Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 Retouching People, Part 3

Hello, everybody--Mike Brown back with you once again, with another lesson in Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 from Educator.com!0000

We've been talking about retouch--basic retouch, retouching skin using the Clone tool and painting at a lower opacity; in the last lesson, I showed you the Liquify filter and how you can contour parts of people's bodies.0007

Here is the finished product from the previous lesson with the Liquify filter, and if you remember, this is where we started; notice the jaw line and the neck line; we went from there to there--went from all these lines to here.0023

Debbie is looking really good right now; we also used the Liquify filter to just add a little curve to the body under there--just a gentle curve to make everything look a little more feminine, and we also used that Liquify filter to open up this eye just a little bit, to balance them out.0039

So, what have we left to do? There is a lot.0060

As you notice, with the three lessons here, retouching people properly--there are a lot of things to do: the spotting, the skin, now the one thing that we're going to do on the skin here: if you notice, she has a lot of pores and texture in the skin--it's not that nice, smooth, 20-year-old, young skin, so we want to knock that down a little bit.0067

But, before we do that, I want to finish working on the lips and the teeth.0089

Notice, she has a slight overbite on this tooth; this one is not so bad, but this one over here is just a little obvious, when you look at it.0094

Let's fix that right away.0104

The first thing we're going to do is duplicate the layer again, here; and now, we have the original one at the bottom; the one after Lesson 2, and this one.0107

We're going to take just the basic Clone tool again (that is the Letter S) and open up the Options here (we're on the Clone tool): we have a soft brush; OK; we're in good shape.0116

What we're going to do--it's the shadow of the tooth on the lip that is the big giveaway.0129

So, we're going to make our opacity at 20%; again, let's make it 25--2,5, really quickly--25%; close up the Options; make it a little bit smaller on the brush.0136

What we're going to do is, rather than clone from this direct pink area under most of the teeth--notice the tooth over here has a little bit of shine; we're going to duplicate that look under this tooth.0149

Option/Alt, click the target, and just begin painting gently across; and notice how it's removing that shadow.0163

Option/Alt, source at that same beginning spot again; Option/Alt, source again; now, we'll bring in the pink from the side; and pretty much...just with a little bit more...there you go!0172

I have one spot right there that should be a little bit pink; fix that up.0189

Now, if we turn it off and we turn it on--just that subtle change (take a look at her mouth)--you have that, and now you don't.0194

All right, what we can do also--let's try one more thing, just for fun.0203

We're going to take the Lasso tool...actually, I'm going to try something: I haven't tried this before--this is an experiment for me, too.0209

Let's go back and draw a rectangular Marquee, and let's go back to the Liquify filter again.0218

I just want to see what is going to happen here; I don't even know--I have never done this one on this particular...0224

We have a huge brush--we're bringing it down (left bracket key; coming down...); all I want to do is try to move those teeth upward, just a little bit.0231

Let's go ahead and see what happens; we're just going to push up the edge of the tooth--oh, it's working!--just taking the edge, the actual edge of the tooth, and backing it upwards just a tiny bit, so that we level out the teeth.0241

Push this edge up just a hair...and the middle; there; let's click OK, hide the crawling ants, do Command+Z, and let's go back and do that with the History brush.0262

Liquify, up, down, up; that looks really nice now!0274

There is where it was before; there is where it is; again, that worked really well.0281

There are so many tools you can use; we took the shadow out and moved the teeth up.0285

Now, the other thing I would like to do to her lips: the shape, down around the bottom here--it's a little thick on the sides--it doesn't have a nice contour.0292

I don't know if that is just a natural lip, or if Botox, or if age...0301

But, we can fix that, and once again, where are we going to go?--OK, we're going to go back to the Liquify filter again.0306

Filter, Distort, Liquify--see how useful this filter is.0315

Brush size up a little bit, and let's very carefully (a little larger) move that edge, just a little up to smooth it; take that centerpiece down; and just slide that little drop in the side of the lip upwards, just a hair.0320

That looks pretty good; and we're going to go and undo it; zoom it up; redo it.0340

It looks pretty decent, but you can begin to see--look right closely where I push in this area; watch the pixels--see, they smeared slightly.0347

We have a way of fixing all of that; this looks better, but I would like to clean the edge up, anyway.0358

Let's take the Clone tool, and this time, we're going to up it to about 80%.0364

We're going to get rid of the Options; we're going to come up; and we're going to clone just a little bit: Option, click, and just see what happens if we move up and work that edge, right along the lip line, and try to clean it just...oh, yes, that is working.0371

Just cleaning that kind of rough area--see what I'm doing; I'm going to go with a lesser opacity--take it down to about 40%, because I don't want that clean edge to look too obtuse; there we go!0394

Just gradually--I don't want to make it too clean, but want to make it look 100% believable--there we go!0411

I'm just very carefully going around that edge to clean it up just a little bit.0420

It could be how she put the lipstick on...right there.0426

OK, now we're going to go undo it; this is where it was when we started the teeth and the lips, and look at the differential.0431

