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Fashion Retouching Techniques

What I want to do right now kind of before lunch is do general retouching tips and tricks, and then I'm going to do some more special effects after our break after the next shooting session, so I think that's how we'll approach it for everybody out on the internet, I am going to try to go slow, but it's not really like remember this button and I'm talking more about concepts if you go to my store under the think outside the box creativity kit, you can get more or less when I'm teaching as a download. So if you purchase thie, think outside the box kit, there are most of these things I'm covering available to download there, just in case you're missing something here. Okay, so the first thing I'm going to start out with is really, really basic, but everything I talk about won't make sense unless you understand layers in their masks on adjustment layers, so I just have to demo this because it won't make any sense if you don't are not familiar with those, uh all right, so I'm just opening ...

up guys remember this fashion floor image, it's just a different ones, your hair's not blowing, um, in this picture, but it's from from day one. In the past when people want to make adjustments let's say you wanted to do and I guess I don't recommend you do this thing like turn it black and white and make one thing red okay, okay, but let's say I'm stem going something, so keep that in mind uh in the past people would do is a duplicate the layer, make it black and white and then a race. The problem is, if you go too far and you started re touching things, you can't backtrack because it's you can only save you can't change your settings p s but you can only go back maybe twenty steps or something like that. So one of the things that I recommend you have to know how to use as much as possible is adjustment layers and their masks um if you don't know what those are, go look it up on youtube learn those it's funny I went I did take some photography in college remember taking I took one class on photo shop in my entire life and I was really struggling and then for some reason one day adjustment, layers and layers mass clicked and it my photography and photoshopping skills went from here to here I mean, it changed everything I did drastically so that's a tip for you, everybody out there trying to educate yourself please an adjustment layers in their mask and I just wanted to point out that we, of course have photoshopped classes. Incredibly dot com sure anyone in particular? No cover adjustment for all of the above? Well, lisa snyder just did her a very intensive course on the essex on all the latest and greatest and then she had a four day course on c s five, so definitely those air included. Okay, so they definitely check out one of those if it's something you need to know. All right. So right down here in the bottom right hand corner. You see, I call it the half moon cookie it's the adjustment layer button if you click on it, you get a variety of options and I'm gonna explain with these are let's pick black and white. All right, what this does is you see how it makes kind of it looks like a layer above it. It's called an adjustment layer and I think of it almost like a joe so you're putting the jelly on top. Your photo and everything beneath it will have that effect. So in this example it's, a black and white gel and everything underneath it will look black and white what's really great, though the key of what you guys need to know is this little button are the little love mask on the right hand side you see that rectangle that's white this is the key to adjustment layers in their masks um what you have the ability to dio is if you see white the words next to our applied so when you see white, that means that effect is applying if you want to hide that effect, you paint black on the mask so if I come over here to my brush and make it black wherever I paint black well now show through the bottom so I'm literally hiding or basically erasing that effect uh so it's it's basically a wayto a race but you don't need to because if I switch back to white I can get rid of it. The reason I use this more is that I have localized adjustments where I could do a lot of little tweaks changed my mind later on everything I'm going to do will be involving this, but one of the things I want to show you real quick while we're in the black and white adjustment is if you're converting to black and white never de saturate never just pull saturation out uh you always want to do it in either a black and white conversion here in photo shop or in adobe camera raw or in light room the reason is when you're looking where it says reds if you see on the left it's black that means if I drag the slider to the left it makes red darker blacker if I drag it to the right it makes makes reds whiter later the reason you care and whites applicable to this entire presentation is because caucasian skin tones are made up of red and yellow so if you drag the red and yellow sliders let's say you want that shot where I had the red hair and the white skin one way you could do this is well is you make this black and white layer you drag the reds and yellows to the right which makes the skin white and then you just mask mask off all the other colors in the picture so what you're doing is you're taking a black and white effect where you make the reds and yellow lighter so that kind of makes the skin look really pure and then you only apply it to the skin so that's an effect there's kind of two ways to get the white skin effect it just depends on the shot one we're expecting the other sometimes