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Portrait Retouching Essentials with Lindsay Adler

Nobody taught me photo shop, and that is not like patting myself on the back like, ok, look at me, I'm so great, I taught myself something like that. I made a whole bunch of mistakes before I actually figured out what's, right? What kind of plug ins are best store? What kind of techniques make ur retouching not look super fake and all those types of things? So what I'm going to teach today is less what you would get in a college course as faras, abc and instead, okay, I've been doing this a while, I've made a lot of mistakes, this is what saves time, and this is what works for me, and so granted, there are endless resource is online, and then throughout this entire week, I promise you'll see people teaching in other ways. But this is what actually is in my work, so I'm a portrait fashion photographer, and so the retouching ideo the range is drastically, so sometimes I'm photographing, for example, professional athletes, sometimes professional athletes, for example, I'm doing portrait o...

f them might not necessarily have the best skin ok working out, what will I have to get rid of blemishes and perfect the skin? And then maybe there's somebody else who it's a celebrity portrait where, ok, maybe I need to do a little bit of liquefy, in other words, perfect them for a magazine cover, as you would see, ok, and then there's all the creative stuff. So if you look in magazines, I do crazy, funky, weird stuff changing colors, marrying images, adding lens flare like just a little bit of everything. So it will be everything from retouching pimples to making people skinnier. Tio saving time and using plug ins all the way to doing weird, funky stuff that whatever inspires you. But before I get started with anything, I have to cover a concept that there's two concepts for everything I do. You have to understand you have to understand adjustment layers and their masks you have to if if you don't watch this ten times because nothing else will make sense um, and then the other part that you need to understand that we'll learn is blend. Those are two things that I knew nothing about four years ago. I knew nothing about adjustment layer, layer, mask and one modes on, and this is why I think my photo shopping and retouching went from like I can kind of make someone look better too there's a method to the madness and I can really retouch effectively, so a lot of what portrait retouching comes down to or retouching in general is perfecting the skin and the controlling where people's eyes look, andi think that's one of the biggest things that people overlook they look at a portrait of somebody in a location and they just think okay, I clean up blemishes I'm done that's all that need to be fixed but actually the way that I make a lot of my photos better has zero to do with removing blemishes it's lightning and darkening different things in the frame I'm going to post on my blogged some images that I took for ads at w p p I their wedding ads and the models started off beautiful nice skin the reason that the pictures look so great is because I darkened down the background light end up the foreground increase contrast so you know where to look so the first tip that I will give you is when you look at a photo if it's not shot even in the studio if it's not a super close shot um figure out where your eyes going in the places that your eye goes to in a frame are the highest areas of contrast okay, so where is the most contrast and that can be may be contrast of two colors together or literally contrast like contrast in face. The next place that it goes is the lightest or brightest park of the frame so that usually ideally is somebody's face and then finally the other place that it looks is the brightest areas of contour of saturation whatever's most saturated so as you look at a photo if you're I'm doesn't really know where to go with those air a couple questions to ask yourself what can you do to make that better so something like in this photo my eyes going toward her jacket and it's kind of going back here and then it eventually it's your face is kind of bouncing all around so you can make the picture a lot better just by starting darkening and lightning certain parts of the picture so let's talk about adjustment layers and learn masks I'm going to come down and I'm going to call it this it's your adjustment larry but I call it has been one cookie because I like food and half moon cookies um so I'm gonna click on it and all of these air different options for adjustment layers and this is look is that if you don't use these you have to starting now um I'm going to start just to illustrate this point and I'm going to make this picture black and white just to illustrate a point so I'm dragging this out so you can actually kind of read beside here so when you use adjustment layers and layers masked anything that you click on out of the half moon cookie essentially what it's doing is it's creating what I almost think of it like a jell o and you put the gel on top of that bottom layer whatever layers and everything below that gel has that effect applied so it's it's that adjustment leyritz a lair oven effect so what I see is whatever words air here in this example it's black and white maybe it's curves maybe it's vibrance anything below it has the effect applied okay that's part of the equation but the next part is this and this is your mask and this is where what I used to dio and it screwed me up time and time again is that would duplicate the background and I would turn it black and white by d saturating it and then let's say that and I would I honestly I never do this but this is it's easy to see let's say that I wanted to make her jacket red again why would a race? And then I realized I'd screw up and I can't undo enough because you can't go back that much and so I keep glaring things so I duplicate later duplicate layer duplicate there and all of a sudden I have ten gigabyte file in reality was, you know, like a couple gigabyte file and I can't go back any steps will adjustment layers and their mass save you that so right now instead of having to a race anywhere you see this white the words next to it have been applied so the whole thing's white so you know that the whole thing's black and white if I come over here and I'm going to take a black brush so I grabbed my brush shortcut be make sure it's black down here and I'm going to change my brush eyes there are on ly ok, you should use a lot of short cuts, but they're only a few that I'm going to say like you really need to know one of them that sees me a huge amount of time is the bracket the bracket keys which are it's kind of above where your enter key is over to the side you're left bracket makes the brush smaller and you're right bracket makes your brush larger the reason that there's something important to know is it's really a pain? We have to come up here and you like a justice eyes and you come back over here okay that's the wrong size and you move the size over and that's okay, you know what I mean? So it's easier to use the brackets. Ok, so I've got the brackets and now anywhere that I paint black it's basically erasing that effect. And so you see a black appear, so I'm using this in the black and white it wouldn't actually ever do this with black and white, but to show you the concept of when you see white it's black conceals white reveals so the black is concealing the effect white is revealing the effect ok so what does that mean to you guys what that means is an example like this if I go ahead and I screw up and accidentally paint on the background and I go ahead and I retouch for like five hours I can always come back switch overto white and paint it back it's always something that I can go back and redo so it's non destructive but how we would use it for a photo like this I'm going to race them is I would go ahead and say well what can I do to really focus my eye on her so I think that I want to do a black and white photo to start off with and I want to make sure I addressed this just because it's it's pretty cool if you do black and like any other way than black and white conversion you're doing it wrong and I don't mean to be like you're doing wrong but you're doing around because this is the way that you're you get the most out of your black and whites if you look here see her on the left hand side it's black on the sliders and on the right hand side it's white that's what it's doing to each one of these colors so watch the red in her jacket if I drag it towards the black the red goes black, I dragged towards the white the red goes white so what that means is if you're looking maybe do landscape