4 Skin Retouching - SCAI021

Hello and welcome back. In this section, we're going to be doing skin retouching. We're going to show you how to remove minor blemishes from skin and also how to just generally even out skin tone while keeping all our detail intact. We got a great section for you. Let's jump into Photoshop. So starting off with our sample image, you can see our subject looks great. She just has like a couple little spots and things like that that we might want to remove. So we're going to start off with a really simple process by targeting the red areas in our subject's skin because some of these blemishes we can remove with tools like the Spot Healing Brush tool, but also we want to get rid of some of this redness as well that we see in the skin. So we need a way to target that red. Here's what we're going to do, a Hue Saturation Adjustment Layer. So let's go up here to Layer, down to New Adjustment Layer, and over to Hue Slash Saturation. Here we go. Let's hit OK. So Hue Saturation. Now the key here right at the very top where it says Master, by default, that's just going to edit all of the colors in your image. We just want to click there and we're going to go to Reds. There we go. Next, we want to use this Eyedropper tool. Click on that and then we want to actually click here on the reds from our image that we want to edit. And that's going to go ahead and like bring this into a certain color range, which we're going to show you in just a second. OK, so now we're editing the reds. By default, it's going to just select a lot of reds, which is going to be most of my subject's skin. So I have to see what I'm doing a little better. What we're going to do is I'm going to take this where it says Saturation here and we're just going to drag that all the way up. OK, and here where it says Hue, we're going to take that and just drag this all the way up as well. All right. Now, I know it looks really weird right now, but that's kind of the point. We want to be able to see what we're doing a little bit better. OK, so now with our Hue and Saturation to the right, it's kind of like highlighting all the areas that we're actually going to wind up affecting. Now, down here on this little slider here, you're going to see like you have two vertical lines. These are the areas that get affected. And then to the left and right, it's kind of feathering. Now, if you click here in the middle of this slider and start dragging this to the left, there we go. You're going to see it affects basically a different range of colors. And you can see here it's kind of like highlighting these actual like little imperfections of the skin, things like that. So this is basically by dragging this to the left. This is basically targeting more of like the really red areas. If you drag it to the right, it would target more of the like yellow areas and things like that of the skin. OK, so we're just going to take this and drag it to the left until it seems like it's doing a pretty good job. Just kind of highlighting or targeting like the really red areas. Something like that looks pretty good. All right. Now, I know it looks very weird right now, obviously. But we're going to go ahead and take our Saturation and Hue back down to zero. So let's just click here, click on zero, click here and go back to zero. So by doing that, like this is just showing us what it's actually going to wind up affecting. So keep this one in the same place. Now, we want to keep our saturation at zero, but our reds, we maybe just want to push this to the right a little bit. OK, you can see as I go to the right, obviously, it's going to go too far, but just a little bit. And it's going to kind of convert those reds into more of like a skin tone type of color. OK, so it's basically taking the reds. So I've got my hue set to plus like 16 right now. Saturation and lightness just stay the exact same. They stay where they are. OK, so basically what we did is just targeted that red color in our subject's skin. OK, use this little slider here to really just make sure it's exactly just the reds that we want to target. And then I just move the hue to the right. So let's go back to the Layers panel, just turn this off and on. Just kind of zoom in. There we go. Off and on. And you can see it just takes care a lot of the redness in my subject's skin. Let's see her down on her chin, off and on. OK, it's taking that redness and just kind of like bringing it back to normal skin color. There we go. Now, by default, this is just a regular layer. It's going to be visible everywhere. So here on the layer mask, we just want to hit B for the brush tool. And then we're going to paint black like over the lips, right? Because the lips, you actually want to be this red color. So we really want to make sure we don't, you know, change the color of the lips. But everywhere else can pretty much stay the same. You can see even here under the eyes, it removes some of the redness. So it's not like a huge, huge change, but it definitely removes redness