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Softening Skin in Photoshop

Lesson 10 from: Portrait Retouching Redefined

Chris Orwig

Softening Skin in Photoshop

Lesson 10 from: Portrait Retouching Redefined

Chris Orwig

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Lesson Info

10. Softening Skin in Photoshop

Lesson Info

Softening Skin in Photoshop

I'm going to do one more thing with skin all right? We're going to close it up with skin so over here in my skin folder and like I said this this whole image start to finish is to our author but in my skin folder shift option command and e on a mac shift all control and yon windows this is going to be the most abstract weird technique that you're going to see but it's awesome I've put up some notes so if you're watching this I would like screen grab those or something um and because it goes through these various steps which you as you're doing them you will be convinced there's no way this is the correct way to do this and this is kind of like when someone says go to this restaurant you have to walk down that one alley and then go up these stairs here like where am I going? But that being said it's amazing and it works amazingly well it works amazingly well after you've done your first steps so like your detail work you're like lytton tone working then then the rest okay here goes way ...

turn off my notes and just get into this so what this this one starts with high pass which we know where to find it you asked a good question filter other high pass we're looking to bring the high pass value up so we can see we turn on the visibility of that that folder filter other high pass so that we can see the underlying image sneak through a little bit so you kind of see when I get up high it's like oh there's the real image coming on my edge there we want to drop we're just starting to see a little bit of that come in maybe about six or seven your images where will that be depends upon capture resolution question is it shift option command n e for new and then e for murder okay yeah and the reason that is is if it's a long story short but if you happen to click on a layer that visibility isn't turned on that one works so that's sort of the one to memorize shift option command and your shift all control any great question thank you. Okay all right and if you didn't get it you can email me and I could send that uh right so hi pass okay hi past usually used to sharpen which is not what we're going to do so we're going to do our next step which is to inverts the layer command eyes a shortcut to invert and that would take a color mentioned make it look like a negative so or takes a mass that's black interns at white so just flip flops what what's happened so that's our second step so we did high pass we invert the high pass then what's the mistake most people make with high passes they forget to remove the color see all the color in there there's a ton of color if I were to just exaggerate for a second look at all that crazy color in there, you know? But we didn't know it's there because it's so subtle so we want to get rid of it we're going to de saturate that layer then after that we're going to take our blending mode too linear light oh my gosh, what in the world are we doing? Doesn't look better high pass inverted de saturated now we're on linear light and as if this technique couldn't get weirder, my friend evan showed me this and yeah, it's a strange path to get there but great results so after we've done our all of that, we're gonna go actually gonna do some advanced blend in so you can access advance planning by double clicking on the layer and that opens up are blending dialogue here what we're going to do with this and you just almost have to trust me. I don't have time to explain what's happening everywhere is we're going to take these sliders which allow us to blend things together and split them by holding on the key that allows us to do different things option are all so optional click this we split it this one goes to two forty we're going optional split the top one. Bring in some of the highlights too, in a way, bring this one down, maybe about ten or so again. It's crazy crazy isn't this crazy? My credits? I can't believe we're doing this. Um, so now we're doing advanced blending to this layer which has high pass inverted de saturated on linear light stick with me way click okay, would it be funny if it didn't work? Tio but next up we'll go to filter this is our last step and we're gonna go to blur and then gaussian blur do you mean on this one? This is where we're going to get our texture back. What this technique does isn't removed texture but adds and even texture over other things, and my value actually looks pretty good. It just happens to be whatever I used last time you kind of see how when I go too high or too low it's smudged everything out when I go to high just have the original image there, so we're looking for is something which looks like a nice, even smooth texture across the image that we're kind of well, the preview didn't really work, but we're looking for the skin should look good at this point, albeit it looks a little bit strange so we do that next up was we're going to mask it and painted it, so stick with me for one more minute. We're almost done, so I want to create a mass filled with black rather than white, so I hold down the option key on a mac all on windows. I click on the adler mask icon it's now black. I grab my brush too. Welcome time, that's so helpful for stuff like this. I have a brush which has no hardness, maybe a little bit bigger here have to work fast, little bit lower a passage I'm just going to start to paint over the image, and what I'm gonna do is paint over it as I'm painting over, I'm thinking, and I did all that for this what's it it's not even making that big of a difference, but when you, a lot of times when you when that's happening, you're you're probably closer than you think. I'm just gonna go pretty quickly here, and it could be that I didn't get it quite enough, I think so. We'll see you'll see in just a second. Let me just go through this did it? Did it? Did it d'oh? If you do the face, you have to do the neck right so we'd have to do all this I also want to darken this part of the neck there's too much brightness there, but I didn't get to that in this demo, but I'm just going to get through this fast is a crazy person can doing the technique which involved sixteen steps now all right, so let's zoom in on the skin and kind of see what we have there and what we can see here is if you look at this one and I'm just going going tio duplicate it so it's it's a little bit too strong here but can you see how it's evening out stuff? I mean, I'm exaggerating it for you a little bit, but can you see how like the shadow on the nose? This is a good indicator right here how it just looks it looks a lot more smooth and how all these little variations in the skin what they tend to do we didn't even know there were little variations there because we thought that we thought those were the variations to got rid of first, but the next now we're getting rid of the sext ones here like I said, I think this is a little too heavy handed for this image I want to be a natural portrait of my friend not not beauty. So you're a pass. Ity and your intensity with this is going to vary. But still, that gives us a pretty good retouching.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Chris Orwig - Portrait Retouching Redefined - Reference Guide.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

Rebecca George
 

Chris is an amazing teacher -- and he's all about efficiency, which I LOVE. He knows ALL the shortcuts and he's so skilled at smoothly working in repetition as he's teaching, so by the end of the class I found that I had effortlessly learned so many important shortcuts and had shifted my editing into warp speed! Such a great class, as are all his classes

brad in glenwood
 

Not sure where all the criticism is coming from. It is a good source for a basic workflow to create realistic portrait retouching. Probably not for the advanced Photoshop user, but I consider myself an intermediate and picked up some very good tips that I will consider and definitely add some to my workflow.I think Chris gave some good philosophy for retouching in the short amount of time. If you want a more involved course with more info then I would recommend Lindsay adler's portrait retouching, but even then her course is given over THREE days! In under 1.5 hours for this lecture, did you really expect more for $19-29? By the way if you look in the upper left hand corner of Lightroom it says Adobe PHOTOSHOP Lightroom, so if you want to be technical he was using Photoshop for all of his retouching! Would you have felt better if he was in Camera Raw? It's the same thing!

grrjr
 

Lots of good information here. I just wish there would have been more of a walkthrough with the main image that is used for this lesson. It would be useful to see how he manipulated the color in the portrait of his friend for a beginner like me. I like the side by side comparison, but would like to know what else was changed in that photo besides getting rid of shine and softening skin.

Student Work

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