Photo 11

Sue Leith

Retouching Exercise

Open AnnieStart.psd

Take MANY snapshots – and name them so you can go back in time if you need to.

Save as yourname.Annie.psd – and save to your desktop – and save often. Don’t wait until the end of class to save. This exercise may take a lot of time and if you have to start over you won’t be able to finish in by the end of class. Saving right from the start will help you in case of unforeseen problems.

1. Gently soften.

2. Permanently get rid of burns on arms and dark spot on hand.

3. Fade wrinkles on face.

4. Lower opacity of your retouch layer to make her look more natural.

5. After previous step, you may find a few wrinkles/spots/marks etc you’d like to remove or fade more.

6. Remove yellow from teeth and brighten them. Subtly.

7. Enlarge left eye. Subtly.

8. Fix right eye.

9. Soften wrinkles on her hand/arms.

10. Strengthen composition.

11. Color correct.

Instructions on how to do this exercise are on the back but don’t look

until you try to do it yourself first.

1. Filter > Noise > Median I used 1 pixel.

2. Do this on the background layer. I used the patch tool.

3. Do this on a new, blank layer named, Retouch. I used a combination of Healing Brush and Spot Healing Brush. Don’t forget to use your option key and click to sample an area and remember to check Sample All Layers in the Options Bar.

4. Turn the eye on this layer on and off to help you choose a natural opacity. I used 22%.

5. Use the patch or healing tool on the background layer. Don’t forget the option of using Edit > Fade available immediately after any tool.

6. Use the sponge tool with the options bar set to de-saturate (around 20% opacity)

Or use a hue/sat adjustment layer after making a selection of the teeth. Target “yellow” gently de-saturate then target Master and gently move the lightness slider up. Subtle.

7. Loosely select left eye (make sure you’re on the background layer), Command J to copy to a new layer. Name the layer left eye. Command T or Edit> Free Transform to transform and make larger. Add a layer mask and paint edges with gray to fade to layer below.

8. Basically I copied her left eye, used transform to flip and distort it slightly so it didn’t look exactly like her left eye, and placed it over her right eye. This works well sometimes for fixing eyes behind glasses.)

Make a copy of left eye. Command J to paste it to a new layer. Command T or Edit > Free Transform to transform and flip horizontal. Move this (her left eye) over her right eye with move tool. Then go back into transform and rotate and distort it a bit, hold down command on the keyboard and slightly drag in the top left corner. It may help to temporarily lower the opacity of the eye layer to help place new eye carefully over the eye below.

9. Loosely select hand and arms, Command J to paste to a new layer, name layer Hand/Arms. Use, Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. I used 1.3 pixels. If you were not neat with your selection and accidentally blurred some of the area around the hand/arms or the watch, add a layer mask and paint with black to show the area below or very carefully erase those areas.

10. Crop off left area of frame to remove the arm and sleeve at the far left. This also helps move Annie away from center of image.

11. This image is too blue. Use a curves adjustment layer, making sure to place it on the very top of the layers palette so it affects all layers below. Use gray eyedropper and click and check a couple of neutral gray areas until you like the change. (Try around her watch or the metal circles on her hat.)