photography for example, if you have a blue sky and you wanted to be darker, you come down to your science and blues, drag it towards the blacks. No, what I dio for retouching in portrait ce if I want someone skin to be really high key and light or if somebody had blotchy skin, if somebody has red blotchy skin and you see it when you convert to black and white, if you drag reds and yellows to the right, it really lightens up someone skin. So basically what you think of is if the skin was blotchy red and you drive the red to the right, evens it out with the rest of the skin tone so you actually could save yourself time if you know you're going to end up in black and white you even to retouch out the blotchy nous because it actually fixes itself right when you're doing the black and white conversion okay, so I switched to black and white and I'm still looking ok, what can I do to bring more focus to her face? So the things that I said is your eye goes so light it's part of the frame so let's start by making her face lighter and have more contrast so when I grab my lasso tool and I'm going to select her face and I'm going to feather and so since is the start of photo shop week, we'll just assume that people haven't heard about feathering if you think about feathering, you're taking a selection and you're telling it ok, if I'm feathering twenty pixels, I go from full effect in that circle and then over twenty pixels outward, I go from full effect zero effect, so it gives me a grady in of that effect so it's not really sharp and that's what you usually want to further your selection, it's a good way to hide what you did, so people always ask, well, how do you know how much to feather? Guess basically because if the person's picture their faces, the whole frame, you're going to need to feather maybe one hundred pixels if their faces this big in the frame, you might only need to the feather fifteen pixels. So there isn't. If someone tells you an answer it's, they're making it up it's kind of disgust and I really lays you always see the same number like forty four pixels and eleven and eighty eight that's because I only want to hit the number one so that's it there's no reason it's just for that reason okay, so I selected her face when you come down to my half one cookie again and this time going to grab levels and I'm looking here and you can tell your white point on the right and you're black point if you look they're actually in the selection of her face there actually isn't a white and there actually isn't a black there's not true contrast there so all I can need to do is I can actually drag this to give myself contrast to the face I can lighten it up if I want tio and there isn't a science here there's sometimes it's there's more science by numbers maybe when you're doing color balance or when you're trying to get the correct skin tones or something like this it's aesthetic it's whatever is pleasing and this is a tangent but that's why? If things like this is important to have your monitor calibrated because for me I do go by I it's what looks good and so if your monitor isn't what the print's going to look like then it's no longer by I it's by whatever your computer decided looked right. So if I look real quick, your I definitely goes more to her face ok? But I'm still getting lost back here so I'm gonna go back down once again and instead of using levels, I'm just going to another tool I could select curves and curves gives you a little bit more control is you can actually grab point since I could pull down a certain area for example, the shadows drag that down a little darker and I could say certainly the highlights breaking that up this is a little bit you have control for that, but I want to do is they want to darken down the whole picture in general? Maybe too like there wasn't looking at the picture obviously there's areas that now they went too dark I lost detail is this side too? I don't always care if I lose detail and shadows or highlights if it looks cool, so it totally depends I understand how to keep the details I want it, but you don't have to so looking back here and it's too much and a lot of the pictures, so what I could go back and do is grab my brush, make sure it's a black brush click on my mask and instead of having it completely paint black, I'm gonna play something like halfway. So how you do that? I would change my past it's now it's been kind of a gray, which means it doesn't completely erase the effect, but it kind of does so if I grab my black brush and I think it got too dark up here and every time I click it cellaring so I'm painting see how it's black now it was great now it's black um I can pump it up a little bit got too dark down here and I'm just clicking so I can kind of paint that effect and you can do is many of these a cz you want it's basically adding a vignette but controlled vignette because if you go ahead and do this in in light room and you just drag the vignette tool you can control how circular it is or how popular it is and then how far in but you can't make it really followed the exact path you can in adjustment brushes something different but just to show you the difference of how the focus is on her now and so I can show you kind of charity and then just using those levels so just using the levels see how much you look at her face a lot more so my first tip to you although this isn't technically retouching is that you need to pay attention to these things and the reason I start off by doing my levels and curves adjustments first is because sometimes when you increase contrast or lighten things blemishes that you didn't see before show up I don't know if anyone's ever had that experience no you go through them here and oh you know I think it's a little too light by darken it down and all of a sudden there's terrible blemish is all over the face that I didn't notice that I have to go back and do it again, so you're better off getting all of the global adjustments the color balance and your levels and things like that get it done right off the bat. So this is the key here that I want you to know his adjustment layers and wear masks again you're white reveals the effect next to it if you paint black it's going to conceal that effect and they're right down here, so as long as every looks you guys roll nodding, so I'm just assuming that looks good. Okay, so let's get on to actual retouching here in this little girl, her name's, becca and she's. Awesome, she says she's a cute little girl even photographing us and she was born all right, so let's go on to a little more complicated of a retouching, I'll show you a couple examples, so let's, zoom in and I'm just going to give you an overview of some of the tools that you should be aware of and everything that I go over. I'm going to select another photo and show you how to do it again another way, okay, so we'll do this a couple times, all right, so looking at this individual, whenever I look at somebody to retouch right up front I kind of go for getting rid of the big blemishes first, and so I'll go through and I'll get rid of spots if it's going to be pimples or maybe it's scars or anything like that, and the next thing I go through and do is get rid of wrinkles or bags under the eyes, and then I go through and I waitin teeth and a clean abis and someone talked to a little bit about some of the things that I would do for skin I so let's go over tools first resume, and I would tell you the tools that are most commonly used and again I'm going to demonstrate them in other pictures as well. So if you come over here to the left hand side, the very first two on the top is the tool that is the most time saving that's built right into photo shop for getting rid of blemishes and it's the spot healing rush so all I need to dio is using my brackets I need to make that brush slightly bigger than the blemish that I want to remove. And so if I click, what I'm saying is ok, this is this doesn't belong here, I don't like it blended in with everything around it and so basically it's saying ok, so this is bad, everything else around it is good and it fills it in no what's better with kind of c s five six is this option has the content aware option. So if you guys have ever played with content aware content where phil continent, where move any of those different things, what it's doing is it's photoshopped is looking at the pixels around it is basically making an educated guess of what probably should go there. So that's, why the spot healing brush has gotten better since content where has been introduced? Because now it I can actually read skin texture and what she probably will be replaced with, so I can just click and this is great when you're looking at, I don't know high