There to there, and it changes her appearance from there to there--nice little job--just a very subtle change; lips out, lips in--it looks much better.0440

All right, now we're going to get down to skin.0455

OK, here we go: what we're going to do: we're going to go to our Selection brush tool as a mask.0459

We're going to paint the mask so we can see it--it's OK if it's green; we'll take the overlay down to 50-something percent, and we want to smooth the skin around the face and the neck area.0466

But, let's just do...yes, I'll do it right down to that necklace.0481

All right, here we go; we're just going to go ahead and paint the mask with a soft edge in the area of the facial skin, and just go around the outer boundary.0487

Come right down to the neck area, right down that necklace, and back up and around; we'll correct it in a minute, but let's go ahead and fill it in first.0499

OK, we have that; now, get up and look at the edging; we're going to go and make a smaller brush, and Option to remove, and we're going to paint away along that edge, fairly cleanly; I'll show you why in a little while.0515

Right there, and we don't want to get it outside; we don't want to get the necklace involved.0536

Make sure the necklace is clear; we can also clear this up later, but I'll do the best I can now.0544

Do it up around the hair, and that is pretty decent.0550

Now, go back to a selection--that is everything else but, so we're going to Select, Invert the Selection; now, we can look at it as a mask, and you see, what I have done is isolated the face and the neck.0556

All right, back to a selection; so now, we are going to take this particular area here, with Debbie worked to where we are--the physical layer; we're going to copy and paste.0571

Command/Control+C, Command/Control+V; a new layer comes in right above the original layer; if I turn it off and on, it's the same.0587

I turn everything off, and you see, I just did the face.0594

What I want to do, first of all, is: I want to put a layer mask on this mask--I want to protect any of the transparent area, or anything outside of there.0599

We're going to go to Layer, Mask...oh, sorry; one step first: I want to load the selection first--Command/Control, click, so that we have that selected.0609

Then, make a layer mask, which reveals the selected area.0623

Now, you see (Option, click): there is our mask, and we can see that we need a couple of areas--I need to paint it white, so I'm going to reverse the colors with X, and I have the brush; I'm going to paint with a brush, just a regular paintbrush--paint in white.0628

Paintbrush paints on the mask.0646

OK, nice and clean right now--Option/Alt, click; we're back.0648

Now, load that selection; go to the Filter menu, down to Blur; we're going to use Gaussian blur, and up it comes.0654

Oh, I made a mistake; here is one for you: on a pixelized layer, notice that the layer mask has the frame around it; that means anything that is affected--that you work on, like painting--will be on the mask.0666

If I click on the regular pixel layer, notice that the frame is now around the face part.0680

That is what I want to work on; that is a good mistake I made.0686

Notice, that means the mask is what is working as far as working and painting, so I click over here--anything I do will affect where the frame is.0690

On the actual layer, the layer selection is on.0699

We're going to go to the Filter menu, down to Blur, down to Gaussian blur, and you will begin to see what happens, right now.0705

See, you can see it right there; Command/Control+H; it's blurring the skin out.0713

Now, it looks like it's blurring it too much; you can go way up and destroy it, but we're going to come back, enough that it is blurred past...and you can see right over here, on the side, that I have a little carryover; that is OK.0720

All right; we're going to click OK, and what we have done, effectively, notice, is blurred the face out, and the neck; the rest of it is OK.0734

I did this so that you could see the difference, and I left this; we could have blurred that, as well.0745

All right, so you say, "What are you doing?!"0750

First, what I'm going to do is: now I'm going to work on the mask.0753

Everything that is white (Option/Alt, click) is where we see the blurred area.0759

If I paint in black now, I can reveal anything that I don't want blur on--for example, eyes.0766

So, I have my paintbrush; I'm painting with black; I'm painting at 100%, and so watch what happens now.0775

I'm going to paint, actually, at 50%, so you can see this, and we'll just gradually bring it up.0784

Notice, as I paint over the eye, it's putting black on the mask, and I am now revealing areas that would not be blurred on the skin.0789

Be patient; now we'll get the smaller brush, and we're going to go and do the eyebrow area.0804

OK, we see that; looking pretty good; let's go over to the other eye, and let's reveal that eye and the eyelashes.0810

We're bringing back by painting black on the mask; Option/Alt--see what we're doing?0820

We need to do it right in the center, so that the eyes are totally clear.0826

Option/Alt; check it; paint black right in there; and hit this eyebrow, as well.0830

There we go; now, we're going to do the same thing with the lips--bring them back by painting gently over the lip area, right out to the outside.0839

OK, and make sure that the teeth are nice and clean; let's get to the edge of the mouth; Option/Alt, click; make sure I get all of the black; Option/Alt, click.0855

I'll do a little right here, to reveal just that clean edge of nose.0868

There, basically, are the areas of the face that we would want to reveal.0873

But now, you say, "Wait a minute--it is still too blurred!"0878

The final step: taking this layer and dropping the opacity back until we just begin to see skin texture.0882