from our subject's skin. All right. Now, on top of that, let's go ahead and create a new layer. And we're going to be using the spot healing brush tool. This is still the best tool for getting rid of like little imperfections and skin. So basically, just make sure that up here at the top, sample all layers is checked because we're going to do this on a new layer and then just create a brush that's about the size of the imperfection you want to remove. And then just simply click and remove it. And there you go. So we're just basically just finding all the little imperfections that we want to remove and just click right on the spot when you're over it. All right. Now, generally, my approach, I like to keep skin retouching and things like that looking as natural as possible. And generally, I try to only remove, you know, imperfections that are temporary. You know, anything that's, you know, like a long term, like beauty mark or something like that, that's going to be, you know, with a subject for the rest of their life. I don't remove those things. I don't recommend removing those things. You know, just like the little temporary, you know, blemishes that, you know, might just pop up for a couple of days and then go away. There we go. All right. Fantastic. So just showing that before and after. That's kind of like the majority of what I would recommend doing. Okay. Our subject looks great at this point. The only really other thing, well, a couple of things that I would do is kind of even out her skin in general. So you can see it's just a little bit like, you know, some of these areas just have like some highlights and then shadows and highlights, just a little bit of like color changes throughout her skin. So the best way to do this, this is the easiest way to do this, is basically what we'll do is create a new layer, use our brush tool, so B for the brush tool, bring our flow. We're going to put that about 10%. So you just type in 10% of there. Okay. And then basically you just hold alt or option to sample a color and then kind of click a couple of times around that area. You can hold alt or option to sample color again, click a couple of times. And I'm just using kind of like a large soft edge brush, again, with a very low flow. I'm just kind of clicking a few times. And what I'm doing is basically just kind of like making the skin color a little bit more even when I do this. So by sampling the color that we want, you know, maybe you're making the under eyes just a little bit lighter here. I'm basically just sampling and clicking. I'm just using the track pad on my laptop right now. You can use a mouse to do this. You can use a tablet. You don't need any particular special equipment. Let's just show you the before and the after with that. Let's zoom out a little bit there. There we go. So before and the after, and you can kind of see it's just a really quick and easy way to even out skin tone. It's basically I'm just sampling these colors and then just kind of clicking in that area and kind of painting it. There we go. We're going to keep going. Now, this technique is really, really great, but it can tend to like cover up some skin texture. So we're going to show you how to get the skin texture back in just a second. There we go. Maybe I want this to be just a little bit lighter. So I'm just sampling this nice lighter skin color and painting right over top of that. There we go. So this should kind of be like a relatively slow process, like little, little changes. Make our brush a little bit smaller towards this area down here. But basically, it's just trying to like smooth out any, any smaller, like, you know, differences between highlights and shadows. There we go. Just make sure your brush isn't too big. Sometimes it's easy to get a little impatient and want your brush to be bigger so you can work a little bit faster. But, you know, in that case, sometimes you wind up doing, doing some things you don't want, like changing the shape of your subject's face or something like that. There we go. Fantastic. So I'm just kind of smoothing the skin out here. Again, this is just the brush tool using a low flow. There we go. And this allows me to just kind of like smooth everything out. And you want this to be subtle. You know, you don't want this to be so strong of an effect. There we go. Cool. Looking good. Do a little bit around here. And I'm just clicking with my, with my cursor on my, on my trackpad. All right, there we go. And that's looking really quite good, actually. So let's go ahead and just turn this off and on so we can see the before and after. So you can see it does actually make quite a big difference. It's just like a slow effect, you know. And if you overdid in any areas, like you don't want that, just hit E for your eraser tool and bring your flow down to about 10%. And then just click a couple times where you want to erase, like if you overdid an area. Okay, so we can see that does actually look good. You know, definitely like kind of just smoothens out the