school, senior picture, tons of pimples, tons of blemishes, um, it's even kind of click around and get rid of a lot of things like that. So that is the spot healing brush, but sometimes a spot healing brush doesn't work particularly around edges or creases or skin with a lot of texture where, for example, maybe a guy with stubble on his face? What it does is it gets confused, it doesn't quite know and smears around the edges, so the next best option after that, right underneath, which is not the spot healing brush it's the healing brush, so the difference between the two is now we're going to talk about clone stamp in a minute but if you think a thought of clone stand before it's basically a cut and paste of pixels you say these pixels here I want them cut over here so what you're doing is you're sampling one area and you're pacing it well here this is a mixed kind of between clone and spot healing because what I can do is I can say by hitting her hitting the old key here alright some clicking I'm saying this is the area of skin right here that I want to select and this is what I wanted to replace so it gives you it gives you more control so if any time you're doing the spot healing it doesn't work, switch over to healing it just gives you more control because you can say ok, no it's elected the wrong skin and guessed incorrectly so I'm going to tell it where to actually come from I can click this tends to work really really well because clone is a cut and paste so it doesn't blend well with the edges you can either if you have a harsh engine clonal show you will see the edge if you have a soft edge starts to blur your pixels so this is the most control this is the best of both worlds, so again I could click around forever and you know click out blemishes and whatever I need sale but you guys get the idea so those air tools that I use I'm a skip over clone for second it's going to come back to that how you use it and show you another toe um the next tool is the pastoral ok, so it's this one right here actually looks like a patch and this is great for me particularly when someone has a really long basically along wrinkle across their forehead or neck wrinkles ok, this is what I use for neck wrinkles, forehead wrinkles things like that as a side note I always get rid of neck wrinkles and particularly in beauty and portrait shots because we went when we look at each other we don't notice neck wrinkles that's not what we perceive as ok, you have to have your neck wrinkles to know what you look like no, I mean no yes it's maybe send someone's face that that showing their age but you don't really need it on the neck for for most people so we touch it out and it makes somebody look younger thinner everything like that. So an example of what I might use the patch strong is what I can do is I can select an area that I don't like it can click and drag it to the area that I wanted to be replaced with and it blends the edges ok and so that's what I use a lot for for wrinkles and things like that it also works well with really large maybe it's a mole maybe the scars something like that things that are larger because you khun circle larger areas I also use the patch tool for moving wrinkles and clothing so if somebody has a dress and they have a large wrinkle all select that wrinkle and click and drag on it does it does well to blend it in so this girl had kind of extraordinary like red lines in her eyes and veins um and so the biggest thing you want to do is aa lot of people would go in and clone but what you start to do is you start to lose sexual shape and texture the I and all of a sudden it looks really creepy because it's flat so what you would want to do is try to get rid of as many of the veins as you can and then try to pull out a little red. So how you can do the red is just about the tools that were talking about before I could go ahead and select the area that's a little bit to read for me who put that again I'm just using the lasso tool to select rough selection I mean a feather it and this is pretty if you go back it's pretty small in the frame so I can do like ten pixels less select, modify, feather and I can do like maybe eleven member one one lazy I can zoom in and now I'm going to come down to my half moon cookie and go to hugh saturation, so I go to human saturation if I go ahead and d saturate just in general, the picture starts to look a little gray um, and it doesn't look as realistic, so what I usually will d'oh is that a pump to here? Where says master, when you click on this, it drops down and it gives you specific colors, so reds and yellows and greens and whatever it may be so I can go in and say, look at somebody's eye and just pull out the reds or if you're looking, I have no idea why there are blues and r I somebody's out there's got to know why? I don't know why it's, not from contacts so I could go ahead into blue in sayin and pull out those colors. This is exactly what you do when somebody has yellow teas, you select their teeth, you do adjustment layers, hugh saturation you go two yellows and you pull out the yellows and so it's the same thing, so I'm gonna do that to dad in a bit okay, so I came back off the reds a little bit and see how it doesn't look great if I do just a little bit but it really pulled back on some of that and I could go ahead and see maybe it's saying in those eyes there yet it's a little bit of science that kind of pull it back and it's not completely getting rid of the color but it's improving it saying now just so you guys know a quick tip I use this non stop if you hold the altar option key and you click on your bottom layer it turns up all the eyeballs for everything above it so you can see your before and after all right so that's so far but let's go to the tool that I use most often all right, so close, sam most people use clone stamp very, very wrong and that's what gives it a bad rap? What people tend to do and I'm just going to show you a bad kloten stand okay, people come to the clone stamp like I said, I mean set it back two it's not supposed to be ok by default it's on normal cutting pace basically so different options you have, you can just the size and then you have your hardness, which is basically the feathering on the end of the brush meaning how soft or how crisp is that edge? So people usually do is they took a really soft brush, and then you have your pass. So how see through is that cut and paste? And so people do like a low capacity because they're thinking, ok, I don't want to make it too obvious, and so they will go ahead and the clothing to the eyes and like, ok, I want to get rid of everything and they'll keep doing this, and I keep doing this, and then all of a sudden is they do it there's, no more skin texture and so that's you know what, you guys probably come to notice as a bad clone, and I overdid obviously so you can see, but I see that the two main things that people do that make a retouch bad is they clone too much or they use a plug in way too much on dso that's when our plug in section will talk about how you can easily go too far. All right, so that's not what you want to do. All right, so here is our first introduction to blend bodes blend mode change how the pixels on the layer on interact with a layer below it, and so blend moans that will talk about for creative effects later are right here and do all these different options and I'm going to show you how you can in the next section how you can add makeup in photo shop using blend modes how you can car about someone to cheek bones in their jolla really defined them using blood moz all of that is right here it's really cool but you also have the ability to change your blindfolds in all of those tools that I just talked about and something I want you guys all go try if you're used to using spot healing brush o r healing brush but you've never tried it with a different blend mode go back and try blend so I'll show you if you're on clones damn if you come up here the two things that I use most often are lighten and darken if you switch your clone stamp to lighten what it's going to dio is it on ly fills in the dark areas of pixels so now if you look see highest like those little little textures on any thrive that make it look like under eye hector like the texture on your cheek is not the same texture is underneath your eyes and that's another thing people do feel this completely clone and then it's like the cheek that extended to the end and that's not what it looks like it doesn't look realistic again unless you're photographing my fifteen year old models that this it's crazy I think people don't really look like that um well they do, but they're fifteen and they have makeup on I don't know exactly about the fifteen like its