Digital Camera World » photo retouching

Photoshop Retouching: a really simple tutorial for making every portrait perfect

jmeyer — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 02:00:08 +0000

When it comes to portraits, everyone wants to look their best. But with today’s high-resolution SLRs, every spot, blemish and flaw can appear in startling detail. There are of course a few shooting techniques you can use to minimise these, such as bouncing light with reflectors to avoid strong shadows, and using off-camera flash to control the direction of the light to complement the model. However, you don’t need to get bogged down with different techniques and equipment to get great portraits, because Elements has a range of tools specially designed for seamless Photoshop retouching.

In this Photoshop retouching tutorial we’ll start by taking a look at how to make the most of a portrait’s colour and tone within Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), before moving onto Elements’ powerful retouching tools.

Our start image

Taking a look at our start image, above, you can see that it has a cool colour cast, and while the overall exposure is good, the skin tones are a touch light and lacking in tonal detail. In the first few steps we’ll look at how to use Adobe Camera Raw to quickly remove this unattractive cold cast, warm the skin and adjust the exposure to create a more striking portrait with deeper skin tones and detail.

Once the raw adjustments have been made we’ll take a look at special Photoshop retouching tools in Elements and how they can be easily applied to instantly brighten eyes and teeth, as well as quickly remove unwanted spots and blemishes.

So with your portrait ready, let’s give it a go.

Click here to go to Step 1 of our tutorial.

How to retouch photos: pro techniques in 10 easy steps

jmeyer — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 10:17:04 +0000

With fashion and portrait retouching, the devil really is in the detail; you might want to enlarge the eyes a little, remove a few spots, lighten the skin, or even reduce the size of the feet! It’s all work that requires you to get up close and personal, not something you can accomplish with a quick sweep of the brush at 50% zoom. And this is what makes the use of layers and layer masks crucial when you retouch photos: if you make a mistake, you can easily delete or edit the layer and have another go.

Do that same work on the original background layer and you might find, 20 minutes down the line, that you’ve got a wonky arm, one eye bigger than the other and skin that looks like a Botox accident.

It’s not until you see all the elements working together that you can really decide whether something looks right or needs a little tweak here and there – which is easily done when everything sits on separate layers.

In this Photoshop tutorial we’ll cover subtle body slimming and reshaping, skin smoothing and colouration, and background lightening, all on different layers, as well as hopefully give you some new Photoshop tips along the way. All you’ll need for this project is Photoshop CS or above and about 30 minutes.

1 Start Instant slimming
We’re going to start with an old trick to slim our model a touch – not that she needs it, but just to show you how it’s done. Open your start image and duplicate the original Background layer by pressing Ctrl-J.

Next press Ctrl-T to initiate a Free Transform. In the options bar at the top of the screen type 97% in the Width box and hit Enter twice.

2 Crop out the left edge
We need to crop out the left edge of the shot, where the chair now looks skewed – the right side is fine because it’s just white background. Press C for the Crop Tool, zoom in using Ctrl and + and line up the bottom-left edge so you don’t lose more than you have to before extending the crop around the picture. When you’re happy, hit Return.

3 Select the rear
Next we’ll slim down a part of the model’s body. Switch to the Lasso Tool (L) and draw a rough selection freehand around her back and bum, as shown. Float this selection to a new layer by pressing Ctrl-J and then go to Filter > Liquify. Adjust the brush size until it’s about one-sixth of the size of the selection.

4 Liquify the body
Now carefully work down the edge of the dress, using your mouse to drag inwards from the very edge of the clothing towards the body. Try to get the back looking straight and uniform, switching to a smaller brush to iron out little kinks if required. Hit Enter when you’re happy.

5 Check the joins
Zoom in close to check that any reshaped fabric creases and patterns line up with any areas of the dress that we didn’t liquify. You can blend those that don’t by adding a layer mask, clicking it to target the mask and brushing over the join with a soft-edge black brush. Next zoom in to 200% and hold down to the spacebar to drag over to the face. Add a new layer (Layer > New > Layer).

6 Clean up the skin
Switch to the Spot Healing Brush (J), and make sure the tool is set to Sample All Layers in the options bar at the top. Now work around the face clicking on blemishes, using a brush size just slightly bigger than the blemish at hand in each case. Switch to the Clone Stamp Tool when near edges of the mouth and nose to avoid blurring the features. In the options bar, set the Sample menu to Current And Below.

