Lessons

Lesson Info

Skin Smoothing

So here in photo shop are our number one goal. The very first thing that we need to do when we come into photo shop is get rid of blemishes, obvious issues on the skin. So we're going to go into the stamp tool. Immediate are not stamped. While I'm sorry, we're going to go into the healing brush immediately. So the healing brush is right here. You see that healing brush, and if you hold it down, you've got a whole bunch of different types. But what we want is this spot healing tool. So the spot healing tool is my favorite option for, um for working on blemishes just because it's quite simple. Um, it's very intelligent and knows what to do. So I just zoom in and I start getting rid of these specific little blemishes here. So I'm just looking for things that are big enough that they cause a problem. I'm not looking for removing beauty marks necessarily. Like I'll leave that one right there. I'm looking for things that just look a little bit weird. Um, or they're definitely blemishes there...

. Definitely like little zits or something. So I'm just getting rid of those types of things hairs, things that are out of place. Um, So you'll notice, though, that sometimes you end up with kind of a weird texture, and so you have to be careful about that. Gotta zoom back out our zoom in and make sure that you're not selecting too much of an area. Because when you're dealing with little tiny blemishes, you need to make sure that your brushes tiny so that you're only getting those blemishes rather than collecting a bunch of skin around it and creating kind of a softness to the skin. You don't want the skin to look too manufactured. Um, so make sure that your brushes the appropriate size. So we're just looking for things that are a little bit out of place or they their offensive to look at. That's probably a bad way to say it offensive to look at, um, so zoom out, and most of the time you don't need to be in that close. You just need to be close enough that you would see what people would see when they're printing. So again, remember, it's better to design your book, um, and know exactly what size this thing's going to be printed before you actually go into edit, because if it's going to be a very small print, you almost don't need to do any of this. But if it's going to be a large print, or if it's going to be, you know, shown up close, then you need Teoh. Then you need to worry about it a little bit more. So just be aware of how big your print if I didn't want to get rid of that one. How big your prints gonna be before you worry about so this up here. It's always a question because these air a little bit more of like freckles. But I'm getting rid of the big ones, the ones that air a little bit obvious. But most of them I can leave, and I'm also going to get rid of stray hairs so you just follow those hairs. But don't try and do an entire hair at once. Do like a little segment. So if you do, if you do too much at once, you end up with, um, stray elements coming in from other places. So just do little segments at a time so that it knows so Photoshopped knows. Oh, I only need to get rid of this. And I don't need to copy from these hairs over here. So just just a little segment of hair at a time. And plus, then if it messes up, it's It's not a huge deal. And especially when you're crossing a hair that you intend on leaving, make sure you cross it and then let go so that it can cause Photoshopped will keep this hair intact. It'll it'll actually follow that line back. Um, I actually I'm going to remove that one them, So that looks fine. Okay, so now this one, I know that's a beauty mark, but it's pretty eye catching, so I'm going to get rid of that. Okay, so now I've gotten rid of the serious blemishes, but I still have kind of this inconsistency in the skin. And so now it's time to get rid of those inconsistencies. And there's two different ways to do it. Um, specifically, if I see like dark patches and things like that, What I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to create a new layer and the reason I'm creating a new layer, I just drag it on top of this little plus button that's right down here. So dragon layer on to that plus button. It will create a new layer like that if you just click the plus button. It creates a blank layer so you don't want to just create a blank layer. You want to actually copy the entire layer. The reason You copy the layers to make sure that you can go back to the original layer. Because sometimes you might go way too far with this smoothing that you dio and then you could just simply take the opacity of that top layer down and the bottom layer will show through and it will become more natural. So what we're going to do now is we're going to go in and we're gonna use this stamp tool and in the stamp tool we're going to use. And I've set up some brush options here that get me there quicker. But basically what we're doing up here is we're going to mode of lighten and 30% opacity. That's basically what we're doing. So I am going to with what it's telling Photoshopped to do is that it wants Photoshopped to take this texture and put it over here. But on Lee lightened things, so if there's something that's darker, it's gonna lighten it. But if it's lighter, it's not going to do anything to it. That way I can specifically target this area right here that has these kind of dark patches in it. So I've got these these dark patches here, and I'm going to just simply option click right up here. And then I'm going to just paint over the top of those darker areas. By doing that, it's just it's just softening up the dark areas so anywhere that I see something that's a little too dark like that Shadow is a little too dark for me. And so I'm just gonna just gonna lighten that shadow with some skin tone, and then I'm gonna do the same thing here and the same thing right up here and see how there's a shadow right there. I can just click here, and this is really great for little shadows