider his camera raw has its own spot healing brush and it's just got a whole lot better it's called the spot removal tool and I have it set on hell in the past what what happened it was always just a circle so you would click on a circle and it would say I'll pick this as a different spot and you could move it around if it didn't pick the right one which was okay but it was really best for spot removal or blemish is here I can now actually paint with it so if you need to make bigger area so it's gone from just a tool that were previously spots the ones where you could actually adjust it and you can even go in and make changes and then lower the opacity so the equivalent of when we talked about lessening effects I can move it to say I would prefer you use that as an area and the reason why would I do this instead of the healing brush is because it's part of a camera so if I adjust the exposure they change on the fly because it's it's not like accusingly spot healing or any of those tools in photo shop where it's based on that moment in time so that's kind of a nice benefit which is leading me to think maybe I might start using this tool a little more than I did in the past it's still a first is a little weird to me to have all these little circles and pins all over the place but you get used to that and it does mean that if at the eleventh hour someone says now you've done all this work let's change the exposure settings or change the white balance I still can because it's going to adjust on the fly everything else we've done when you click okay it opens in photo shop you don't see any of those things and now I could do other work but at any time I could just double click and go back myself too click on that spot healing brush and there's all the little pins on her face would show me all the things I've done with this healing brush now as an aside not that I would do this here but if you have a photograph and you want to see our their specs of dust or things of that nature this command called visualize spots lets you go in and see are there for example sensor dust or something like that here with a person of a person that I have you're not going to really see it but this is a nice option where if you have a photograph that maybe you've taken one a landscape photo and you're a little worried that you might have some sensor dust or something else this is where this becomes a really useful tool is to help you see where the spots are including ones that the naked eye you might miss them a little bit here it lets you see it I don't know that I'd necessarily use that dealing with something like this but that's a solution potentially for the question off well howto why make retouching adjustments made to a photograph and still preserve the edit ability of camera this healing brush within cameras special with its new change where I can actually paint with that I would suggest it might become a very useful way to do this kind of work so something to consider as we're working okay let's look at some specific issues that are going to make a difference in photographs of people somewhere somewhere along along the way I remember reading studies about when people look at photographs what they look at and they generally look at people smile and their eyes are the two most important things and of course everything else but if someone is smiling then the look of their teeth is important and you can see a person where in in person their teeth look fine there's something wrong with him but photographically because of issues to deal with lighting whatever it is they look a little generally yellowish in we want whiten their teeth now like anything you have to take this with great assault on be carefully don't go over the top and make it look like bad toothpaste commercial or for those who have ever watched friends the episode of friends where ross did teeth whitening and he had like glow in the teeth glow in the dark teeth you don't want that so we're gonna go to one hundred percent do you hear and we want to try and take her teeth which are overall looking pretty good but I want to make them a little brighter so I start off by first making a selection because there are fairly decent edges I'm going to try the quick selection tool and see what I get with that and overall not bad it's trying to tweak that a little bit and probably just a bit more that's actually quite good overall any time I'm doing some like this I'm gonna want to soften the edges of my selection just a little bit so we're going to go into our select menu and choose feather and just feathered a few pixels just to make sure now we'll see the technique I'm going to use here will involve an adjustment layer because the reasons we just make one I can tweak the adjustments and two I'm going to be one b and b I can use the mask ah function if I do need to feather just a hair more so the meth the adjustment I'm gonna use is hugh saturation now some people would go to a command like exposure of brightness and contrast but the real problem that we usually encounter with photographs with someone's teeth is their smiles a little too yellowish so ryland is brightening it we need to decrease the yellow a little bit and do a little bit of brighton a little bit so the simplest method is used hugh saturation and then up at the top here where it gives us options one of them is we can pick a different color area so it always defaults to master I'm going to pick yellows and all we're gonna do is lower the saturation of the yellows and look at the difference it's subtle but you can see now her teeth are looking a little less yellowish and then what I generally do if thing go once I've done that go back to the master and take this lightness and just put it up just a little tiny bit not very much even that's bordering on that's actually probably about as much as I would go so two steps go to the first yellows and reduce the saturation of the yellow and then a little bit on that putting the lightness up just a little bit now if you look at that and you suddenly notice it looks a little too obvious this is where you could use the properties click on the mask and use this feather command and I'm going to go way overboard that's too much but just all this will do is just soften the edge of our mass so it just lightens it softens here