7 Smooth out rough areas
Add a Curves adjustment layer and drag a point in the shadows sector upwards to lighten the shadows on the skin. Click OK, target the layer’s mask and press Ctrl-I to hide the effect. Tap D, then X if need be to set the foreground colour set to white, and use a soft brush to paint over the neck to lighten the shadows.

To smooth the skin a touch, target Layer 3, then press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E to create a new layer that merges all of the existing layers. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set Radius to 3 pixels. Hit OK, then add a mask to this layer by clicking the “Add layer mask” button at the foot of the Layers palette.

8 Paint in this smoothing
To turn the mask black and hence mask out your new blurred layer, click the mask thumbnail to target the mask and then press Ctrl-I. Now tap X if need be to set the foreground colour to white. Using a soft-edged brush of around 50 pixels in size, paint onto areas of the skin that look a little rough, to effectively cut a hole in the black mask and reveal the smoothed skin, avoiding facial features or areas of detail.

9 Lighten the skin
We want to tone down the model’s tan too, so add another Curves adjustment layer, then reshape the curve roughly as shown above. Click OK, target the mask and then press Ctrl-I to conceal this adjustment. With the foreground colour set to white, use a soft-edged brush to paint over the skin, cutting a hole in the mask to apply the Curves adjustment to these areas. Avoid painting over the red dress!

10 Finish Adjusting skin colour
Holding down the Ctrl key, click the Curves layer’s mask to load it as a selection. With the selection active, add a Selective Color adjustment layer: the layer’s effect will be limited to the same areas. Choose Yellows from the dialog’s Colors menu and set Yellow to –100% and Black to +100%. Click OK and save the image as a PSD to preserve all the layers so you can revisit them later if you want to tweak them.

Using Layers

Because using Adjustment Layers and layer masks is so crucial to advanced portrait retouching, we created this handy cheat sheet to better illustrated what we did and how all the layers fit together when you retouch photos.

Click on the infographic to see the larger version, or drag and drop it to your desktop to download it. And if you find this useful, you might like some of the other infographics in our ongoing photography cheat sheet series.

Improve skin tone with Adobe Camera Raw

jmeyer — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:30:31 +0000

Adobe Camera Raw has long included a Clarity slider, which gives a dark outline to edges to make an image really jump off the screen. In the latest incarnations of Camera Raw, the Clarity slider can actually be dragged left, to negative settings, to add a soft-focus effect.

It works very well for smoothing out skin tones, without affecting underlying detail in the way that, say, a Gaussian Blur might do. Applying it to the entire image, however, doesn’t look that great; we need a way of focusing it on just the skin areas.

While we could focus our efforts on using the Adjustment Brush in Camera Raw, masking is always easier done in the main editing window of Photoshop. So the solution is to process two versions of the same image: one with the Clarity smoothing the skin tones and another without.

Then we can simply combine the two versions using layers and masks to ensure that the Clarity smoothing isn’t applied to details like hair, eyes and lips.

And as if this little smoothing trick wasn’t enough, we’ll show you an interesting way of improving skin colour, too.

How to improve skin tone with Adobe Camera Raw

Step 1: Open the RAW image
Open your original image in Photoshop CS and the Camera Raw editor will launch. The image is a little under-exposed, so let’s start by dragging the Exposure slider to the right.

A setting of +1.35 should be about right. We want a bit more surrounding detail to show up too, so push Fill Light to 35 to reveal detail in those darker tones.

Step 2: Set the white balance
The white balance is looking a touch on the warm side too, so select the White Balance tool from the options bar at the top, zoom in, and click in the whites of the eye, which provides us with a neutral tone (for more, learn how to get perfect white balance in-camera using a colour chart).

The White Balance is reset, but is a little on the cool side, so push the Temperature slider up to 4500 (to learn more about colour temperature, download this handy cheat sheet explaining some of the common white balance presets).

Step 3: Adjust the Clarity slider
Click the Open Image button and the edited image will launch in Photoshop. Ignore this for now and open the RAW file again, so that it opens in Adobe Camera Raw. Now drag the Clarity slider downwards to -100. You’ll see the image take on a smooth, soft focus effect. Click Open Image again.

Step 4: Combine the shots
You should now have two versions of the image open in Photoshop; one with the Clarity smoothing effect and one without it. Select the Clarity version and press Ctrl+A to select the entire image, then Ctrl+C to copy it. Next, select the unsmoothed version and press Ctrl+V to paste the smoothed version as a new layer on top of the unsmoothed one.