regular for cosmetic ads, so if you watch instead of completely getting rid of the texture if I switched to lighten I could grab a higher opacity even and I'm still going to select I'm holding the other option key so going to select theory of skin when I feel this in see how it doesn't cover up those dots you see those you can still see that texture it just kind of filled in some of the dark area okay? So that works well for filling and under the eyes would it really works well for is also is wrinkles smile lines for headlines and kind of darker blotchy areas of the skin all the time it's somebody for some reason you look you look at an individual they just have this blockchain is here but if you go ahead and clone it all out, then it's not the right skin tone for what else you're going to do to remove blotchy nous other than cloning well that's when you would switch it to light and and it just lightens up those dark areas maybe it's a birthmark or maybe it's just bad skin at that time so five german and I use my clones stamp again online and watch how it fills in the shadow but it doesn't affect the area around it because I didn't want it to clone the area around I just wanted to fill in um the smile lines the same thing here and it's just filling them in but not touching the fixes I don't want it to touch so it's the same thing if I back out and I'm looking here and I think this area's it's a little dark they didn't want it to be I could make my brush larger maybe back off the capacity a little bit and I could just kind of fill in a tiny bit going to a little bit more thing distracts me that said it so you can kind of like fill in watching this okay, so you can do that but we talked about lighten and fill in shadows around the smile lines underneath the eyes forehead but you can also switch it to darken so that it on ly darkens lighter pixels. So right now when we searched the light and it only lightens darker pixels, you can switch it up. So this is what you do when you have that person who had a really greasy forehead and they have a really bright shine on their forehead or really shiny nose something like that you come up here in your blood mode and you switch it to darken so I can come in and maybe see how it looks there, you know I could darken down this highlight or maybe I could darken down the highly on her nose could do the same thing make my brush a little smaller and now would only do is on ly kind of darken those highlight pixels and so now it just you could leave the highlight there because it would be a highlight on her nose but you don't want that much and I could fill in kind of entirely on the side of her nose but for me I'm particularly looking for it's that kind of greasy foreheads, shiny noses, things like that blown out highlights maybe you over exposed a little bit and the top of the cheeks are a little bit blown out and you can't get that detail back okay? We can switch to darken clone from beside the cheek and it fills it in and it looks realistic and it matches so that's one of the ways I use light in our darken so those air blend moans but keep in mind all of these tools like if you look at healing rush slow healing brush has lightened in darkened all right, so if you're trying to think in your head okay, why why would I maybe use light in or darken to get rid of something? Well, let's say that somebody has blond hair against a black background and it's crazy and there's all the you know if the hair sticking out well, you can go ahead and take spot healing brush and if you make it darken and you trace over those lines it's not going to do spot healing or healing or make any changes to the background because that's dark it'll only just get rid of those hairs the same thing someone dark hair on a light background switch it to lightnin it's not going to try to change the background at all it'll on ly get rid of the hair that's kind of a quick way that I try to clean up here there isn't any miraculous easy way to clean a pair but that's that's one of the short cuts a perfect example of where you want to use your blood moans of these wrinkles in her neck right here ok if you look at the wrinkles on her neck here this is when is the time when patch tool doesn't work patch tool, spot healing all of those because this is an area of high contrast in texture you if you've done is a lot you know you look out there and you're like, oh crap because you know that these tools are going to work so if I come in for example I can kind of like finals is going to be a wallet I can travel probably fake it enough it's crab patch and I could like but if you zoom in when you see can you see that mistakes that it made? This is a little sign, no book, something I want youto I'll take away is that I don't retouch every photo the same not by far it depends on where it's going because I don't have time if I know that the biggest this photo is going to be is an eight by ten and it's a high school senior portrait it's only communicate by ten I'll use plug ins I can use shortcuts doesn't mean I don't do a good job, but I know what errors or what's kind of skin texture I would require a tw those print sizes if I know, for example, of deputy on one of the pictures that I have is going to be eight feet on the long side. I had to do the whole thinking thing by hand because it had to be perfect and everyone would be able to call me out and trust me, people d'oh! Okay, they totally call you out. It seems there's a tiny little air s o I keep that in mind because as a working professional, if I can use a plug and I would use a plug in if it saves me time and it looks good and if there's a short cut it's o it's okay, don't feel bad, you know, it doesn't make me any better that let go on this picture, it took me two hours and did it by hand. You know, if I'm only making so much off of that photo, it's not worth my time to do some ok, how I would probably use just a little bit if I use my clone stamp online in and I just feel it in a bit, you know, it kind of just fill it and more realistically, same thing for here, I can kind of just fill in those areas, and I mean, you could give it a try and kind of figure out what looks realistic, but it feels it and you don't get kind of the the alias thing that we're getting around the edges and duplicate the background and to save me time, I use the plug in portraiture, that's kind of my times even plug in. So what this plug in does fundamentally, is it smoothes out skin, and we're always told not to smooth out skin, but what's good is it allows you to have a balance between smoothing out skin and eliminating details, so basically, the only thing I could do is to show you how it works. Um if you're a beauty re toucher and you want to keep all the detail and you want every poor he wanted to be perfect and you're gonna have huge photos watch the next section ok this is kind of a shortcut section so and implicate the background again I'm gonna go to filter in economic and portraiture so I will tell you what people do wrong right off the bat so you can write down do not do this okay the first thing that people do as they think oh, this is lovely let's turn up all the sliders and smooth everything out okay um up here in the in the top left this area is called details moving what it's saying is ok you have these different areas of detail in a photo you have for example fine detail which is going to be like pores and hairs like the little things that make your skin look real but you know it's what maintains detail in the skin ok the next thing you have I was going to be medium kind of like blemishes that you might have andan largest kind of blotchy nous of skin threshold is basically how far into those other details isn't reached so how far you stretch from fine into medium and so on and so forth it's just kind of ah blending option if you will so if you're looking here I used to say to myself ok well I want to keep most of my findings because that's what makes it look real there's some people that will have like dry flaky skin where that instance you might want to get rid of some of that fine detail because I don't want the flakiness but for here okay you want to back off of that and what I usually do is I start with everything down really really low and then I slowly kind of creep up and watch it but what I usually d'oh is I will get the slider set I will hit ok I'll walk into another room do something and come back and take a look and see if I think it looks too retouched because sometimes you can go too far with like who were skin so perfect and then it's no it's too perfect it's a little bit over the top so I'm going to keep working here but the next thing you could dio is you can grab these eye droppers and the on droppers that