just a little bit to help it kind of blend in with the surrounding area and usually when I do this kind of before after I'll do it a few times at this sort of one hundred percent size to make sure that I'll also make sure out and say what does it look like in the context of the overall photograph and again if you want to do horrible toothpaste commercial you could certainly do that but no I actually saw an ad in a local flyer advertising circuit went around and whoever did the retouching for this dentist's ad clearly had not learned the lesson of don't push it too far because it was quite laughable actually how every single person was small and had teeth that were so white it was like whoa that's just too much now we can take the same kind of approach on the whites of people's eyes and here you can try a couple of options what I would normally start with is if you can make an initial selection of the whites of her eye and I'm not going to be terribly concerned if it's not incredibly accurate because we'll see we're going to tweak it and I would once again do hugh saturation because with the whites of people's eyes often they look a little pinkish reddish greyish as well as being needed to be brighton so all I did was brightened them it would look a little bit odd so often we go into the reds and lower the saturation of the reds and sometimes just doing that enough is going to make a big difference then go back to the master and line it up now here's another example of where I would take full advantage of the editable nature of an adjustment I want to make sure that I've got a good selection mass going on here so I'm going to temporarily I've said okay I went to plus five let's put it up to sixty three which is way too high but now what that lets me do is look more closely at it and make sure I'm on the mask take my paintbrush in this case I would use ah hard edge brush kind of small and I'm gonna do is paint with black to say these areas and here I want to get a little better because it doesn't look very natural to me right in there this and paint with white just to make sure I'm getting all these areas and once again this is an advantage of using a tool like the welcome brush because now I can adjust the pressure sensitivity it looks completely unrealistic and that's because I went way too high so we went to what we say plus five I think it was much better even go just a hair more than that now that I look at it so now I've done one eye and now I think over the other click on the mask and just go directly to the paintbrush and wherever I paint with white in effect I'm painting in the improved the whiteness of someone's eye you could also do this by making a selection but in this case since I've already got my mass started to me this makes equally good sense so now we zoom out let's see what we got so far nice looking pretty good now let's pretend we have done everything we need to weave weave done any kind of retouching too her face that we do we've done any kind of softening or justin assume we've done all that because we've already covered that in the last session and now I want to do one little thing which is just create a little kind of a sparkle in her eyes and once again there's a number of ways of doing this one way that is what I would call a simple kind of older way to do it but it still works is to just make a very rough selection of both eyes and duplicate them so now I have very odd just a pair of high sitting on all their pride themselves which is really weird I'm goingto convert that for smart filters because I want to be able to try some things and we're going to go in to just this layer and choose sharpen and we're going on sharp mask and went to sharpen it a fair bit somewhere up pretty high now at first when I do this is going you're going to look at him go yeah that doesn't look very realistic that's because it's sharp and way too much so in this case at a mask take my paintbrush let's go a little closer on that make sure black is my for one color and I just wanna make sure that all I'm really doing in fact I could even successfully argued that all I really want to do is sharpen the iris of her eye and not all this other area so just paint away all these other things that you've done this way we got so far so there's still some areas that I need to paint away like under her I hear that now it's gonna be really hard to see it this level of magnification but I think you'll find when you look at it this is just a little kind of a sparkle and sharpness in her I sold compare this eye with this one why haven't mask yet it looks like she's got really weird sparkly I make up on which might actually work in this case is a bit too much but look at this I and then I turn this back off again and like our recurring theme and I apologize if I sound like I'm repeating myself over and over again but I know I am because I'm trying make a point here that even this case I deliberately sharpened it a whole lot and now that I've got it master I want I might look at and say well maybe I do I could pull this back a little bit was not quite so obviously sharpened and that looks a little more realistic to what I want so I just have to go to this other eye do the same thing paint away the parts that I don't want to be quite so sharp and so when we talk about sharpening for printing to me there's really two parts of sharpening one will ultimately be the overall sharpening just to make sure our photo is sharp enough to print but they're also be selective sharpening and for faces and things like that I would tend to sharpen a ll but mohr their eyes their lips maybe their teeth their hair possibly just to make sure that the detail that I want is pulled out just a little bit more and as always I would do them in this smart way so that I could decide is that the effect that I want or not all right so we'll close what we're doing on these two images and go on look at another example of a typical situation that we can run into this guy has got a few problems going on here but the most significant of which is really shiny hot spot on his forehead and one thing is you'll find with pictures of people is that people their eyes tend to be drawn to the brightest parts of a photograph so I guess we'll just stick with this one for now so we want to take away people's attention