Removing wrinkles and shadows – Part 2

Posted on November 16, 2008 by Phil   no comments yet

In this tutorial we are going to focus on the face and neck to remove those dark wrinkles and to even out some of the shadows around the eyes. Open your file from the previous tutorial and we will make a start.

Step 1:

First thing we want is to merge everything we have thus far to a new layer, select the top most layer and hit shift+ctrl+alt+E and behold a brand new layer does appear. Create a new layer above this by either alt clicking on the new layer icon or through the Layer>new>Layer menu. In the options box we want to name our layer wrinkles, set its blend mode to soft light and check the box that says “fill with Soft-Light-neutral color (50% gray)”.

With this new layer selected we want to have the brush tool with a nice soft brush and a very low opacity of around 8% and its colour set to white. We are going to paint along the dark wrinkles and shadows beneath the eyes slowly building it up to even out the tones of the skin and make the wrinkles/shadows less intense.

If you go to far with this you can either switch your colour to black and add paint some darkness back in, reduce your layer opacity or better still open up the colour picker and choose a brightness value of 50% which will act like an eraser.

Step 2:

Create a new layer at the top of the stack and pick up the clone stamp tool by hitting S. Set the tools blend mode to lighten by hitting shift+alt+G and get in nice and close to the neck area. Choose a soft brush again with a very low opacity no more than 10%, it is always best to build it up slowly rather than jump in hammer and tong as it gives a much better effect and enables more control. With source set to “sample all layers” paint over the wrinkles of the neck selecting source points from a clean area near to the area you are working on. Make lots of different source points as you work to keep the skin tones fluent. It is ok to over do it a little here as we will use a technique to blend it in better in a minute however do not attempt to fully tackle the neck shadow just yet.

When you are happy go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and blur this layer to about 4 pixels to blend your brush strokes in then reduce the layers opacity to around 70% to bring back a little texture, after all we don’t want this image to look fake, do we?

Step 3:

Create another soft light layer in the same way as in step 1 and using a soft brush of about 5% opacity paint in over the shadow beneath the neck but be careful not to bleach the colour out of the skin with too much dodging (This technique is called dodge and burn, dodge to lighten and burn to darken). You may slightly overdo things and apply the same technique as the last step with some blurring and opacity reduction as I did to get the best result.

Step 4:

We are now going to use the techniques you have just learnt to reduce the shadowing around her mouth. but before we do this lets merge everything to a new layer at the top so as before select the top most layer and hit shift+ctrl+alt+E and name the layer merged. Create a new layer and set its mode to soft light, dodge the dark areas around the mouth as we did with the neck and eyes. Go a little too much with it here so that the skin looks a little bleached out as below.

Now create a new layer and set its mode to color. With the brush tool selected hold down alt to access the eyedropper tool and sample a nice bright skin colour from somewhere close to the mouth area. Set the brushes opacity to around 10% and paint some colour back in over the bleached area. You may want to use the blurring technique to help those brush strokes blend in but keep it to a minimum so you do not blur the layer in onto the lips.

We will leave this tutorial here for now but we have a long long way to go yet. I will leave you with one tip for now though, when retouching it is nice to compare your progress with the original on the fly. To do this simply hold the alt key down and click on the background layers eye icon to hide all the other layers and click again with the alt key to show them. Amazing how far we have come already!!