will allow you to select the specific skin tone so if you look on the right hand side you can actually see exactly the skin tones that my portraiture effect would be affecting so I could select her cheekbones or the top of her face I can get really specific so let's go back to the mistakes people make mistake number one is down here where it says enhancements people think skin softening soften let's drag the something you never leave that where it is I'm zero you never wanted drugs often because you're blurring your pixels and it's what gives you that kind of anybody? Remember what was a glamour shots? Ok, ok. Let us kind of let's do today let's just say that I absolutely and my mother's basement she absolutely has a very large photo of me, my sister and her at glamour shots when we were, like early teens and we have giant ruffles, giant colorful ruffles on our shoulders. Okay, um, so yes, but it's kind of like the glamour shot effective here when you when you go ahead and softness it's really this blurring your pixels so you don't really want to mess with that. The next thing people do if they think that portraiture is kind of the one stop shop, you click it once and you're done the reason that people fall into a trap, there is the look and they'll say, all right, well, this lower part of her back down here, it definitely needs of help, so they'll pump up all the sliders. But when you do so, it over softens the face, so how I use it is I know that the softening that I need on the forehead is different than what I need on the cheeks is different than what I need on someone's back it's it's different in different parts of the body, especially depending on the individual so what I'll do for portraiture is I'll run it three times and on ly have it apply, so I'll have it apply one area to the shoulder one area to the top of the cheeks one area to the bottom of the cheek it's only like clicking a couple more times, but it still saving me and able to maintain detail so I would do one for example let's go up to her face and that for me is way overdone, okay? I know that's overdone, so I'm going to do is I'm going to select this area for skin and I'm going to back off to where it looks better to me and really what I wanted I mean, just so you know, if you click on one of these and neither selected that's, what gives your hand to do before and after so like ok, so maybe that's a little bit smoother and one of the options I'm going to click for you guys to see is if you hit on the right hand side create transparency mask what it's going to dio is it's only going to take those pixels that you changed and put them into a new layer you will actually see the whole picture so is easier for me to sit, okay and show you so I turn off the bottom layers. It shows me what pixels were affected with the reason that's useful is I can go in and say, well, I know that I didn't intend to soften her eyelashes or her eyebrows so it could mask that out where he could erase it. You know, either way, and I know that I didn't want to soften her lips either, so I could get rid of the effect there, and I can turn on the bottom layers and what's good is because this is the lair I can always mask or race, whatever, you know, whatever if you're trying to do not destructive mask like I was kind of back off if I thought that it went a little bit too far. So all right, someone emerge down and I want to do this duplicate again. I would do this one more time, but to show you how to do it for the back. So I do filter image, gnomic portraiture and now I'm gonna pump it way, way up when a zoom into her back, grab my eye dropper, select the skin on her back pump of this detail smoothing, and you can see kind of a foreign after it makes a big difference because without a plug in, I'm not really sure what you do there to get rid of that roughness because what do you mean, what do you do? You have to go in and clone each one of those we're spot he'll every looks like goose bumps basically and then if you go ahead and cloning search, lose details, so this is kind of the best way that you could maintain detail, smooth it out a little bit without having to go in and spend hours so I had okay here do the same thing, I can turn off my bottom layers, see what it affected, and I know okay definitely didn't want up here didn't want the lips or the nose and I can turn it back on, so if you look, I was able to do a retouch basically for her face, a separate one for her back and then I still need to go in and clean up, so this isn't like a start to finish complete image just kind of showing you some of the techniques. So that being said, since we've talked about how I dooz portraiture, spot hailing and healing using blood modes, clone stance using blend modes um pew saturation, all those things I'm gonna go over and show you a couple different examples of how I would use all these tools I think what I'm going to do is we do might my dad's photo first, and then we're going to pop over and work on a high school senior photo, all right, so good old dad, okay, so sure then, but as the president of his rotary club, so this was his rotary picture that I took for him. Um, issue everything that I do raw it's, always a raw style, and I make my global changes in light room or adobe camera raw. The reason this is really good for me as well is let's say that I have a bride in a white dress, and I blew out some of the highlights or there's some detail in the background that I wanted, but I couldn't get that detail and her dress in the past, you have to introduce flashes or maybe it's going ahead and trying to fix it in printing, but shooting raw, I can open the image twice. I can open the image once where her dresses correctly exposed, and then an image where the backgrounds correctly exposed and use masking the combined them together. So that's why, I mean, have reported that I do it's raw sorrow for the rock inverter it's going to open up dad here and I want to zoom in so the first thing that we talked about wass when we first talked about was removing color in the eyes so same thing applies for whitening teeth so I can grab a lasso tool select modify feather to twenty two this time adjustment layers he saturation yellows de saturate especially the before and after and pretty simple if ever you have one of these adjustment layers and you're like wow one at a little bit more yellow back into look realistic if you click on the box to the left of the mask it will open up those options again so you could always get back to them so I can go ahead go back over to the yellows channel and bring back a little bit okay, so did that so far I can move around and notice again I'm going to duplicate my background I could go back to close stamp unlike hidden and if I wanted I could fill in just a little bit under the eyes now I want this is a portrait, so I want this to still look like him so I don't want to get rid of all the blemishes I just want to phil in just a bit a little bit light and things a tiny bit all right, so the next thing that I want to do it I will use this tool repeatedly I love to bring out detail in the eyes and I'll push this even further when I have a beauty subject sorry that it's not not beauty subject. So I'm going to grab my last ritual and I'm just going to select his eyes loosely. It doesn't need to be exact and I wouldn't remember this shortcut super super useless is another one that used repeatedly command j command jay copies and paste your selection into a new layer so if you look now, I just have his eyes and a new layer so I'm looking to do here is brighten up his eyes a little bit, bring back a little bit more detail. Uh looks looks crazy. So this is why I do this sedan versus someone else writes if I go to image adjustments and I'm just selected on that island right now, image adjustments, shadows, highlights if you look this shadows option is I can start to bring back this is this is before and this is after so I can start to bring out some detail in the iris and in the eye. And so this is I mean, the eyes of the window to the soul, right? And so this is what really people connect with people smiles that so I want the teeth white people's eyes because that's where the emotion is, so if I had okay here, obviously didn't father this selection so you can race you can mask and I can kind of just going to raise here a little bit lower rapacity and this is what works also, you know, sometimes people may be in a picture you had. It was an overcast day and there was just a little bit of raccoon eyes. Not maybe not too much. If it's really recognize you're not saving the picture, you know, you had to feel it first, but let's say you did have a reflector, it was just a little bit overcast is a little bit