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Lesson Info

Cleaning Up Skin & Blemishes in Photoshop

Now, when I look at this, I mean a zoom in and I'd like to do control or command space bar. And then I can click and drag and bring their cute little faces up. And I can see that little Eldin. He's such the second child. He's like the fund goofy, like just very independent little guy. Ah, so I'm not surprised. He has a scratch on his nose, and I don't know what happened down here if that was dinner or he got a little Boo Boo somewhere. But we're gonna easily, easily, easily fix that. And it turns out that we have a bunch of tools that make that really easy. So if you photograph kids, this is huge because they always have something like food that didn't get cleaned up or a scratch or something. So let's talk about how we can do this for safety sake, I guess. Let's before anything else, let's duplicate our background layer just so we have a copy of it. Ah, in case we need it for any reason. So to do that, you compress Commander control J to jump up a copy, or you can do what I just did d...

rag it, click and drag it down onto the new layer button down here, and that makes a copy. So it's just kind of nice to have that. I don't usually I don't always remember to do this, but we should do that. That's best practice. OK, now, when it comes to retouching these things, there's a lot of tools we can use. They are part of what I call the J family, because Jay is the keyboard shortcut that will pull up this family. So which ever family member was most recently in action? That's what you'll get if you press J. So right now this is the healing brush tool. There's also the spot healing brush, the patch tool, the content aware Move tool and the red eye Tool, which I just realized I didn't bring an example of a red eye image. I have a hard time getting those because my family we have a lot of dark eyes, and it reacts to the melon in in your in your body. And so we're not reactive as reactive, although these guys have blue eyes. I didn't use a flash on him, so but red eyes really easy to fix. You get the red eye tool, and if his eyes were red, you'd get this little tool and you'd click on the red. Uh, and it goes away. That's pretty much all you dio. If it doesn't work quite right, just undo it and try again because it just it had what I call a misfire. Sometimes it just calculates a little off, so it's really easy to fix. So that's the red eye tool. But see him back in here. We're going to take care of these little scratches, so let's actually do this will use the healing brush. In this case, I think that will be good. So it works like any of the other brush engine tools, like the brush itself or the eraser brush. You can use your bracket keys to change the size of your brush, so the left bracket key makes it smaller. The right bracket key is going to make it bigger, so it's the left or right bracket key to change that brush size. Okay, by default, it's going to be soft brush, and for most cases I can think of you probably want to leave it that way. so we'll go ahead and leave it when you're working with the healing brush or the clone stamp, which will get Teoh eventually, It's a good idea to work on a blank layer, so I'm not gonna work directly on the background or the background copy. Just work on a blank layer, and you want to make sure when you have that tool that up in the options bar up here, where it says sample, you want to make sure. Sure, sure, that it says all layers. If you're working on a blank layer like this, okay, so that's your set up. Grab the healing brush tool not to be confused with the spot healing brush. Just good old fashioned healing brush. Get on a blank layer and make sure sample is set. Toe all airs and you'll see why here in a minute. Something to make the brush quite a bit smaller doesn't need to be huge. I don't want to heal a bigger area of his face than I need Teoh. So he has this little bitty scratch on his nose. I'm going to just dial this pretty, tiny um, and then we'll zoom in even closer. So the way that this works is we're gonna use a healthy area of tissue to heal his alley. To put that in kid friendly turn. Okay, so it's basically transplant surgery. Just kidding. Not at all. Transplant surgery. But it would be nice. A transplant surgery were this easy and with the few complications. So what we're going to dio is Ault or hold down, alter or option on your keyboard, and you'll notice the cursor changes from this nice round brush changes into this little funny looking thing called a target. So while I'm holding all tore option, I get this target and I'm going to position the target and a healthy area that I want to draw from to fix the scratch. So this area of his nose would work well to cover this with. So I'm gonna put my cursor here and now it's hard to see because, uh, you're looking at my screen, but I'm gonna click with my mouse or my tablet. So I just alter, optioned, clicked right here and that's it. Now I let go. Nothing happened. But what I did was I told photo shop where to source from. So I have done what's called setting your source point. So I all clicked. I set my source. Point said, Hey, photo shop source from here and now I'm gonna position my cursor here. I'm not painting yet, but you can see a little preview. It's showing me what it's going to replace that scratch with. So now all I have to do is put my cursor there and click and paint the scratch. Now you'll notice while I'm here. I'm not gonna let go yet while I'm here and I'm holding down the mouse. Do you see this little plus sign that slightly above into the right? That's where I set my source point, so that plus sign is the source point. So I call it your tail because it's following you wherever you go. It's tailing you, but it's really your source point. And what's happening is that as I paint on this scratch the source point ISS sampling the area underneath it, in this case, the healthy tissue and then the healthy tissue is being painted out through the brush. So then, when I let go, it all blends together and he has no more scratch. Super simple, really clean This is a good starter image, cause just a little biddy scratch. No big deal. Then I can scroll down over here and I can repeat to get rid of these little areas. Ah, and the way that the healing brush works. In case you might be wondering, How is it different than the clone stamp? The healing brush, like the name implies it heals, so it's blending that healthy tissue. It's trying to blend it in, so it's great for these situations, like a little scratch or like some acne or something. I'll show you some other situations where it won't work as well. And then we would need the straight up clone tool because it it doesn't blend it just clones. So it's just copying stuff. Sometimes that blending can get you in trouble, and it it blends together in a way that's not gonna help. So knowing that, then I'm gonna set my little source point somewhere, like maybe here and I'll just paint over these areas, and when I let go, it should hopefully blend in. Yeah, somewhat