under the eye, so I simply click here and then just lighten up those shadows on the I. This is the best way to get rid of like bags under the eyes. So I'm just I'm just softening up the shadows by painting a little bit of of skin. But at 30% and on Lee Bright Ning things up and then the same is true. Conversely, if I if I wanted to take away Shine or if there's to a bright spot on someone's head, I could do the same thing by just changing this mode instead of from lighten to darken. So if you have someone that has a little patch of like, shiny skin and it's, it's, it's glowing. You can always just turn this too dark and 30% and then simply grab and I'm looking for a place. Maybe right there. See, there's a little shine there. That's fine. But if I wanted to get rid of it, I could option click in a darker area and then just paint over and it gets rid of the shine on her nose really quickly. So if you ever have, like a shiny nose or a shiny head, you want to get the stamp tool, go to darken and 30% opacity, and then you'll be you'll be good to go. And so now you can see the difference between the two. So I've just minimized. I haven't completely changed anything about structure or about her face, But I've just minimized those kind of inconsistent areas in the skin. Then the last thing once I like what I've done. I just simply again shift, click. Both of them could command E. And now they're back together. And then the last thing that I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna use a plug in. And so I'm gonna go to the filter and I'm going to go to image gnomic and two portrait three. And it's going to open up that inside of portrait. And I can choose over here on the left hand side what I want to do with the skin smoothing. Okay, so it's it's smoothing the whole thing. And I found that this program is best used very simply, don't I Don't worry about the skin masking. There's a skin masking option that allows me to completely mask out, and it chooses the skin and all that kind of stuff. But I was find it's not quite accurate. So what I do is I just do a normal skin smoothing, and you can kind of test this and see, you know, like how how much you want to dio. But what you want to do is just choose until your skin smoothing is the way you like it. Um, and there's a fine medium and large dial that tell you how much smoothing it's going to do on those different levels of of texture and once you've chosen what you want to do, and mine is kind of in the middle of all of them. But I'm really not trying to get the fine detail as much time trying to smooth larger detail so you can see that I'm kind of fine detail is fairly normal mediums a little higher, but large is much higher. And then I'm the most important thing that I can do is create over here a new layer and then click. OK, so I've made a new layer and you can see that it's smooth it, but it's left some of those, but it's too much, which is fine because that's our intention. The first thing I'm gonna do is I have this layer and I need to create a layer mask and I'm gonna go down here again and and to the layer mask option here. But instead of just making a layer mask, I'm gonna hold the option key down. So I'm gonna hold the option key down and I'm a click it and it creates a black mask, which means nothing showing. And then I'm gonna go to the brush. So I go to the brush tool and I'm going to use white and painting white at 100%. And I'm just going to choose the skin. And I'm just so I'm painting back in all of that skin, smoothing just into her skin. So that's the easiest way to just get her skin selected there. And then I just turn off the bottom layer so that I can see where I missed. And there we go. That looks pretty good. Now, here's the real trick. Come in and look at her skin. It looks good, but I'm gonna take the opacity down to zero, and I'm gonna just start bringing it in until I like what it looks like. She looks natural, but she looks softer. She looks like she has great skin, but it's not perfect. I'm not going for perfect because nobody actually is perfect. I want reality, but I want it to be the best version of reality I can have. And so that looks really nice. I think your skin looks nice and smooth. It turns out to be usually around 30 to 50% is where I go. So once I'm done with that, usually I'll leave that skins moving up. I don't flatten that. And then I am ready to go back to to light room. So I'm gonna hit command w I'm gonna hit, save. It's going to return this image back toe light room saved. And then from light room, that's where I'll share it. So when you're round tripping from light room to photo shop and back, you always want to come back toe, light room and light room is where you're going to do all of your sharing and all of your work in, uh, delivering these files so you can see that I've got a Photoshopped document here and I've got her original. So there's final. There's the original much better, but still very natural, still very raw looking. And the beauty of this is that Then I can take whatever setting I had just go to the develop module and in there just highlight this image and then shift. Click over to this image and hit Turn off Auto Sync, turn on and then hit, sync and then just simply go in. Oh, before we do that, I'm gonna go in here and simply go down to my effects. Turned back on the grain on the old one on the raw one. And then I'm gonna highlight both of these images and sink and check none. And then I'm just going to say I want the grain effect to go back over to this one. So I synchronize the grain effect from here to here. So now I have this image, but with grain and with that beautiful softness behind it and so she looks fantastic. I love it. Okay, so that is how I taken image into photo shop and skin smooth and and deal with very specific skin issues. It's faster to do it there because there's more power, especially if you're working on, like, a senior or something like that, or someone with challenging skin issues.