of recognized what you could do the same thing you still actually eyes image if you go to image adjustments, shadows highlights by doing shadows, you fill in the eyes a little bit, okay, so it's not so dark so I can over here let's clean up these edges as well. And so if I look when we zoom back and show you, you know, it lightens up the eyes, but in a natural way you wouldn't have noticed before, um there's, another tool that I use for beauty. Um, you guys know, over here we've seen the blur tool before, um, the blur tool in general, you're not really supposed to use it it's not really a good tool it's it's smudging things it's un degrading pixels but I mean, people have used it for retouching I think it's not doesn't really give you a lot of control, but there is a tool that's good and this is for cs six users it's better quality and actually has a point six it's a sharpened tool so it's the opposite of the blur tool to sharpen tool here and it's the thing that looks like a triangle looks like a point. So the sharpened tool as you pain it allows you to sharpen an image but basically it looks like it's pulling out detail and so what I'll do is an image especially what's close up where you really see the eyes if you paint just a little bit of the sharpened on the iris, it pulls out a ton of detail. So what is human? And I wanted to put this strength to maybe thirty percent because each time you go over it it'll pileup that effect. So if I go ahead and I just hit, we'll show you I'm going to duplicate this you can see before and after real quick any if I paint over his eyes a little bit cat syriza fire you see how much detail I can pull out of there now we want to be careful is the more you do it, you actually get artifact ing just like if you were doing a sharpened like smart, sharpened or on sharp mask eventually if you sharpen too much you see artifact ing but here I tend to just get this really beautiful detail in the eyes in the sharpness so it looks better surprising beckon I'm just gonna leave this and to show you the before and after there's a lot more life in the eyes there um the eyes is probably one of those areas that it's not essential that you re touched because like you look at it and say the eyes of bad or, you know, there's blemishes or anything like that, but I think it tends to make up for a better portrait. Ok, so here's the next thing all right? So one of the biggest complaints that I get from people is that they have a double chin or they looked too fat or whatever it may be I get that all the time. So first we'll just it's nice if you can fix it in your photography if you have your subject, if you shoot slightly higher angle even you have your subject lean forward and seek their turnout and look up at you it kind of stretches out let's get underneath the neck so that's one way to improve it if for for example, in this picture I didn't do that, I need a little bit more health you can change it you can't fix it so one of the tools will be talking about in a minute is the liquefy tool and I use that tool all the time it's really really useful but oh I don't want to do that here this is this is one of the tools that I found makes it easier all right so what I want to d'oh it's for that double chin that I want to fix um I am going to use the last ritual and I'm going to loosely select the double chin area loosely something like that and that tool that I told you before the shortcut command j so when a coffee and pace it into a new layer okay so little warning they probably wanna write this down if you don't know it the next thing you want to do is hit command t and what that does is they activate to transform controls which is where you're going to find this next tool which is the work tool so if you right click on your selection you have here and go toe warp what it allow me to d'oh it's kind of pull up and warp and make the job was a little bit less defined ok so there's a couple things you should keep in mind when you're doing doing this here as you notice it's not all lined up now now it's sze looking kind of funky where you're going to fix that the next thing is, if you see in this top left and that left hand corner where you have work, um, see, all right now, it's elected on a center dot does your anchor points? So you kind of anchoring what you don't want to change or what you'd like to keep relatively the same. So let's say there was something that needed to line up with you could anchor in that top left point if they were trying to get the neckline, tow line ups something to that effect, so we did ok? And what I suggest you do your generally better off going more subtle, and then if you need to do it again to keep going because it's a little harder to line up, especially I think this is a difficult example when you have a shirt line trying to get that to be a realist sick, so we did ok and supplied it, and so what I need to dio is they need to mask out where its overall afterwards made a mistake so fine. Go ahead here, I'm going to come down and add a mask, and we've talked about masking for adjustment layers so things like levels and things like you saturation, but you can apply masks your ability to mass things out. Also two pixels or changes that you've made and so what I can do is a complete black to erase something, but if I mess up in the future, I can always go back and fix it so if you look right here next to half moon cookie to the left there's a mass going to click on it and it adds a mask to the pixels I just changed, so what I can do is I can go in and wherever I paint black on that mask when a pain I need to pay one hundred percent here because otherwise I'll have, like, blurry pixels I'm racing half of it, but if you notice you know, I can start to erase that effect. Um, so I'm looking for a couple things thie easiest way from me to be on the line this up is if I'm back off the capacity, I can see the chin underneath a little bit, so if you see kind of where it was before, for example, so I can go back in, but that and kind of painting blend and I can kind of see where his chin wass flynn these back and then I can turn the opacity all the way back up and see if it's looking realistic and what I need to dio so I'm looking over here and I'm seeing, you know, okay this area needs to be a little more crisp, and I can kind of paint things in and kind of blend. Maybe over here I obviously have to find a way to make that edge look sharper sometimes that's going to be cloning. And so I like, I definitely pick an example that this is a real life example that I run into all the time where you finish what you make it, make it work. So I piccolo capacity. I start to blend in the edge of the shirt, and I'm just seeing lots of clicking and trying to blend and see how I could see what the job was. Well, I got to go back and paying it back in, and I'm just kind of blending and trying to make it look realistic. So is usually a combination of masking and cloning to make things blend a blessing. I want to show you right now. I reactivated the work so I can line something's up. Okay, so if you go back to work and that was a pain the lineup, I put it back on and I can start lining things up again. And it's just kind of cloning of lending, so for time's sake I would work on that and that's about it but it's still realistic I basically just have to make it so it doesn't look double it could just blend that in okay so that's if you look you can fix that light in his eyes I move it in just a little bit smoother to about here share real quick ok so let's move on to a different photograph I'm going to make sure I want to make sure I cover liquefy and a couple other a little beautiful changes so I'm going to talk a little fast because I know everyone else can probably re watch you guys can ask me questions if you have them one thing talking about your blend modes um that's really useful for me okay, so this is a crazy fashion photo that I did um there was a cover of of a magazine when hit okay um all right so I had a hair stylist that didn't bring enough hair to do what I wanted so if you look here I can see the fake hair through casey that there's like filler hair sometimes you went into something where somebody has but they pulled her hair back tight it's kind of pc if you can see their scalp or maybe somebody they just don't have much full hair so what I'll uses I will use my clone stamp with different blend modes so if I come in here if you watch if I grabbed my clones dam on lighten and I come in and I grab, I can kind of fill in that hair and so this is what I do on so many of my photographs is I end up cloning hair so that it gives you that nice kind of smooth flow I feel when I'm looking to do is I try to clone like highlights down