nicely. If it doesn't blend in quite as you like, you can just do it again. Go over it a little bit more until it blends for you. We'll get this guy over here. You might also have to do this in a couple different passes because you'll notice if I do this in one pass and I keep dragging my cursor. Look what I've done. I've actually moved the problem because in the same brush stroke, I have painted down healthy new tissue. And then I've dragged the source point across where the problem waas. And because I haven't let go of my mouse yet. It's like the paint isn't dry, so the source point didn't sample the new paint that's covering the Howie. It's sampling was underneath that still. So you have to be mindful when you're doing this. You want to be mindful that you're not doing a long stroke where you're running into that problem. So again, if I set my source point, let's say you also anything about where you set your source point. If I am intending to drag my brush this way, I don't want to set the source point right here, because now when I paint and I drag to the right, I just ran the source point into the problem again. So now look, it's moved again. Okay, so this tool can be incredibly frustrating if you're not thinking strategically about it. So when I look at this and I think, okay, I'm gonna plan to drag my brush horizontally across like this. Then I want to set my source point somewhere where I have room for the source point toe. Also move horizontally with me without running into trouble. Sometimes you don't have a lot of room for that. So sometimes you have to go click, and then you make short little strokes and you have to slowly build up, and sometimes you can just click and run with it. So it really just depends. But I would set this may be over here and now I can brush through there and not worry too much. And now it's gone. Came. See? I thought he had another Maybe not. I'm not going to try to make him look like a supermodel. And, you know, like his skin is made of porcelain or something, cause he's a kid and we're gonna keep it real. But I can just all click any time I'm moving to a new section in doing a new thing. I'm Ault clicking. So when I'm working with this tool, I always have. I'm right handed. So I always have my left. My thumb I use on my altar option key. So I'm constantly all click set a new point and then paint all clicks at a new point and then, you know, let go of all and then paint So it's just a constant thing. I should also point out that each time you set a point and then you know, you paint whatever when you let go. If I move over somewhere else. If I don't set a new point and I start painting here, you see that the point is back where I left it down below. Unless you turn on this option here, this is the aligned option. This means that if I set my point here, if I click and let's say I paint here now, then I let go. Then I move up here and I don't set a new point. I just start painting again. The point moved with me because of the lined. So every time you start a new stroke, the point will go back to the same relative position to your brush. So some people like in some situations that might be helpful to do it that way. Personally, I I don't know if it's because I'm a control freak or what, but I personally like to just always know where my source point is. I don't want to look, and even if I know it's aligned and it will be close, I don't want to guess exactly where because you don't see exactly where it is until you click to start painting. So in this case, that would be fine. It's not gonna harm anything, But if you have a busy image with a lot going on, it might get in the way. So I usually leave this off. And that means that when I set my point down here and I paint and then I come over here and I paint the source point will always be where I left it, which is nice. But it also means I have to reset it all the time, so that's a choice that I make for the way I like to work and for what I'm doing. But you'll have to just experiment and see what works best for you and and whatever image that you are working on. Okay, so that is pretty nice. We got rid of his scratches, and I should also point out that we worked on that blank layer and we told it to sample all layers. What that did is if I hide these so you don't see them. What that means is here's our paint. And I made a lot of extra stuff cause I was demo ing, so I don't know what I think. This was the real thing and his nose here, this was all just me doodling. But, um, that means that we've sampled the layer below, but we've actually put the paint on this blank layer one. Why that is advantageous is it just helps keep things separate, and it makes it easy. So if I make a mistake, which happens a lot with this tool, sometimes things just go wrong or you drag too far and oops. Now, you ran your source point into the wall or something. And so there's a lot of undoing and redoing involved. Um, but it makes it really easy to just erase it, and you don't have to worry that you're erasing some other important part of your image. So if I look at this and I like, let's say I felt like I did a bad job on this area here, I could just grab the eraser tool and erase, and I'm on this blank layer. So I don't have to worry, because maybe I've done some other work to the image, and I don't want toe mix these corrections with any other corrections so we can isolate them on a layer by themselves, and that gives us more control. And then I could just do it again. Then I would grab you know, this tool and try again. I could also try using the, um, spot healing brush again. I have to make sure it looks a little different, but I I'd also in a sample, all layers, the spot healing brush. You don't have to do the source point setting, but it's made more for spots not for blotches who like this kind of a bigger blotch. It's made more for just clicking. So if there was like one little pimple that I wanted to zap, I could zap it like let's see if there's like whatever this is. I don't know what this is, but I could just zap it by. I just click and I rub a little. And when I let go, it's gone. I can click and paint with it, but it might leave a funny mark. I can kind of see my brush mark there, Um, and you don't get any control over what it's using for source material. So it's just kind of, ah, smart fix. So it's wherever it is that you paint with it. It's going to sort of feel around and then guess what it should use to correct it. So it's really best for small little dots. Let's try it down here and see how it will work. It might be good, because this is pretty simple. Not too bad it got rid of it. But I can see the marks, um, that it left. So so maybe I leave it and maybe I just kind of brush over it a second time to clean up the marks. You know, that is an option, or I never reached for this tool. Unless I really am doing. I'll show you an example where I would use this. But in this case, I would stick to the healing brush where I set my source point and then paint just because I have more control and I don't have to worry about it. So, um, that's that for you.