Photo 11

Sue Leith

Retouching

Start with a well exposed, image that is in focus and fairly close up of a face. Also, choose an image that gives you something to retouch, you want some wrinkles, pimples, spots on walls etc. Challenge yourself. Don’t use flash. Unless you know what you’re doing it makes terrible photographs.

1. Get rid of anything you want to permanently remove – not just fade - for example, spots on walls, signs, blemishes, red eye etc. Use the retouching tools: patch, red eye, healing brush, spot healing brush, or a combination of all. Do this on the background layer.

2. Transform (Edit> Free Transform or Command T) to make subject look thinner or wider – or taller or shorter. (Drag side arrow in or out, up or down slightly.) Subtle.

3. Crop excess, if necessary, leftover from step 2.

4. Loosely select eyes with Lasso, or other selection tool, and use the shortcut Command J to paste that selection to a new layer (or Layer>New> Layer via copy).

Name your new layer.

5. Transform (Command T or Edit > Free Transform) to make eyes larger. If you don’t want to change the proportion, hold the shift and opt key while dragging out the corner anchors. I like to drag up slightly, not holding shift/opt to make the eyes wider. You may not Transform on a background layer, so make sure to turn your background into a regular layer before this step.

6. Add a layer mask to your new eyes layer (click on the 5^th icon from the right on the bottom of the layers palette) and paint with black around the edges. (This works best when you lower the brush opacity to less than 100% in the Options bar.) The purpose of this mask is to blend the new eyes smoothly into face below. Use a large, soft brush. (If you forget and use a hard brush you can go to Blur > Gaussian Blur and gently blur the mask after painting. Turn the eyeball for the “large eye” layer on and off occasionally to see where the edges are to make your work easier.

This technique can also be used to change the size of mouth, nose etc.

7. Select whites of both eyes magic wand with +) and use the sponge tool (nested with the dodge and burn tools) set to de-saturate to remove red. Don’t go too far or they’ll look dirty gray. Use the same tool, but switch to saturate in the options bar to gently brighten. Subtle!

8. De-saturate teeth using technique above. Again, don’t go too far or they’ll look dirty gray. Subtle!

9 Try the sponge tool set to saturate to darken lips or to deepen eye color.

10. Add a new empty layer, on top of all other layers. Name the new layer “retouch”. You will be doing all fading to this layer. Use the healing brush or spot healing brush, making sure “sample all layers” is checked in the Options bar. Your goal on this new layer is to get rid of all wrinkles. It will not look good, but phony, but for now, that’s what you want.

11. Lower the opacity of the retouch layer to make it look natural. Do not forget this last step or your subject will be left looking like they had a facelift!

Not all images need to have all of these steps taken. For example, you may not need to whiten eyes or you may not want to make eyes larger. And, as you learn new techniques you may want to add them to your retouching routine. This is just a guide to get you started. Be CREATIVE. HAVE FUN!