overall tone in our subject. But sometimes what happens is when we do this, it can kind of cover up some skin texture. So here's a great way to get back your skin texture. What we're going to do, I'm going to make that layer invisible temporarily. So we saw the skin texture before I did that. Let's make a new layer up here just by clicking on the new layer icon. And then what we're going to do is basically take a copy of everything we see and put that on its own layer. It's called Apply Image. So we're going to go to Image, down here to Apply Image. There we go. And then just hit OK. Okay, it's basically just a snapshot of everything you see, and it's on its own layer. So now with this layer, I'm just going to desaturate this. So let's go to Image, down to Adjustments, and I'm going to go to Desaturate. There we go. It's a black and white layer. Once it's desaturated, we're going to right click, and I'm just going to go down to where it says Convert to a Smart Object. So basically, I just have a desaturated version of my image. Now it's a smart object. So why did I do all that? Basically, what I'm about to do is use a high pass filter to extract the texture of my image. And after I extract the texture, I can apply it to this other layer below where I just painted with the brush tool. So it's going to basically copy just the texture from this black and white layer, and then apply it to where I paint. So whatever I paint is going to have texture on top of it. Really cool process. Okay, if you've ever done frequency separation with us or any other tutorials, it's actually quite similar to that process. Okay. So now I have a apply image layer on top of everything. I made it black and white, and then I made it a smart object. So what we're going to do now is go to Filter, down here to Other, and over to High Pass. Filter, Other, High Pass. And then, I know it looks really weird, but you basically just want to do this about until you can see skin texture on your subject. You can see the skin texture quite clear. Now, I made it a smart object before doing this high pass filter. So if I need to change this radius at any time, I can do that. Let's hit OK. There we are. So now, if I take this layer, this is, again, the black and white layer that I made a smart object and did a high pass filter. If I change this and make this, I change the blending mode from Normal to Overlay, what it's actually going to do is enhance the texture of my whole image. Okay. So this is actually a technique that you can use for sharpening. Like if I wanted to sharpen certain areas of my subject, you could use this technique. Okay. In fact, let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to hit Control or Command J, and I'll save this later for sharpening. There we go. I just duplicated. Control or Command J duplicates. But in this case, I want it to be texture. So I'm going to double click. We're just going to call this Texture. And the layer under it, I'm going to call Paint. Paint. There we go. So let's go ahead and just turn our paint layer off and on. Remember, this is the layer we just did with the brush tool. Okay. Now this texture layer looks pretty good. But right now, as you can see, you can, especially with the hair, right? Right now, as I turn this off and on, it's affecting everywhere in the image. But I actually don't want that. I want this texture to only be visible where the paint layer is visible. Okay. To do that, we're going to use what's called a clipping mask. Basically, it just makes sure that this layer is only visible where the layer underneath it is visible. It's a really cool technology. All right. Or tool, feature, whatever you call it. Okay. So we want to turn this texture layer into a clipping mask. We're going to right click here and we're going to go down to where it says, there we go, Create Clipping Mask. Perfect. Now you're going to see it's going to move over to the right hand side and kind of point down to the paint layer. So that's letting us know that it's basically only affecting the paint layer. Okay. Now check this out. I just want to give you an example here. If I go on the paint layer and I just start painting with any color, it's going to have texture over top of it. I can just turn this texture off and on. So you can see, it's going to basically put texture over top of anything you paint, right? So let's hit undo a couple of times. Basically, now what I have is I have this layer where I just did my painting and then over top of it, you can see, let's just zoom in here. So you can see over top of it, I have my texture back right over top. So all that to be said, this layer that we have, this paint layer, it evens out my subject's skin tone. And then we have our texture that we can put right back over top of it. Okay. So now anywhere I paint, use my brush tool and just kind of paint with this color. It really doesn't matter what you do. Anything I paint on here, it's still going to have skin texture because that's this other layer right on top. Now, if