Phil Parsons

Photo retouching clean up – Part one

This tutorial is going to cover the first part of our retouch, the clean up. We are going to start with the skin removing any blemishes and move onto tackling those ever annoying fly away hairs.

Tutorial images:

Beautiful Bride by Fernando Weberich

Step 1:

Once you have downloaded the image open it up in Photoshop and arm yourself with the healing brush tool. Copy the background to a new layer using ctrl+J and name it something like bride. We are going to now work our way around the skin getting rid of any moles or small blemishes. To do this we will create a reference point for the healing brush close to our blemish by holding down alt and clicking on a similarly coloured patch of skin to that of the skin the blemish is on. With that set, brush over the blemish and let Photoshop magic it away. Use a soft edged brush for best results.

Use this technique to get rid of any other small blemishes on the skin before moving onto step 2.

Step 2:

You probably found the last step quite easy as the Bride’s skin was pretty clean already but I assure most images will have you working with healing for a good hour to get it all looking clear. There is still some imperfections in the skin around the arms and body but these are larger and using the healing brush just won’t cut it. For these we will use the patch tool. The patch tool should be set to “new selection” with pattern set to source. Use the patch tool to select the areas of skin that look blotchy then drag that selection over to a clear patch of skin to replace the texture, don’t worry about the face and neck for now as we will tackle that at a later stage. The idea here is to even out the skin tones and create a less contrasting texture, below is how far I took it.

Step 3:

We will now tackle all those flyaway hairs around her head so pick up the clone stamp tool by hitting S, set its mode to lighten (shift+alt+G) with “sample all layers” selected and create a new layer called flyaway. You may find this step harder if you are working with a mouse, in fact the whole retouching process really requires the use of a graphic tablet, but give it a go anyway. The technique you want to apply here is to use a soft brush with a low opacity 10-20% and slowly build up the cloning to cover the hairs. Follow the line of the hairs with the brush and be sure to sample from various different areas to avoid repetition in the pattern. If once you have finished an area you step back and notice that it looks a little over touched then reduce the opacity of the layer to distract from it.

We don’t need to completely remove them all just reduce them to take distraction away from the face. We will leave the clean up there for this tutorial and start work on the face in the next tutorial.

Posted on November 12th, 2008 under Photoshop tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.