Retouching the face – part 3
In this tutorial we will concentrate on the face with a little more cleaning up and some tricks to add some depth and appeal to the eyes and mouth.
Step 1:
Open your file up in Photoshop and if you haven’t done so already merge everything to the top by selecting the top most layer and hitting shift+ctrl+alt+E. Create a new soft light layer and name it dodge and burn. Take the brush tool with a soft brush, colour set to white and opacity set to just 3% and increase the brush size using the bracket key ] to cover the eye as below.
Using a couple of clicks bring the brightness of the eyes up a little bit. On the same layer switch to black using the X key and reduce your brush size right down with the bracket key [. Set the brushes opacity to 10% by hitting 1 and paint the eyebrows, eyelashes and the outer ring of the iris to add a little depth to the eyes. As always build it up slowly until you have a result like below.
Finish the eyes off by brightening the whites of the eyes slightly with a white brush.
Step 2:
We will now focus on the mouth and the chin area. First thing we will do is add a little depth to the lips with some dodge and burn. Create a new soft light layer and bring the highlights of the lips up with some dodging as we did with the eyes (white brush, 10%, soft) and darken the dark ares a little with some burning (black brush, 10%, soft). The result should be similar to the image below.
Step 3:
Merge everything to the top again (shift+ctrl+alt+E) and call this merged. You may find that having all these layers is slowing your computer up, if so go ahead an select all the layers from the top to the layer above the background and merge them. I now want to clean up the chin area and remove some of the variation in skin tones. Take the patch tool as we did in the first tutorial and make a selection around one of the varied skin tones on the chin.
Making sure you have source set for the the patch tool in the tool preferences bar at the top of the window drag the selection over to an area of skin on the cheek where the texture is even. Work over the face and repeat this technique to even out the skin tones as below, be careful not to go too far and lose structure of facial areas.
In the next tutorial I will tackle a couple of issues with the eyelashes and move onto the body. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it!!
Look how great our retouch is looking already!!
Posted on November 19th, 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.