so there's a continuous smooth highlights that looked like that really full luscious hair on and that's what they do in aa most hair and they're absolutely retouched and so what they'll do is they'll do something like this and you get a cease the highlight continuing through and so some of these areas it's a mix of okay that was on lytton maybe I need to switch back to dark and to kind of fill in through here and fill in through here you're seeing kind of filling in the hair same thing here I could grab regular clone or conduct grab darken try toe fill in fill in here let's grab and I'll show you in a second how to fix mistakes it's crab here for lytton I was trying to fill in all those hair areas because you're working on a new layer any place that you make mistakes you can always add your mask, grab your black brush and go back in and see how it overlaps here it's not really a big deal because I can just mask it off so if ever you have somebody who has a messy or pc hair it's pretty easy to do but you have to use your clone stamp unlike in her darken so just remember if it needs to fill in shadows put it on lighten if it needs to darken down a highlight put it on darken okay, so I spent a long time fixing this hair this girl was um the hair is a mess let's just say didn't he zahir status and not so you mean to say it didn't work out um ok couple other retouching tips this is not my photograph this was an image contributed by one of the attendees to my last retouching class and a couple things of how to fix this we have a couple of issues going on here. One of things that I wanted to tell you that's new to see s six is the crop tool is much more like like rooms if you guys are familiar with light room if you crop something it's not really cropped you can always go back and get those pixels banks but in photo shop when you crop something it's gone okay not true anymore. Now with your crop tool you have an option and cia six in the top right where it says delete cropped pixels so you have the ability to turn that off and now we could always go back whenever you go back and true crop mode it's still there so what I want to do first of all, I want to straighten out that horizon line and I want a crop in and I'm just going to make this a somewhat tighter picture I was gonna drop into there for now and anything you want if you have your aspect ratios you put it here just like normal it's all the same. But what I want to show you how to dio is how to get rid of this uh this happens to me or happened to me all the time because I had a small studio space. So if you want to use a really large light source a large soft box or knocked a box and the person standing up or there's a group of people all of a sudden in the corner you have this box there on do you have to clone it out so you can clean it out? You could go ahead and hit the clone stamp and tryto duplicate this you grab the clone stamp on normal one hundred percent and tryto clone things it looks ok, but you can tell it's not lined up. This is would particularly be a problem if you had a clear pattern like stripes or some kind of repeated tile on your background if you try, let me just go back a couple sets if you went ahead and attempted to do this with patch tool are you know it doesn't I mean I can show you but it doesn't work you get kind of blending, we work a little bit but ok, so that's what I kind of would happen it's it's saying ok, well this is such a large area of black did you really wantto you know, get rid the whole side and it's on an edge the edge of your frames it doesn't know what to blend with the edge because it's at the edge so that's not what you want so the tool that you want to know is going to be the content aware moved toe on there few other times where I use this, I'll use this if maybe there's a garbage can in the background and it's against offense a chain link fence so you see that repeated and when you try to clone it it's a pain in the butt but the continent where move it guesses and it allows you to say ok, this area of fence put it over top of this trash can and blend it okay for us in the studio here we want to do is I'm going to select this area or it could suck the area below and I can click on it and it's here so we went over all the other tools spot healing healing brush pactual here's your content where move and so you wanted to be on move and you're going to click and you're going to drag it will do its thing and I might try and selecting from below because it's probably more accurate below because it is kind of continuing so let's see what it comes up with going from the side so you see ok there's an air their sledge try from underneath and see if this works any better and what also is useful is staying right on the edge of just letting you know things to watch for when you can see that edge it kind of confuses it so this is where I would do something where I might extend that over you can clone it over I could for example grab here go to my content aware in this time maybe say instead of move extended so you can actually click and drag it thinks and extends out the edge ocean it blends it in okay so that looks good so I can select underneath now select here school backs a content aware lou and I think it's a little more intensive all right, so what it's actually doing exactly trying to move the whole thing's obviously switching back to extend it should be fine see this all right so let's let it think and I'm pretty sure ok, so if you look at it if you knew you probably know but it's all about being close enough so it's your continent where extend tool right there just make sure you don't have anything on the edges that will distract it okay let's dio liquefy and then I'm gonna come back and show you um one more for harsh skin okay, so I think the girl I was use this girl's an example because she doesn't really need liquefy um and liquefy is your way that you change pixels you change the shape of an individual so for me every time I've ever done a wedding they all wear tube tops that are too tight and there's over boob like it spills over this is a tool that you need for that or high school senior girls that were their pants way too tight and they're standing outside and hands like little muffin tops that you need to fix so this is a tool for that and it allows you to shift and move pixels so the reason I selected this girl is I'm going to show you is well in addition just to portrait retouching what I'm thinking when I'm doing beauty photography so a couple of things that I'm thinking right off the bat um ok so I told you over move um muffin tops okay fix all that stuff but other things that aren't is obvious I always lower people's shoulders in every portrait I ever do. I lower people's shoulders because people hold tension in their shoulders when you elongate someone's neck, it makes him look more relaxed, and then also it makes him look skinnier longer next, make people looks more slender, so it lower people's next. This is also where if somebody had, as we like to say, a five head instead of a forehead, you can make their forehead a little bit smaller also wrinkles in the clothing that stick out that maybe it wasn't actually muffin. Top of the shirt wrinkled on the side. You need to pull that back, and these are all the things I'm thinking of for liquefy. Look, if I is, you know, essential tool for me, not just because I'm not trying to make everyone skinny and has nothing to do with that it's just smoothing out lines, getting rid of anything that's distracting to me so it's under filter, liquefy and the tool that you are most concerned about is in the top left, and that is the ford work tool, and what it allows you to do is it allows you to push and drag pixels now thiss tool has been the same for a long time, the capabilities, but the biggest difference. Is cia six instead of allowing a nine hundred thousand pixels allows fifteen thousand so if you're working with really really large files it's going to give you a bigger brush to work with so it is a lot better on that and that's why if anything the reason I updated to see a six was that was that one one reason something to show you how it works if I come in here and as I said she doesn't really need any body reshaping one of the things I look at is lowering shoulders so if I go ahead and grab the ford work tool doesn't that top left is called and re size and I want to click and I'm going to drag it's going to lower her shoulder and her clavicles a little bit to see how it just elongated her neck makes you look skinnier and more relaxed so what you want to consider when you're using the ford work tool is tips for you to make it look most believable is you want to use is big of brush is possible without