components of the compassion people but like for example in mexico we have to wipe range soler's it will still it still is red and yellow but you don't use you want to make someone who's not white look really pale and white it's kind of why I say that if you like when I have an african american client I've never playing with it is reds and yellows but it's going to be more red ben yellow so it depends on the individual exactly which tone is dominant it's red, yellow and orange on I have tricks and tips for things that I do for example with african american skin to get that kind of silver look uh but it's it's totally different effect so it's still reds, yellows and oranges you shoes you don't want to make them look super weight if they're not wait it's up to what you want what you want to create yeah definitely yes it's it's definitely after what you want so you're the black and white here all right? So let's say okay, you definitely don't want to just paint selectively red in this because its it's kind of been done but what I dio to help control the I um is if I click on my half man cooking again and let'sjust drag levels in this example if I want to control my I I need to dark and down the edges and really just dark and down whatever I don't want you to look at and almost every picture that I'm playing with that something that I do every picture that I'm retouching, I figure out looking and where's my eye going in this picture how can I darkened down elements that I don't care about that I don't want to see so if I just dragging levels and drag this down, I could drag it way down, okay, obviously, that goes way too dark, but I can switch to my black brush changed capacity and kind of latent up things that I want to be later and what it'll d'oh is it gives me of him yet that is more controlled instead of just using the vigna and light room, which just gives you kind of a circle or you could make it more of an oval so I can really control where the eye goes instead of just generic of what late room might give you with oven yet so I could make it really dramatic there. And so I I definitely goes much more to her face in this example, and it makes it much moodier than originally. So this is how you use the adjustment layers is the half moon cookie that gives you those gels and the layer masses what you lets you paint on and off the effect so it's black, black in order to hide that effect or white to show that effect. So I'm going to just had to make sure you understood that real quick um, I don't like to tell people that they need to own a lot of programs. Um a lot of plug ins on ly because there's so much you can be you can do on your own and it's not all about what you the equipment you honor the tools I will say is professionals, though if their son that makes your job easier and saves you time, then it's worth the investment one that I personally am a big fan of his image, gnomic portraiture on. So I'm just gonna show you a real quick how I do that. I'm going to do this retouch, and I think I'm going to try one of julie's images I haven't seen her images, I'll just tell you what I'm looking at, what I see and how I might retouch it to get my creative retouching and make it look like a beauty retouch uh, so for this individual, when I zoom in her skin needs a lot of work, not a ton, but it's got a lot of texture that I don't really want on there's a bunch of things that I need to fix this type of image. I would end up spending a lot of time on to be honest in this in this particular instance, if it's going to be in a magazine or a large print, so instead of taking it through the entire retouch, I want to give you a few tips and tricks the first thing that I want to touch on is okay getting rid of all of these blemishes here, all of the spots, the tool that I would probably use it's spot healing rush or the healing brush tool what it allows you to do is it gives you this little circle and let's put a spot healing, and you make it slightly larger than the blemish, and you put it over the blemish, and when you click on it, you're saying this doesn't belong, please replace it with skin that does belong based on the textures around it's. When I click, it just gets rid of it. And so that's really good if you just kind of clicking around trying to get rid of blemishes quickly. Um, so I would spend time kind of looking around doing that. Another thing that you might consider another tool that I use regularly is a patchouli, and I'm telling you I could teach forever on retouching techniques. This isn't a retouching class. I'm just going to try to tell you the tools that I use in a couple of things you might not have heard of, so just want to show you what I'm using, I will oftentimes use the patch tool it's right here honor the spot healing russian healing bridge under patch tool. And what is best for is it's best for basically you select something that doesn't belong and you click and drag it to an area of skin where you want it to be replaced with. So for me, I'm looking and I like a nice girl, but I've no idea what she's doing right before, like she had, like, write read through all of her eyes, so I'm going to select this vein, click on it and drag it to the area that I wanted to be replaced with and what photo shop does when I let go is it replaces it and blend it in so it's a really good tool, I use it a lot for wrinkles in shirts and backgrounds. A lot of times it works really, really well for that it works well for really well for the big wrinkles on the foreheads, so when people have just really defined for headlines, you console ect, those click and drag, and it takes that new area scan it, replaces it and