from that respect so put on a new layer now you want to address something here because for years there was a discussion of using the clone stamp tool and change the blend mode of the tool up here and if I changed this to dark khun mode the theory of it is now that means when I used the clone stamp tool it's like saying on ly clone over areas that I can darken so in other words it would take just the hot spots and dark in them the thing that that was realized later on is if you put the results if you're doing that sample all layers that doesn't do anything the blend mode for the clone staff will only works if you're painting directly on a layer so changing the blend mode up here will do nothing what you could do though it's changed the blend mode here so let me show you an example of what I mean let's get back into close percent I'm gonna take my clone stamp tool but the opacity back up and we'll just start to this little bit sample from here and then clone over on top and that's set to normal if I said to darken all is doing is saying I won't adjust the pixels that are already the right color on ly darken the other the ones that need to be basically so that's what this darkened blend mode will allow you to do and generally that means it's going to help make things look more natural consider view decide worrying about did I get too much of his nose in here for example I can just create that reference point and then as I paint I'm don't have to be quite so accurate because all that is adjusting is the areas that need to be that need to be lightened so the way this works is look at the problem and consider the difference being the problem and what you're trying how we'd like it to look for example in this case the problem was he had hot spot which means they were to light so I wanted to darken them so then I changed the blend mode of this layer to darken if he had dark blemishes that needed to be lightened then by the same theory I would use the blend modi would make a new layer and change the bled one of that layer to lighten because that's what's gonna let me say on ly affect the pixels that you can make lighter and some cases a combination of that and lowering the opacity now this fellow you could also do the same thing with lots of other issues let's take a look at his bit of five o'clock shadow here if I tried to use the clone stamp tool and the laywer blend motta said to darken knows how nothing is happening even though I could pick up like a white color nothing's really happening because it's the blend mode of this layer is incorrect so if I make a new layer and this one I changed to lighten this is what I was talking about now hard part here is trying to find a place to sample from but let's use this part here now you see it's working because it's allowing me to say I just want to lighten these areas so you can go through and again trying to find an area that work is the challenge that was a little extreme but you get the ideas will work doing is we're changing the blend moto then we'd have two layers which I would probably at least when I first are working on this theory name accordingly so I know this is the layer I used a darkened things this is layer usedto lighten things and take advantage of this blend boat and that means you could also then not only used the clone stamp tool but if it makes justice good sense to try the other tools like the spot healing brush I could certainly do that and it's goingto do the spot healing and consider on ly using this blend mode that I have applied here so the one thing I will I warn you in advance about hot spots is I don't know how to say this without sounding odd but once you fix one hot spot somewhere you'll suddenly see them everywhere so the chances are you oh there's another one oh there's another one and depending what it is if it's a little tiny highlight on this sided someone's knows I'm not gonna worry about obsessively about every single part I'm going mostly look and say that's really distracting he's got a big hot spot on his forehead now some of us have greater problems with hot spots and reflections and others but thankfully there is a solution to it so as you're working think about it perhaps from the standpoint of is it distracting you if there's a little hot spot on the end of someone's nose again it could just be the light source where it's coming and it looks natural so don't necessarily feel you have to fix every single problem but this method of using a couple of different layers one for lightning one for darkening is going to serve you very well it's a nice solution for lots of different problems in the photo shop okay here's a situation that you might want to consider the liquefied tool and photo shop has some really interesting possibilities and we'll look at it in a couple of context here one is to just do very basic kind of adjusting but here's the situation I think it's really interesting this photograph was taken in this they wanted a photo of a girl that was smiling and she's doing an okay job but really could be smiling a little more and just to make our life more challenging she's wearing a headset microphone so what I want to basically do is work on certain areas or face but not this area and as a photo shop cia six now you can do liquefy as a smart filter which you couldn't use him you could not do before and is actually quite fast if you're watching any tutorial about liquefy and it's based on any earlier version take everything they say with a grain of salt including myself I used to say liquefy is so slow that you probably want to make a selection first just work in a small area now liquefy is so fast I don't have to worry about it and it's now a smart filter which means editable so I've made this layer a smart filter and I go to liquefy now not that you would do this but just to show you how fast this is in the past if I went to make any adjustment I would push the pixels like this and I would have like a five minute wait not really five minutes but I'd have a delay in seeing it update but here it's really live if you make an adjustment it will adjust very quickly now what I want to do in this case is I want to make it look like she's smiling more but you want to do that I'm gonna have to kind of distort her lips a little bit and if I do that I risk used distorting