affecting areas that you don't want it touch so for example right there if I use the really big brush it's going toe change her entire face we don't want that but if I say I'm trying to I don't know move through that our armor maybe without her leg maybe make her thigh smaller if I use a really small brush you start to see like wrinkles, you have to keep going back and making it smooth and then you're twenty steps ahead and it's all wavy I notice this particularly when I'm working on people's arms is all of a sudden it's not smooth like an arm supposed to be anymore so that's, what you want is the bigger brush the bigger brush that you can use, the better okay, other tips I tend to find if even of environment like this a background where it's solid black or solid white when you're moving and using forward work told you're actually distorting picture pixels you're stretching them you're changing their shape, you're ruining them basically, um so if you're doing something like this, if you can instead of clicking on the inside and pulling which changes the shape stretches them out if I can grab from outside of her arm and pull in, I'm squishing those outside pixels and it's less noticeable, so if you can kind of grabbed from pixels that it doesn't matter if they're stretched or changed, it makes for a more really realistic retouch ok, a couple other tips so you want a big brush if you can select from areas where you wouldn't notice moved pixels that's great and then you also don't want to move pixel over a really long distance, so if I were trying to move many, many pixels you see it work and you can see it right there obviously you want to do this? I'm showing you the pixels okay for something like this, what I recommend you do is instead of grabbing once and clicking and dragging do smaller movements but keep selecting from different areas because then you're affecting different pixels so far trying to move her arm a little from here I'm grabbing from below and grabbing from here so don't just do one long movement and said you know, keep moving from different areas of select ction um okay so moving quickly a couple other things it's inexpensive boob jobs can the same um I would lower her chest a little bit I also will use this to lengthen hair we perceive people with longer fuller hair is being more attractive you don't want to overdo it um I also will lower hairlines she doesn't need it but when I need to reshape someone's face if I'm doing a beauty shot I want if they want higher cheekbones what you do is you plan here if you guys can see this my cheekbones air here my jaw lines here if I pull in a little bit in between it makes it look like my cheekbones were higher so are pulling in just a little bit there and you'll be able to see this in another shot um okay and I want to talk about we're going to go back over look, if I in the next section is, well, something a little bit different something to go back it okay? And so you can see um little changes you know, but it gives you a lot of tools we're going to talk about what you do if you have a background when you liquefy that it's noticeable so that's going to be in the next retouching section so what I want to finish up with is super fast going over those basic retouching techniques with a high school senior. I know that in a high school senior portrait if the person's only getting say an eight by ten, I'm going to use a plug in it's going to save me time one is human and some of the tools that I know I would use something like this if I use spot healing, I know it doesn't work because it's looking at the blemishes next to it and it's going to think that's what it should be replaced. So this is an instance I'm showing you all I think of the tools this is an instance where I know I might need to use the patch tool because aiken select and drag and dry it to the area of skin that it needs to be replaced with, but I know that spot healing wouldn't have worked as well and so I would use a patch to a lot more in the sense since then, a lot of clicking and dragging. Now you'll see here if when I'm doing it by hand, it is kind of a pain, and so you'll see when we take a look at retouching plug ins, how it'll save you time okay, so I can click and drag it's fine, same thing over here, but also for this area for these blemishes, I could also go ahead and grab my clone stamp on light in coming here, mitt opacity and maybe there's a portrait where you don't want to completely remove the blemishes. Maybe you're just trying to make them less noticeable. So if I use lytton just kind of fills them in a bit, same thing with the scars over here doesn't remove them, it just fills them in a bit, so I'm able to click around you can see I'm filling them in same thing underneath the eyes, filling in bags under the eyes, but not eliminating I'd late enough, and so you can see, ok, you can see how far we can get there's a couple other things where I can actually go ahead on, and this is in the three day class that I talk. It goes a little bit further for that blemishes in the skin. You can actually load a red channel and then change the color balance so it's no longer read, you can add a little bit more yellow or green or whatever you need to match it. So keep this one in minds a cz we go on to the later sections so you can get an idea of what retouching plugin does for timesaving. So is that a good stopping point? That's, a great stopping in the studio audience have questions, not a single question grabbing my I don't be bashful, done. Can you explain? You said to use both light room and photoshopped, you explained where it looks from just what you've spoken about is that you do the fine kind of fine tuning and photoshopped. What are you doing in light room? So when I open up an image in that room, um, what I'm doing is exposure. Um a little bit of clarity, I don't want to go too far, because maybe if I were going sharpen, we'll see that later with retouching plug in, so I do white balance, absolutely exposure and contrast. Um, what I keep in mind as well is, for contrast, if I go too far and don't open as a smart object the whole thing you guys learn it this week. If you're watching the whole photo shop, we can't go back, so I tend to open things up a little bit flatter, then what I would actually want to because I could always go ahead and photo shop and do my little adjustments to add contrast to the face that contrasts here back it off in certain areas if and contrast and maybe the whole maybe the dress went a little bit overexposed. I opened it up. Well, if I do a ton of retouching, I can't go back. Okay? Smart objects, different stories. So white balance exposure. Um, a little bit of clarity. And then I have other stuff I do. I use presets. I also use a lot of plug ins, but what I will do is open it up, work on in photo shop and then sometimes it kick it back over the light room. Where apply presets. The reason that I use presets and also plug ins like nick, for example, they have recipes that you create. The reason do that is if you look when I shoot a fashion editorial. A hassle of the same throughout. The same thing if you're putting together maybe a wedding out when you want the black and whites have the same feeling maybe it's an engagement session where it's going to be on a wall and they want them all to have the same feel they kick it back over into light room and make sure it all feels the same very cool so we are on a tight schedule here, so we probably won't get to a ton more questions that we have a couple more minutes here's a question from pro photographer what tools are best for improving skin that looks dry and that it's kind of something that you talked about a little bit so just remind ok so a couple things if the skin looks drawing and it looks kind of just flaky that's when you might say what that means to me is I'm picturing it is it's going to be lighter and so maybe clone on dark unjust smooth it out a little bit I would use portraiture and I would have that finding till turned up a little bit higher than normal to kind of smooth it out if it's a patch of dry skin I'd selected and use the patch tool to click and drag it so it's kind of depends on what it is and that's the same thing if I say somebody has blotchy skin, maybe I can fix it in portraiture maybe it's, a clone, stand by lightning. And so the reason I have all these tools lined up is I get into you, not one tool work for everything. You try it like crap. I thought that worked, ok, next one, next one down the line, and so you find the tool that works correctly, and then where you do it, you know, this is the statue will not work here, or the spot healing will not work here. And then you know exactly what tools to jump to right away.