blends it in seamlessly. We're patched, told doesn't work well is on areas of high contrast, so edges it doesn't really work well on edges or areas with lots and lots of textures. Sometimes it won't work very well. So the next thing that I'll cover we did the spot healing brush how we use that and we also had the patch tool for the next thing I wanted to cover is clone and the easiest way that people screw up their retouching is cloning incorrectly what a lot of people will do is they'll set their clone brush too maybe fifteen percent or twenty percent capacity and the clone a lot. And so what cloning is it's kind of like cutting and pasting pixels more or less that's really what you're saying? Okay, when a copy these pics of cloned them over here andi opacity is like how much of those pixels like how much transparency those pixels have. So what happens is people take the clone stamp and if you take this at a later opacity and I'm going to just demo this, you get an idea if I'm trying to fill in under the eyes and I stick it out like fourteen percent if I have to keep cloning in cloning in cloning and cloning to fill it in and fill it in and okay, so what you do to fill it in see how you lose the skin texture that's what makes it look fake eyes people taking these low capacity brushes and keep going over it to fill it in uh sometimes when you take a brush at a higher opacity let's say, I'm just going to grab umm let's say, like, seventy percent capacity or so seventy five, if you click and drag, it works, okay? You know that that works pretty good. Um in this instance, but a lot of times it looks really fake because, like, like that, um, the texture right in your eye doesn't look the texture on your cheek. So the point of this is there is a solution that most people I don't know about there's something called blend modes, how many people use blend votes? Okay, great. So that's, what half of the audience here? Um typically when I use blend mode it's for adding textures, two images on dh what it is, is it saying, how does that that brush effect the pixels that you're touching? It's really, general? Because look there's all these different blend modes and each one does something general, so I can't actually say what a blend mode is it's affecting how the brush interacts with the pixels that you were clicking on. Um, what you need to know here for retouching why you care about me, don't do that. Why you care is one of the biggest retouching tips is I can give you is to change the blend vote of your clone stamp. So that it is purposely targeting pixels okay, so to take that back into something that makes more sense um what am I trying to do here? I'm trying to look at these options multiply color, burn dark and trying to light and under the eyes, right? I wanna light in those bags under the eyes so if I click my clone santo lay in and I clone what it does it's going to on ly effect and clone the darker areas, the shadows underneath the eyes but those textures right underneath the eyes it will leave alone those highlights and so it looks much more realistic. So if I take something, maybe let's try try fifty if I click and clone seo it keeps those textures but fills in the shadow, so that looks much more realistic because you maintained the texture underneath the eye and just filled in the darkness a little bit where it really works well is something like this for me the smile lines you want to completely get rid of him necessarily. So if I click see how it just fills in the shadows but it keeps looking realistic. I don't have to literally cut and paste part of the skin on dso you just you sort of see repeated textures and then it doesn't look right so it's really great because that you could just fill in areas that need to be filled in maybe a c right here on your face it looks a little dark here I can put a light and brush and just kind of laying in there and it kind of fills in the darkness just a bit so the same thing applies was say the highlight on her nose what you wanna do the highlight on her nose darken it so if I go to my blend mode and I switched to darken I could do something similar so I want to click here I can darken and it fills in it keeps that highlight texture but it will fill in the shadow and so you're able to still keep ten skin texture so a perfect example over here okay I always worried about getting rid of neck wrinkles particularly in beauty but also in portrait sits she's not very attractive it just doesn't look good so I'm always re touching those out the same thing with armpits on this is same the same technique will work kind of armpit wrinkles as well and so here if I try the patch tool if you zoom in on it didn't actually where I can see that you can see what was retouched that didn't really work well um if I use the clone hello opacity okay you start to lose the texture figures clone on high capacity it's kind of hard to blend but what this works brilliantly for is if I switch to clone on light and it's just going to fill in those shadows, so I took my clone stamp in, it'll fill it in and it leaves the textures around it that you don't want to get rid of because that also, if I didn't want to affect that texture right outside, I'd have to, like, take a little brush and try to clone like around it if I had a normal capacity, whereas here it's just not going to touch it's, not touching the shadow so I can bump it up to if I want and just clone over it and it fills in the shadows. So that is a major retouching tip that I think you can take to the bank saves you time and make sure we touch him or more effective so again, that's blend modes, which can be found up in the top left where it