Step 5: Hide All
Select the top (smoothed) layer in the layer stack you’ve just created, and then add a layer mask by holding down the Alt key and clicking on the Add Layer Mask icon.

This adds a black mask, effectively blocking out the smoothed layer to reveal the unsmoothed layer below. Grab a soft-edged brush of 200-300 pixels and set Opacity to 100%. Ensuring the layer mask is selected, set foreground colour to white by pressing D.

Step 6: Paint over the skin
Zoom in on the face using Ctrl and +, then use the Brush tool to paint over the areas of skin, ignoring details like hair, eyes, mouth, nose and eyebrows, as well as any edge detail such as the sides of the face or bridge of the nose. Be sure to paint over the hands, too.

Step 7: Set Blending Options
You can see that the face is now nicely diffused, but we’ve lost the highlights around the face that help give a sense of three-dimensionality – they’ve turned a little greyish. The solution lies in the Blending Options. Click the FX button in the Layers palette and select Blending Options.

Step 8: ‘Blend If’ for highlights
Focus on the Blend If section of the dialog. Hold down Alt and click the white triangle on the This Layer ramp (top) to split it in two. Now drag the left half leftwards, until the highlight edge reappears.

Don’t go too far for fear of removing the effect from the midtones. We settled at 155. Click OK to finish.

Step 9: Selective Colour
Click on the Add New Adjustment Layer icon at bottom of your Layers palette and choose Selective Colour from the drop-down menu. We’re going to use this adjustment layer to improve the skin colour a little.

Firstly, change the Layer Blending Mode from Normal to Colour, so the image isn’t made lighter or darker, then make sure Reds are selected in the adjustment Colours menu.

Step 10: Neutralise the skin
We can neutralise some of the pinkness in the model’s face by setting Magenta to -20% and then dragging Yellows to -20% (to tone down the corresponding increase in the greens). Turn the layer mask black by selecting it and pressing Ctrl+I.

Finally, repeat Steps 5 and 6 to paint over areas of skin that you want to tone down.

Repair burnt out skies: Photoshop tutorial

dcworld — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:25:04 +0000

How to repair a burnt out sky: use Layer masks to perfect your landscape photos

Photoshop tutorial: A dramatic sky brings a landscape photograph to life, and although the colour-filled skies of dawn and dusk are perfect for awe-inspiring landscape shots, fluffy clouds and deep blue skies of midday can produce equally striking scenes. The midday sun presents a few technical problems though, especially if you need to shoot into or in the rough direction of the sun, the result of which can be a complete burnout of the sky or a steep gradient from white to dark blue. So if your perfect scenic shot is ruined by lens flare or bleaching, don’t panic, get the shot you want and rescue the sky in Photoshop later. Follow the simple steps in this tutorial to learn about layering techniques, how to increase tone and give your landscape photography punch.

1. Select the sky

Open the file named landscape_before.jpg. The position of the sun, just out of shot, has caused the left-hand side of the sky to completely burn out. To start the repairs, grab the Quck Selection tool from the Tools palette and drag the cursor across the sky to select it. Click Refine Edge in the top options bar.

2. Darken the colour.

In the Refine Edge options boxes, set Smooth to 0, Feather to 2 and Expand to 3. Click OK. Go to Layer>NewAdjustmentLayer>Levels and set the three sliders to 50, 1.00 and 255 to darken the blues in the sky. Go to Layer>New>Layer. Select the Eyedropper tool and click into the dark blue patch of sky.

3. Create a gradient

Click the arrow next to the colour swatches in the Tools palette to swap the foreground and background colours. Click into a light blue area of sky. Hold down Ctrl. Click into the Levels layer’s mask to reselect the sky. Select Gradient tool. Hold down Shift. Drag the cursor from the bottom of the sky to the top.

4. Reveal the clourds

Go to Levels>NewAdjustmentLayer>Levels. Drag the Levels layer below the Sky Image layer. Holding down Alt, hover the cursor between the two layers until it changes shape; left-click. This clips the Adjustment Layer to the image layer. Now select a soft-edged black bruch with an Opacity of 20% and Size of 700px.

5. Create a cloud

Use the brush to reveal the cloud on the right. Select the top Sky image layer. Hold down Shift. Click on the bottom layer so all the layers are selected. Hold down Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E to merge the selected layers into a new layer, then use the standard Lasso tool to select the small cloud to the top left of the tree.