the microphone as well which would kind of give it away so this tool is called the freeze mass to him what it lets you do is is tell certain areas don't affect this area and I don't have even to be incredibly accurate I'm just trying to make sure that in the next step when I do something that it doesn't take this part of the microphone as well now this is one of the main tools we use in liquefy which is the forward warp tool and generally speaking and using liquefy you want the brush size to be a small issue could get away with but in this case I don't want to get too small if I go really small then it just looks like a bad impression of joker and batman so I have to kind of do a happy medium here because thea think remember like in this particular case I'm trying to make it look like she's smiling when people smile our cheeks tend to go up a little bit so I want to make sure I'm not just liquefying her the edge of her mouth but also her cheeks so just to be safe I would probably go in and just make sure let's just freeze her nose so I don't catch that by mistake come over here and we just go like this was making noise and probably going to be other side do somewhere kind of thing and click okay and if we look at the difference before and after it looks realistic enough to sell the idea obviously you're seeing me turn on off and laughing going okay that looks silly but someone walking in right now wouldn't necessarily look at this and go wow her smile is on I realized I didn't do the best job I could have made it a little better but you get the idea is that subtle changes and liquefy and by freezing something you can control where you want the important added bonuses now we can go back in and say I probably didn't do the best job on here let me just tweak that a little bit that looks a little better click okay and updates and of course we have a filter mass if you did liquefy the wrong part by mistake you could do that in this case I know it's one of the thing that that I don't really like let's go back here didn't mean to open that smart object I meant to go back to liquefy and that is to me this eye looks a little smaller than that one and that may just be the way she is but I'm gonna go in and use this tool reality just because of his name the bloat tool and just kind of make her eye just a little bigger not and again I'm doing a few subtle clicks it's like that now liquefy can be used for all kinds of things including if you have a portrait of a person and you realize you got this really nice portrait but their clothing is sticking out in a way that's kind of distracting particularly if they're on a nice solid background then you have more ability to kind of push things in and adjust so here's an example I'm gonna open this j peg and when I look at it overall I love everything about this post but this little part of her top is just pushing out just a little bit so this is another area where I might want to do a little bit of liquefying so I'm going to convert to a smart object so that I can then liquefy in a non and destructive manner and here again eyes do a quick little freeze I don't want to freeze her excuse me I don't want to liquefy her hand or her arm that's all I really need to do in this case because I'm just going to go to this part right here and I use this forward work tool now that brush is too big but I again wouldn't go too small because then it just doesn't work very well so we're going to try and find the right happy medium something like maybe this right and just kind of push it in a little bit more now knows it is adjusting the background but in this case because the background is kind of this black cloth material that's not ah horrible problem tohave but I have to be careful it was like a brick wall I might see it more obviously so anywhere where you if you saw him he has anything else in this particular photograph but if there was anything that was kind of fly away material has wanted to adjust or something like that that's an easy way to do it with liquefied now this photo has one other thing that I noticed she has a few little kind of flyaway hairs that are distracting me just a little bit I'm going to ignore for a moment the fact that there's a couple of years right in front of her face but these ones around the outside this would be another example where I would take my layer and I say okay what's the problem I want to fix the problem is she has a little tiny hairs that are too light and the words I want to darken them so I changed the blend mode to darken and now if we take our clone stamp tool just big enough optional click and now as I start painting I know they're wantto worry about getting the wrong part because I've got the blend mode adjusted so that it's going to be on ly darkening and when I meet blend mode again and blend mode of the layer not the tool itself and this is one of the ways we can start to tweak some of these little hairs that are just distracting us just a little bit I want to take them all out because it would look a little artificial but anyone that's like really noticeable and can have an odd position and that again is done by same method we talked before of using that darkened mode to get to this kind of result now if you decide at any time of course when I look at it that maybe suddenly it looks like I've cut off too much of her hair I could lower that opacity just a little bit so they're still very subtly seeing her hair but nowhere near as obvious as it was before now here's an interesting challenge someone with glasses and they've got a big glare now he has a couple of issues first of all hot spot let's do that first okay that's gonna bother me unless I do darkened mode clone stamp bigger brush optional click drag over maybe it's same down here with the opacity just to hear that's better now on to our topic which is glasses glare anytime you have glare on glasses this is a challenge now as a photographer you can make your life simpler if you have the control over this so I'm going to show you all attempt to fix this anyway if I have to but if I was taking photos of this fellow and it happens I waas so I gave him some instructions that okay here's his name was scott said okay scott hears we're going to do I'm gonna take a photograph of you and then try to keep yourself is still a possible and