says mode this is blend mode for cloning. They're also blend modes for layers, which we will talk about later in our creative retouching section. So questions about that? Yes, when you do the clone stamp and m, it moves with the, you know, moves with it, is there a way to lock it down? Because sometimes like it's, too close to an edge and then it's like going off the face, that kind of thing, so kind of give you an example of what you might dio let's say that I wanted to clone and like what I would do would be to clone in a straight line and you create a path for the cloning and if you hold the shift key if you shift and then click a little clone in a straight line so let's see if I can kind of demo that on her but that's what I would do that prevents it from going into the end you can also make the edge of your clone of your actual brush harder s then it's not kind of peeking over but let's just I'm going to do something that looks totally wrong just to demonstrate the point um if I'm cloning and I want a clone from here to hear us too if they don't even notice it's pick another area let's click on her cheek okay something like that if you want to if I hold click and then hold shifts it will no not set it does work, I think it's just my computer so it'll create a straight line. If you hold the shift key, you click hold shifting the click again it does a straight line down and then I could do the same thing shift click and I'll do a straight line across click it and I'll just get a box um I do that a lot if I'm trying, okay? Let's say you have an individual there against the background and there's like something that was sticking out of their leg and I don't want to have to try carefully clone in a line, I'll hold the shift and click and it will drop like a straight line down the leg so I should try to match it so it looks more realistically could realistically smooth same thing that got an edge of his shirt, maybe there's a bump that you want to get rid of if you click and do the clone and then you shift, it will just kind of clone it out so that's where I use that tool all right, so let me jump into portrait journalist we do you have anything major over there? Have a question from winston salem, north carolina when editing pictures where the subjects have extremely dark circles air bags under their eyes, what would you recommend? I would do light and it's the same thing for bags for bags under the eyes of theirs. What you're trying to do is just fill in you don't necessarily want to eliminate it because it's a deep, sunken eyes it doesn't look right because it looks like you just got rid of everything under the eyes, so if you do light and you don't do it at one hundred percent you just kind of fill in the shadows a little bit it will look better. Another tool that I recommend is shadows highlights tool um, so if somebody is deep sunken eyes and there's kind of bags under the eyes shadow highlights pulls out some of that detail and so it just makes it a little less darker, but without getting rid of skin tone, it just makes the bag's lighter, so I don't have anything really good to demonstrate that with, but it also used shadows highlights for eyes as well to pull detail out of the ice, so we'll see if that works with any of your demo images that I had. So a quick question that day from jimmy justice in brooklyn, new york is there a similar cloning blending tool in light room? Yes, it's just there is a clone tool in light room, but you can't just the blend mode so that's, when people ask me how I treat light room is, I treat light room as a workflow management program, so I'm managing my files, I'm organizing them, I'm doing batch adjustments, I'm doing global adjustments so things like exposure and maybe feel like the things I would do in camera raw before I opened up in photo shop, so I do those things on dh then anything like cloning and retouching and liquefy and all those tools I do in photo shop um and I do sometimes use presets in light room but that after every touched so if you understand what that means he'll get it um one more or shall I move on to your good perfect all right, so I'm going to move on tio image gnomic portraiture again I'm not going over that completely hide retouch everything just tips and tricks and highlights uh so I don't like to say that everybody needs to buy new software but the one I like is portraiture and this is if you want to see how it's spelled it's this you mention ah mick portraiture because everyone never knows so its image gnomic portraiture um all right, so let me open it up. The problem that people have um is that they over retouch what they'll do is they'll say ok, the skin on her back or the skin on her neck it needs a lot of softening they pump up the softening so it it does it to the entire face the entire body and then it looks to porcelain. Um and so for example, if I not showing you how I do this yet but let me just show you if I was trying to get that back to look good down here and I applied to the entire picture, you see what it does to our faith um so what human shaman portraiture allows you to do is it allows you to select specific skin tones and then adjust how shar how smooth you want fine, medium or large detail so for example here you have fine so you can say how much you want to find to be affected let me kind of zero these out a little bit so you can see how much you want find to be affected medium and large for me fine details like skin texture and that's what makes it believable so usually I don't really smooth out fine unless somebody has, like, really flaky skin or really textured skin that needs help so I actually instead of tearing it out