6. Match the sky

In the same layer, go to Edit>Copy and then Edit>Paste to create a new cloud layer. Use the Move tool to position the new cloud in the upper centre of the image. Before blending the cloud, go to Enhance>AdjustLighting>Levels and increase the Shadows to 40 to roughly match the sky.

7. Blend the cloud

Create a new Levels Adjustment Layer. Move it below the image layer in the Layers palette. Clip it to the new cloud layer using the technique described in step 4. Select a soft black brush, size 300px, Opacity 20%. Click into the Layer Mask. Paint around the edges of the cloud to blend it seamlessly with the sky.

8. Using the mask

Click onto the merged layer and select the Lasso tool. Select the cloud cluster to the left of the tree, including a little bit of the hilltop. Copy (Ctrl+C) and then Paste (Ctrl+V) the clouds into a new layer. Making sure that the new layer is selected, go to Image>Rotate>FlipLayerHorizontal, then select the Move tool.

9. Manipulate the clouds

Grab one of the corner anchor points; increase the size slightly. This will help to make the clouds look significantly different from the originals. Move the clouds over to the left of the image. Open the Levels window (Ctrl + L) and adjust the midtones to 0.85 to match the blue in the clouds with the sky beneath.

10. Blend with the sky

Create a new Levels Adjustment Layer. Clip it to the bottom of the sky layer as in step 4. Reduce the Opacity to 70%. Use a black brush to remove any sky that covers the hill, reducing the size of the brush as needed to get an accurate blend. Once finished, set the Opacity of the cloud layer back to 100%.

11. Improve the tones

To improve the image contrast, make sure you have the top layer selected, then create a new Levels Adjustment Layer. Adjust the Shadows to 5 and Highlights to 225 and click OK. Click on the Layers palette options and select Flatten Image. This will flatten all of the adjustments down onto one layer.

12. Boost the colours

The colour could do with a boost, so create a new Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer and increase the Saturation to 5. There are also a few warm colours in the foreground rock that can be enhanced by using the Edit drop-down. Select Red and increase the value to 50. Use Ctrl+E to merge the layers.

13. Burn in the shadows

You can now use the Dodge and Burn tools to life the detail within the image. Select the Burn tool and a soft brush with a diameter of 700px and an Exposure of 5%. Set Range to Shadows, then start by painting over the rock, foreground grass and tree to darken the shadows.

14. Highlight the grass

Once you’ve finished with the Burn tool, left-click and hold on the tool icon to select the Dodge tool. Set the Range to Highlights and use the same values as you did with the Burn tool. Now carefully paint over the grass and rock in the foreground to help lift the highlights from the image.

15. Sharpen up

It’s good to sharpen the image before applying a vignette, because this will help to avoid any noise being introduced to the sky. Make sure that you have zoomed the image to 100% by using the Ctrl and + keys to zoom in, then go to Enhance>AdjustSharpness. Again, make sure the preview is at 100%.

16. Adjust the sharpness

Click and hold the left mouse button in the preview window and drag the image to a point of interest – for this image, the rock in the foreground. Now move the Amount slider to 100% and Radius to 1.5. You’ll instantly see the detail in the rock increase in contrast and lose some of the detail.

17. Fine-tuning

Reduce the Radius slider to 0.5 – this will bring back the finer detail – then reduce the Amount slider to 50%. You want a good balance between the two adjustments that avoids haloing, a sign of over-sharpening. You can check the results before and after by clicking on the preview to see the original image.

18. Add a vignette

The sky looks better, but the uniformity of the gradient looks a little unnatural. To give a more natural effect, go to Filter>CorrectCameraDistortion and reduce the Vignette Amount to -30. You’ll see the corners darken slightly. Click on the layer options menu and choose Flatten Image.

Whiten teeth and eyes with Photoshop Elements

dcworld — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 12:09:09 +0000

Learn to retouch portraits using Photoshop Elements to whiten teeth, improve skin tones and improve contrast.

Digital Camera’s 10-part series ‘Teach Yourself Photoshop’ builds into a complete video reference library. These easy-to-follow video guides will take you on a start-to-finish journey through perfecting your photos in the digital darkroom. In this video you’ll find out how to retouch a portrait by whitening teeth and eyes, removing wrinkles, improving skin tones and tidying up hair. Discover how to use the Dodge Tool, Sponge Tool, Spot Healing Tool, Clone Stamp Tool, Adjustment Levels, Adjust Colour for Skin Tone for perfect portraits. Click the links to the right and build up the complete collection with each new issue of Digital Camera.

