Here it is, a tutorial I’ve written on basic retouching. This is the first one, and it shows how to generally improve an image. In the second one (which should be up sometime this week) I’ll be showing you how to remove imperfections like wrinkles, pimples, and other blemishes.
This was made in Adobe Photoshop CS (version eight) but I’m confident it will work in other versions, and perhaps in Paint Shop Pro as well. A basic knowledge of photoshop is required, but I’ll try to explain things as clearly as I can.
First of all, I’m going to take you from this, to this, read on if you’re interested.
1. Open up the before in PS or PSP. It should be your ‘background image”. This picture was obviously already retouched, and it’s quite lovely, but the quality isn’t the best and it could use a little altering.
What we’re going to do now, is smooth the skin. Press the “D” key. This should change your foreground color to black and your background color to white.
Select the brush tool, and choose a medium soft brush. I chose the default 3px circle brush, and my settings were 59px for diameter, and 18px for the hardness.
Now we’re going to enter the “quick mask mode”. To do this, press the “Q” key. With your foreground color still as black, paint over Jessica’s face. You should see a red, slightly transparent layer of color. Keep painting until all of her skin is covered, but don’t paint over the eyes, lips, eyebrows etc.
This is what it should look like this.
When you’re done, press the “Q” key again. The red areas become selected, which should look either like this, or like this. Don’t see the difference? The one in the first one has the marquee around the outside of the photo. If your picture looks like the first one, press ctrl+shift+i all at once. This inverts the selection.
Now duplicate the layer and go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. For the settings, choose 4.2 as the radius. Click ok. Don’t freak out, because it’s not going to stay like this. Change the opacity of this layer (should be Layer 1) to 55%. It looks a lot more realistic now.
2. Now we’re going to change the lips. Select your background layer with the original picture, and then select the pen tool, and change the settings so it looks like this. Using the pen tool, select the area around the lips by clicking on the corner of the lips, then clicking on a point beside it, like this. When you have the whole mouth selected, you need to close the outline by clicking on the first point you have made. It should look like this. Right click anywhere in the inside of the outline, and choose “Make selection”. If a window pops out, make sure the feather is set to 0, and the anti alias boxis checked. Click ok. The mouth should now be selected. Duplicate the layer (ctrl+j). This should be under your skin layer, and above the layer with the original image. Now we’re going to smooth out the mouth. Choose the smudge tool (R). By default you get the blur tool, but we don’t want that. To get the smudge tool, click on the blur tool holding the left mouse button until you get a little box with three options. Choose the smudge tool. Change the options at the top to Normal mode, and 19% strength. Now (starting from one side of the lip, upper or bottom) click on one part of the lip and (still holding) move your mouse across to the other side. Do the same with the other part of the lip (bottom or top, depending which one you started with). Be careful not to go over the teeth. It should look like this. This doesn’t look realistic, so we’re going to lower the opacity of this layer to 56%. It should look like this.
Optional step!
Adding lip liner. To do this, all you need to do is go to Select>Load Selection. Make sure you still have the lip layer selected. If a window pops out, leave the settings alone and click ok. With the lips still selected, create a new layer (Layer>New>Layer… and click ok). Now you need to change the foreground color to a color slightly darker than the lips. I chose #E0978D. With the lips still selected, go to Edit>Stroke. A window should pop out. Change it to 1px, the location to outside. Click ok. The lip liner is too dark, so set the mode to Darken, and the opacity to 40%. It should look like this.
3. The eyes usually don’t need much work. All I did was brightened up the lower part of the eye using the dodge tool.
4. Now we’re going to edit the skin color. Select the blurred skin layer, and go to Image>Adjust>Brightness/Contrast. Change the brightness to 24, and the contrast to 18. The go to Image>Adjustments>Color Balance. Play around with the settings until you get the shade of skin you like. Then go to Brightness/Contrast again, and set the Brightness to 12 and the Contrast to -24. Mine looks like this.
5. Now it’s time for hair. Choose the background layer with the original image. Select the hair the same way you selected the lips, with the pen tool. Right click, choose make selection, click ok. Duplicate the layer. Go to Image>Adjustment>Color Balance,and play around with the settings to get a less green tint. I chose 15,7,32. Go to Brightness/Contrast again, and change the settings to 6 (brightness), and 16 (contrast). Mine looks like this.
6. Let’s add some make-up to her face. We’ve already added the lip liner (if you did the optional step). What you need to do now is merge all of the layers together, copy the layer, undo the merging so all the layers are separate, and paste the merged layer on top. This way you won’t have to switch in between layers to do the make-up.
Let’s start with blush. You may not want to put blush on her, it’s your call. If you want the blush, make a new layer on top of the “merged layers” layer. Choose a pink-ish color like #FFE6DA as my foreground color, and with a soft round brush, make two circles on her cheeks. Set the mode to Multiply, and the opacity to 80%. Click.
Now the eyshadow. You can choose whatever color you like, I chose grey (#D0D0D0). Paint with the grey color on the space between her eye and her eyebrow, and a little under her bottom eyelid. The following only works if you use grey as the color. To make colorful eyeshadow, play around with the modes and opacity. For grey, change the mode to Hue, and the opacity to 75%.
Click.
Finally, the mascara/eyeliner. All we’re going to do is use to burn tool (it’s under the dodge tool) to make her eyelashes darker. To get the best out of this, don’t use a round brush for this. Choose one of the default photoshop brushes. Choose the original background image, and right click on it with the burn tool selected. Pick this brush. Make it smaller, and zoom in on the eyes. Make sure the exposure in the burn settings is set to around 35%. Her eyelashes look all right, so all we need to do is make the bottom lashes darker. Starting from the tip of the lash, move your mouse slowly to the other end. Do this for all of the bottom lashes on both eyes. Click.
7. The last thing we need to do is get rid of the flying hair in the background. Click.
That’s what we’re going to get rid of. This part is really easy, all you have to do is choose the polygonal lasso tool (under the lasso tool) and outline the parts with the flying hair so they’re selected. Before you do that, change the feather to 2px in the settings. After you’ve selected them, fill the parts in with #F6FCFA. If some parts look too dark/light compared to the actual blue background, even it out with the burn and dodge tools. Click.
That’s it! I know it’s long, it took me 3 hours to write, but I hope it worked for you.
In one of my future blogs I might post a tutorial for removing blemishes and wrinkles, so keep checking back!
Happy New Year!
