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Lesson Info

Retouching Skin: Oily and Freckles

I want to show you why it's not as easy as you might think but then it's even easier than you thought okay um so uh so if I go into the light room you might think that you can go ahead and maybe we'll pull down those highlights but the problem that I'm running into is if I go ahead and I darkened down the whites were darkened down the highlights it darkens down everything that they're actually blown out speculum highlights that you mean you can't even pull them back in is going to have to be a retouched thing which is why the other photographs that where we had oily skin yesterday we tried to go with a softer modifier here we're using a beauty dish which still isn't harsh but with really oily skin you're going to have to go with a soft box all right so I'm going to open up in photo shop and try to see what we can do to save this skin all right so my instinct is if there's a bright highlight one of the things that I usually try to do is they usually try to clone with a blend mode on dar...

ken that's using my go to give it a try imclone over but it's ok it's not bad but it's not great like I would go over it a few more times and see if I could get it to look natural and that's I mean I think that if you didn't know what it looked like before I honestly think that's passable right you know clones sam on darken what it did is it when you haven't darkened whatever you're selecting on ly darkens down highlights but it doesn't affect the shadow areas what that means is that that texture will maintain its shape and it won't just get really really hazy that might be a direction I would go some highlights if they're small like the one on the nose you know maybe it would clone it or maybe I would attempt to use the patch tool switch for something else attempts to use the patch to patch it out no that works if it's small it's a small area but one other thing that you might try is I'm going to create a brand new layer and I am going to have a completely empty and grab my eye dropper and what I'm going to do is I'm gonna grab the color of skin right around that blown out highlight so I'm grabbing eyedropper to select that color and then switching over to my brush and with a soft brush I'm just gonna paint over this area and obviously it's looking a little bit muddy but if I change my blend mode to darken it will just dark in those highlights down by that color and so let's just give that a try and then I come back off my capacity a little bit so you could do something like that now it may be it looks a little bit not really but it's your brain won't perceive it like that you guys saw the before but if you looked at this I don't think it would at all faze you as being retouched so those are some things you could try to get past chill it out do it if you can get it to look natural with clone stamp on darken try that if not select a skin tone nearby in a new layer and then change the blend motor darkened so itjust darkens down those highlights by that color as I said before we were going to touch on freckles and how to retouch and not clone out freckles I do have a couple pictures that demonstrate this this girl didn't really have should really have that much retouching that was needed to do but what about kind of filling in and the shadows underneath her eyes what would you do there is a much longer version of this and so I'm just going to give you the basics one thing that you could do is make let's say your whole face is covered in blemish is one thing that you could dio is to make a selection based on channels I'll show you how to do it it doesn't apply to this image because she has nice skin but if I go over to channels I can flip through each different color channel and find the one with the most contrast appearing in those freckles so let's see um was that red nope definitely not red green all right how about blue and then I can see them there in the blue so what that's going to allow me to do is I can load that channel as a selection and now what it's done is it's grabbed a lot of those freckles for me if you click on the layer holding command what it does is it creates a selection based her on the channel it makes a selection of the blue channel so I could go over to my layers and hit command j and it made a selection both of the some of the freckles and also some of the skin tones so if I go ahead and I increase contrast on that and I start retouching underneath it'll still hold some of the freckle detail a little bit more intense than that but that's the idea of how you could do it most of the time what I'll do is I'll do my whole frequency separation but before I do frequency separation I'll use a tool that we're going to be using a lot now so I wanted to introduce color range color range lets you make a selection based on color and that a lot of different ways you could modify this you can go teo duplicated background go to select color range and wherever I click it'll make a selection based on that color so it started to select out some of her freckles you also have a at the top have fuzziness and fuzziness is based on that color you just selected how far into other tones does it reach and so is it reaching into the skin tone or just holding tight to those freckles I haven't set at quick mask because that was the easiest for me to see but what good is it if you hold the shift key in I can click on other freckles that were slightly different color and it will start adding those two that selection so I can click around and maybe there's a more a little more of a freckle here that I want to end something like that so if you look I've got a lot of her freckled detail and aiken you know I could do multiple selections and keep adding on to it got a lot of physical detail going on there looks good so I'm going to hit okay and it's made the selection there I'm going to hit command j and so if you look command jay gave me that which is basically the freckles now if you look it picks up a lot of the freckle detail and maybe it's a little bit coarse of an edge and I think it might be a little bit too noticeable if I step back before I made thea before I made the second layer I could also just soften the edges a little bit well this election by going up to select modify and I could feather the selection by one pixel is all I need to do or if I wanted it to be a little bit broader to make sure I'm getting the whole freckle I could expand or contract it but let's just do one pixel and I'll just give you a little bit softer of a selection there and you could do even if it still looks too hard go to to go to three you know do whatever you need to in that room so then what I can do is I can go ahead and I can run my frequency separation I can smooth everything out but those freckles are going to stay on top good at the actions that could do frequency separation um let me hide that top killer that you can't see it yet hide that top blur let's tio that really run my action and hide it frequency separation there I'm gonna look for when I can't see pores anymore but