then just take your glasses off and I'll take a second photo now if you have an assistant who could remove the glass for the person and if your camera's on a tripod even easier but in this case it wasn't so let me show you what I did so I got a second photograph of him without his glasses on and I'm just gonna grab a chunk of him here a little more than I need and drag this over onto this photograph clearly it does not match up very well so let's temporarily I'm just gonna do this so I can see what I'm doing here select these two layers and use otto align layers and see if it can't line those up for me pretty darn close so now I have a layer without glasses on that's lining up pretty well with the one with the glasses but the glasses have to glare so then I used typical photoshopped techniques and add a layer and then invert the layer so that means while there is a layer there it's completely hidden then I go back to my paintbrush to will be for brush I look at my settings I want to make sure I have white it's my foreign cars nonpartisan pressing text to swap the colors and then I start painting wherever I I want this and I got I think I have a hard edge brush in this case but you get the idea now it's not lining up perfectly yet but that's okay it looks to me like his eyes and this case they're just a little tad higher so I'm gonna unlike these two take my move tool and just nudge down just a hair it looks like the eyes are really off because you're seeing me turn that on and off but again if you just walked in and saw that I don't think you'd look at it so let's wait hot spot again I don't think you look at that and say wow his eyes were really wonky it's only because you're seeing the before and after and if necessary if the angle was not quite right I could even cut the two eyes into two pieces and adjust them myself needless to say that's great if you have that opportunity if you are the photographer you can adjust it more you can find the right angles there's not a glare you could take them off I know some photographers that depending on the type of glass is actually in their studio have glasses without glass in them that's another option but in this case what if we don't have that what if you know what all we've got is this well here we've got a make do with what we have and I suppose I could try to first clone the part of the eye where the glare is really bad let's try that first new layer I'm going to just take a chunk of this like this actually I should have made a new layer first need to do that we try it again because what I'm gonna do in this case instead of what I say cloning meant really copy some pixel so I'm making a selection and I do command control j when she means now I just have that little piece by itself and I do free transform we're going to flip horizontal and now see if I can kind of match this up I might lower the opacity a little bit to see where I need a little closer I'm losing a little bit of quality but it should be enough for me to kind of see if I've got it in the right general place that looks over all not bad enter now this would be another rare case of me saying yes I am going to a race because I just want to race the unnecessary parts was all I'm really trying to do is cover up that little part where there was a glare and again at this really high zoomed in view it looks really unrealistic but here not bad at all sometimes if it's bad enough the solution might be even though people are mirror images of each other try taking one eye duplicating it and then flipping it taking that whole eye over and see if you can use that I'd still use the same principle where I'm not going to assume that it's in a match up perfectly temporary lower the opacity and try and get his eyeball matching the same kind of size I probably should have selected just a little more of his eye because it didn't quite match up you see I've got a bit of a problem where in this case his eye was lower down so that's not gonna work as well but it's another option so dealing with glass glare while you could use the clone stamp tool and some people will clone and use that method of saying darkened chase a blend more the layer to darken that is a possibility but honestly my feeling is if you congrats some other chunk of information that looks good put it on a layer by itself and tweak it so you a justin transform then to me that might be just a z z now one thing I should mention here is I've just been using free transform commander control t but here is an interesting little option especially when it comes time to this kind of retouching this little button right up of the top here is called the warp button and when you do it as thie ability or you could just kind of push and pull things so if you decide that this not that this works in this case but if you decided you needed to just readjust something to fit your really just sort of pushing and pulling it and then when you hit enter it will adjust now if you wanted the most control once again convert to a smart object first then when you free transform and warping into a really bad war first now if I decide later on okay that was bad when I go back to free transform and warp it's right where I left it so I can try do we adjust it if necessary so free transform is a nice option free transfer with war takes it even a step further so I'm going to give you a little project on and give you a photograph of one of our subjects and I'd like you to go through a series of steps and make your best attempt to try to touch up some blemishes maybe do a little bit of that skin smoothing and some other things to try and get a fuel for but try to do it not in an hour but in a fairly short period of time because remember chances are we're gonna have a serious airport you wantto adjust not just one or two is not just one or two the what I meant by that is not just one or two you can take many many hours but ah bunch that you need to make look good fairly quickly and you have a fairly set siri's of steps that you take and the same time do it using our flexible methods so if you need to you can always tweet your results so there you go some couple of days of retouching uh next we're going to talk about some other very important things including giving a little project and maybe even a little quiz for you we'll see you tomorrow