I'll actually go minus on the fine. I'll make sure that somebody is not smoothing out the detail because that's what makes it look realistic then you have medium medium is more it's kind of actually bigger textures large is going to be blotchy nous and skin on and then threshold means kind of how far over into other tones it reaches not as relevant um what I usually dio is I will start with something like this kind of low for the fine medium and large and the next question asks you for skin tones the next person is saying ok, what skin tones do you want a fact? What colors in the skin, what parts of the face so I'm gonna turn that on and grab the eyedropper tool and see how I'm bossing over it, showing me what I'm selecting, and so I can say specifically, do I want to just affect the cheek to smooth it out? Or maybe I want to come down here and slick these tones on the on the back, and I'll just like the back, and so is letting me do it, sending me target what I'm smoothing more important, more specifically, because, for example, my head foreheads really smooth. I don't want to smooth it like this get on the back. Um, so, let's, start here with let's do kind of we'll start with this get on the back first, okay? So I could look at it, and if I switch to me, show you the before after here, you kind of see how it evens it out a little bit. I can probably in this instance, might be one of the times rambo case moving out fine, because those little bumps, I mean, that is finding so I don't want so I can pump it up a little bit, and that makes you a pretty significant difference, and I would have to first come and get rid of all those big is big. Blemishes first in my spot healing rush but it makes a big difference and smoothing it out I could pump it up even further and so basically for this, you just kind of figure out what point it starts to look fake so they hit okay, uh you have an option to do something called create transparency mask so I am going to click this on and show you what it would d'oh okay, um, so if you take a look here and come down here see the foreign after and again I own this offers have no idea what's going on um see the before and after it smooth it out, but what it's doing is creating a mask and so it's on ly showing you the pixels that you've just affected. Well, the reason that's really good as I can see here, okay, I don't want to smooth out her eyes and her eyebrows because that is your pupils and it's going to be her eyebrows. I want that detail so I can go in and erase or mask out things that I didn't want touch. So I like that because it gives me a visual and to make sure that I'm not smoothing things that shouldn't be smooth like lips, but I do want to smooth kind of the shadows underneath the neck and I do want to smooth the back so okay um so the next thing I could dio as I can go in it's gonna flatten that down for you guys I can go in and I could do a totally separate layer where I go and do filter image gnomic portraiture and this time I can go in and smooth out just for the cheek so maybe I would grab the eyedropper smooth at her cheek and say okay that's too smooth and so I could back off of everything so I could back off a fine they come back off of me when I come back off a large and I can give you a before and after and so you're just making sure you don't go too far in this moving direction so this is how I'll do it retouch is I'll have an individual I'll get rid of their blemishes I'll fill in the shape of the shadows under the eyes and then I'll go through and I'll run portraiture five or six times and I'll do one and just say ok the back like a couple klicks I don't have to go through and just do it montell time she'll do one for the back I'll do in front of the neck I'll do it for the cheeks uh and then it keeps its way of skin tone where it should be but I can smooth out more if I need teo on rough areas of skin like on the back so to proceed, I'm going to grab another image and let's take a look. Um, let's, look at where is saved julie so in the meantime, as your opening that up several people including one shot, john hernandez and andrew nor it are wondering if you use split frequency method of skin retouching or does not take too much time, okay? So without going into what it is, I it does work well, but for me it does take too much time, and how usually treated is portraiture is gets me for far enough for retouching and good enough quality that when it's going to be for most people, the portrait size, they'd bluff it's completely, completely fine, and if it's going to be a commercial client, I would maybe outsource it if it's depending on the budget. So I don't usually because I don't have that much time just as a side note for everybody out there. I am a one person business at this point, so everything I do it's just me, my assistant, lila helps me out with emails, but she's more of a friend, assistant and she's my friend, and she helps me out on different things, but you know all these things you don't need to think you have to have a large staff to accomplish a lot of these things but I am looking to hire somebody, because, you know, the more you could kind of pass off things that someone else can do, that you can specialize. So that's. Why? A lot of things. I for me, I still retouch a lot of my own work, almost all of it, because it's kind of my my creative flair, that I'm adding to its my specialty retouch. But if I have a portrait that requires a basic retouch in that time, I could be better, you know, maybe trying to market to new clients or two network. So I'm trying to outsource things, because that's, what I tell people to do, focus on your specialty.