she's got some really nice skin so don't need to blur too much maybe right there and I could do the whole thing and I can start smoothing out so all she really needed honestly was underneath her eyes and so on the lola I can clean up under her eyes smooth out her skin lighten it up if there are other uneven skin tones a concert kind of smoothing things up and I could run through the whole frequency separation and then add those freckles back in after the fact she like didn't have too much bad skin but that's what you would want to dio find a way to make a selection of the freckles whether it's going to be in channels or in color range put him on a hop lair retouch everything that add them back in if the skin looks a little bit too rough in the freckles you can actually go ahead and run portraiture just on the freckles so that's popular you could go ahead and just smooth them out and soften them a little bit and there's still maintain their shape overall but you'll just get rid of a little bit of thie texture if you don't have portraiture you could also just soften a little bit it could just blurt it out like a couple pixels to get rid of that texture um that's basically what you do there's not really much of ah a way around it but if you are for some reason having a huge problem separating the freckles from the skin you've tried to see if you could make a selection and channels you've tried to make a selection with color range you might be interested in a plug in on one makes perfect mask and what perfect mask lets you do is it lets you decide what colors air in a mask so I could say okay yes keep that color red on her nose from that freckle but bright next to it that peachy color don't add that to the selection so it lets you say yes keep these colors no get rid of these and it helps you refine and then you can also go in and you can kind of outline different edges that need to be refined more so that plug it might save you time especially if there's a you know there's some type of freckled portrait that you just cannot uh cannot get perfect so it's just what we're already doing to save the freckled out on differently okay question yeah freckles darker yeah and more finale you could make the freckles darker and you could do that either there's a couple ways adjustment layers before when we go ahead and we have levels and we darken everything down everything darkens down because it's a gel on top but there's a button that you can hit that will make that level that adjustment layer on li applied to the layer right below it and it's this one right here it's the square that has a little downward pointing arrow when I do that it on lee applies it to that selection so now I can bring out the freckles and if I think maybe I can see a little bit definition too much definition filter blur goshen blur and like like a tiny bit just soften it a little bit so look at this before you use before and after bringing out the freckles or the hole before or after is that you love it folks are loving we have done clark photo same freckles ha I hope that world but then and then and more more easy one was donna kay I love how she just showed us that freckled trick your old knows howto works mark I like you think ok I'm going to keep plugging through things right coming back over here any other major skin things I wanted to show taking a look here same thing it was the exact same approach this is a photograph that my boyfriend took if you go it's just geoff rohaas photography that comes his website and his final retouch of this is awesome did a phenomenal job but one of the reasons it's so nice is that it looks really realistic because it maintained all the freckles so it's it's realism this's a fashion and then she could have chosen to get rid of it but it looks more believable even though it's so perfect because they're freckles so sometimes including I don't say imperfection cause I love freckles but including something that might you might think would be retouched out makes you go oh wait with her skin really like that so it's kind of a trick there all right so these air a whole bunch of photos that we'll be covering some of the problem areas that we need to be addressing I think I'm going to be bouncing around a little bit so hopefully you can hang on for that let's do ah a couple changes that I could do like and wright in late room to help me out this is what we were able to get with those two yesterday and he's mean I think the exposure is correct on both of them for sure but he's still really really pale and I showed you that you could go ahead and use the selective adjustment brush too dark in certain areas down but also if there's kind of a divide in a photograph like this another tool that I will sometimes use I want this picture another tool that will sometimes use is right here and it's a grady in tool in the greedy and tool I used to use for landscapes you drag it from the top of the sky down to the tree line and I can just darken up the sky and make that really rich and so it doesn't seem that applicable in portrait until you have drastically different skin tones I can go ahead and dragged the silver and how it works is the center point is a center point of the fade on this side over here the effects that I've applied is one hundred percent and the effect that I've applied on the opposite is at zero so how big the differences between those two lines decides how subtle that grady int which means if I need something a little bit more chris I can pull it in I can also rotate it and so I could try to hide it um if you could get that rotating there it could also tryto hide it that way or make it a little bit more subtle you know something like that now of course I've just darken him down like intensely I wouldn't really do that instead let me reset everything I could darken down his exposure tiny bit and increase the contrast for little more death may be a little bit more clarity so he doesn't look as washed out because since he was so pale there were no shadows no shadows means no definition means that he just looks flat when I add clarity clarity is kind of like a smart sharp in what it really does is it pops contrast into the mid tones and it gives you a little bit more shadow detail so for him he needs some of that shadow detail there so let's just take a quick look kind of the four after so I could go ahead and just slide that grady and over if you didn't know I did that you can't really see the grady int there's it's about making a subtle on where you place it and I could keep tweaking it to get it right also if somebody had maybe he looked like I made him a little bit more yellow maybe she already looked maybe she looked really really red and I wanted to just get rid of some of the readiness on her pull down on that a little bit I could use ingredient from the other side and just pull out a little bit of saturation so you can kind of work with these when you have people with different colored skin tones in the same photograph you can actually go ahead and do some of that in in photo shop but I can do it here would definitely prefer toe get it done quickly