Remove distracting backgrounds in Photoshop Elements

dcworld — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 11:26:43 +0000

How to remove distracting backgrounds from your photos while keeping important foreground detail

Digital Camera’s 10-part series ‘Teach Yourself Photoshop’ builds into a complete video reference library. These easy-to-follow video guides will take you on a start-to-finish journey through perfecting your photos in the digital darkroom. In this video you’ll find out how to remove a distracing background from a photo while making sure to keep all the important foreground detail. Get to grips with selection tools, Clone Stamp tool and more. Click the links to the right and build up the complete collection with each new issue of Digital Camera.

Remove spots in Photoshop Elements

dcworld — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:52:32 +0000

How to retouch skin to improve your portraits in Adobe CameraRaw and Photoshop Elements

Digital Camera’s 10-part series ‘Teach Yourself Photoshop’ builds into a complete video reference library. These easy-to-follow video guides will take you on a start-to-finish journey through perfecting your photos in the digital darkroom. In this video you’ll discover how to retouch portraits using basic tools in the Adobe CameraRaw editor and Photoshop Elements including the Spot Healing tool, Healing Brush, Clone Stamp tool and more. Click the links to the right and build up the complete collection with each new issue of Digital Camera.

Get perfect skin tones

dcworld — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 11:09:29 +0000

Photoshop Guide 3.3: Improve skintones in Photoshop Elements using Levels

Digital Camera’s 10-part series ‘Teach Yourself Photoshop’ builds into a complete video reference library. These easy-to-follow video guides will take you on a start-to-finish journey through perfecting your photos in the digital darkroom. In this video you’ll learn how to enhance the skin tones in your portrait photographs by using the Levels command in Photoshop Elements. Find out how to adjust the shadows and highlights to create a range of tones while keeping all the details in your portraits. To watch more videos in this series, click the links on the right, and build up the complete collection with each new issue of Digital Camera.

How to remove dust and imperfections from photos

dcworld — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:48:12 +0000

Dust on your D-SLR’s sensor can ruin your image. Watch this video to find out how to use Photoshop’s dust removal tools to get blemish free shots.

No matter how careful you are, dust always seems to end up in the inner workings of your D-SLR. This is most problematic in landscape photography as shooting at small apertures such as f/22 aren’t as forgiving as shooting at, say, f/4. Often the first time you’ll notice these marks appearing on your shots is when you open them up in Photoshop. Most imperfections can be removed using Photoshop’s 3 main dust removal tools, each of which can be used to quickly fix different areas and blemish types. Find out how to use the Spot Healing Brush, the Healing Brush and the Clone tool.

Fix a film scan in Photoshop

dcworld — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:48:08 +0000

No matter how bad the damage to a negative is, scan it and you can carry out a perfect edit in Photoshop Elements.

Most modern desktop scanners have the capability to scan negatives without any major issues. Here, we show you how to take those scans and improve them dramatically.

1. Straighten and crop

The image needs straightening, so choose the Straighten Tool and select Original Size from the Canvas Options. Click and drag the tool along the horizon line from one side to the other. Next, use the Crop Tool to crop away the areas of exposed canvas.

2. Colour cast removal

To correct any colour cast, go to Enhance>Adjust Colour>Remove Colour Cast. Click with the eyedropper in an area of the image that should be a neutral colour, such as the lighter areas within the sky. It may take a few attempts to get this right. Click OK when you’re happy.

3. Healing dust spots

Add a new Layer and choose the Spot Healing Brush. Choose a soft brush, check Proximity Match and All Layers. Zoom in to the image and use the brush at a small size to dab over all the small marks and dust spots.

4. Selective Levels adjustments

Use the Quick Selection Tool to select the sky. Add a Levels Adjustment Layer via Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Levels. Drag the White Point slider to the left to brighten the highlights and modify the midtones with the central (Gamma) slider.

5. More Adjustment Layers

Use other Levels Adjustment Layers to change the tones in other areas of the image. You can restrict the effect of the Adjustment Layer by filling it with black via Edit>Fill Layer. Paint over the area you want to show adjustment by using the Brush Tool with white as Foreground.

6. Fine adjustments

You can make fine tweaks to each Layer mask by painting into it with black and white. Remember, you can always adjust the settings by double-clicking the Adjustment Layer once you’ve painted the mask. When you’re happy, flatten the image via Layer>Flatten Image.