you have too much skin texture, you can go here into your high pass, double click there, and you can bring that lower. If you want it more exaggerated, you can bring it higher. Okay. So you can adjust this at any time. It actually looked pretty good where we had it. There we go. So let's go ahead and group that. There we go. We'll just call that skin smoothing. There we go. We'll group this, call it color. All right. Group that, call it blemish. Fantastic. And then this is going to be sharpening. I'll make that visible. And then let's put a layer mask on this layer, on the sharpening layer. I'm going to hit control and command I to invert that layer mask and then use our brush tool to just make it visible here, like over top of the eyes. All right. So I'm just basically just sharpening the eyes a little bit. So let's make that invisible and visible. All right. Especially, yep, right here over top of her pupils. There we go. So if I zoom out a little bit, you can see it just kind of sharpens her eyes. It's not a super strong effect, but it does kind of bring your attention back to its subject size. All right. And all in all, this looks pretty good. Let's go back to our skin smoothing. I'm going to go to my paint layer. Okay. Make sure your flow is set to, you know, 10% or so. And I'm just going to smooth it a little bit more. I like to keep it really natural. Keeping in mind that I do have skin texture over top of this. So I don't have to worry about the fact that I'm just using the brush tool. It's not actually going to take away the skin texture because again, there we go. I brought my flow to 5% just now because I felt like 10% was even just a little bit too strong. There we go. Just kind of smoothing this out a little bit more. There we go. Really nice flow, like a low flow. Just kind of helps us out. Okay. Kind of lighten that area up there a little bit. Very nice. All right. So there's the before and after. So you can see it's actually quite, does quite a bit. Let's do eraser. So I'm going to hit E for the eraser tool and just erase it just a tiny bit around the sides. Just make it look a little more natural. But as you can see, that does quite a bit. You know, it's actually quite helpful. And again, I can zoom all the way in and the skin texture stays over top of it. So just a really great technique. You can basically paint new skin on a person and then on another layer, have the skin texture fully intact. Okay. That looks really good. Now, the last thing I want to do is just a little bit of color balance on my subject's face. So let's create a new layer on the top of everything. We'll go to select down here to color range. And we'll just click on our subject's face. There we go. Hit okay. We'll go to layer down to new adjustment layer and over to color balance, just like we did before. Let's hit okay. And then we're going to use the same process just like we did in our previous section. So we'll go to our mid-tones. There we go. Let's just add a little red. There we go. Maybe a little magenta and maybe a little bit of yellow. Okay. Let's go to our shadows. Maybe add a little bit of red. Not so much. There we go. And we'll go to our highlights as well. Fantastic. And again, I'm just using tab to go between these. The highlights look pretty good where they were. All right. Highlights look pretty good. Let's just turn this off and on. All right. I think it's a little bit too much magenta skin. So let's just kind of go in and change that a little bit more. There we go. I'll turn that off and on. And that looks good. I'm just going to lower the opacity of that just a little bit. We have our color balance. Just kind of giving our subject skin just a little bit more color. There we go. A little bit more green. That's looking good. Just a little bit more color in the skin. Fantastic. All right. I think that's looking really good. Let's go ahead. We're going to hold alt or option and then click on this background. So there's the before and after with this image. So a bunch of little small steps, but you can see why they're making a pretty big difference. There's, again, the before and the after. So let's go ahead. We started off with this color where we basically just targeted that red color, kind of removed it. We did our blemish removal, you know, for the little spots. We did our skin smoothing. Maybe that's a little bit too visible. We can just take that entire layer and lower the opacity a little bit. We did some sharpening and then our color balance. So again, here's our before and the after. Bunch of small little steps, but they add up to make a big result. And our skin looks totally natural. Our subject still looks like themselves. This doesn't look like a highly retouched image in my opinion. And that's kind of the goal. It's, you know, create a really natural looking photo. Just kind of like even some skin out, remove some blemishes, and we're good to go. Thanks so much for watching. Got another great skin retouching section for you coming up next. Bye everyone.