Watch: down to 77%...and when we get down to about 40%...maybe even up to 50, watch what I do when I turn it off; there is the original skin, right there--all of that texture.0893

I hope you can see this on your screen; and when I turn it on, you can see texture, but it has smoothed that skin out.0910

I want it to be believable (let's even drop it to maybe 40%--there we go); we'll turn it off and turn it on, and even around the eyes, it's a little smoother now.0919

That is a little too much, still; let's drop it into the 30s--off and on; you see skin texture, but the skin looks much smoother.0931

Let's look at it at the neck area; Undo and Redo; there you have how to soften skin texture by taking a separate layer; copy and paste; blur it; paint back on a layer mask the areas you want to be crystal-clear; and then pull the opacity back until you get the desired amount.0941

Again, I want the integrity to be maintained on this shot.0969

So now, we have taken it, and we have gone from: that is the original Debbie, to: that is where we fixed the skin and Liquified; that is where we did the lips, and that is where we did the skin.0974

Now, we have a pretty nice-looking change; we went from there to there, looking at the neck area.0989

The only other thing I would like to do is make one last mask, for exposure only.0996

Let's do a Levels; we have our white mask (oops, I had a selection active; that is the problem; do that again--I deselected the selection)--Levels with an overview, and what I want to do is paint on the mask.1004

I'm going to show you one final trick here: we're going to paint with the paintbrush at 100% opacity, and paint on the mask in black.1020

We will use that backslash--remember the backslash?1033

Now, we have no mask, so we don't see it; but notice, the eye went gray; so now, we can paint with the red area and see what we have right here.1038

We'll take the bright area of the neck and just go ahead; we'll do this very quickly.1048

Paint that; and that looks pretty good; now we'll come up, and I want to clean out that piece of jewelry; Option (oops, I want to go and reverse the colors--sorry), and I'm painting out because we're painting on here.1057

We got that back; that's fine; all right, let's backslash out and look what we have done to the mask.1075

But now, we have masked it and left everything else; we want this area that is black to be the selection; very easy trick here.1082

To invert the mask, do Command on a Mac/Control on a PC, the letter I, and you notice that the mask flips.1093

That is it--so now, let's go to Option/Alt, click, Command/Control to load the selection--or we don't even need to do that--excuse me--we have the mask; sorry, I lost control.1103

Let's bring back the Levels; now, the mask is only revealing the neck area, so if we darken it just slightly, notice how the color comes up, too.1115

Remember, exposure affects color; and there--we have now adjusted the brightness level and brought it down on the neck.1126

So, we have now done teeth, lips and skin texture; one final trick for you--there is one more.1136

This one, I want to show you on this particular image here--it's unretouched, but I just want to show you how this works--it's kind of cool.1149

Let's see; maybe I can do this on Debbie...yes, I can--that will do this!1158

All right, one of the things I see--her cheeks are probably high, and it would be nice if they were a little smoother; it would look a little younger.1166

So, what we're going to do is: we're going to make a blank layer, right above the face.1173

Click the layer--there is your blank layer; I'm going to go to the Edit menu; I'm going to do Fill Layer, and I'm going to fill it with 50% gray.1180

I click OK, and now we have a layer that is 50% gray; I want to get it on the top, so that none of those exposure controls affect it.1190

And you say, "What are you doing?!"1202

All right, Blend mode: remember the Overlay mode that we used for High Pass Sharpening--anything that is brighter than 50% gray is bright; anything that is darker is darker; but neutral gray--50%--does not show at all.1204

Change the Blend mode to Overlay, and you can see nothing; but you can still see that it is gray.1223

Now, we're going to take our Burn; we're in Dodge tool; the Burn tool darkens; the Dodge tool makes things lighter.1229

What we're going to do is zoom up, and on this layer right here, that we just created, we're going to make a pretty big brush, and we're going to kind of smooth this out, right here, to darken the cheeks down so that they expand just slightly.1239

We have been working mid-tones; the exposure will make it 15%, and we'll just gently (notice how that contoured)...1258

Do a little darkening, just on the cheeks themselves, just to add a little texturization right down there.1269

There we go; if I turn it off and I turn it on, we get a little effect in the cheek.1280

Very interesting...so you can add contouring.1288

I think I want to brighten that up a little; it's just a little too dark right there, so let's go back and make that this one, at 15%, and just lighten that up just a tiny bit--there we go!1291

So, off and on; it just added a little depth to her skin tone; and there you have a non-destructive way of contouring parts of the body by adding shadows or brightening up.1306

Let me show you one final way; we're going to do it right here on her.1321

We'll add a blank layer, Edit, Fill the Layer with 50% gray, change the Blend mode to Overlay, go to the Burn tool, and we're at 15%, and simply by hitting right there, the cheeks get a little darker, and we can add some blush on the cheek, up at the top, because as it gets darker, the color comes up just a little bit.1326

Drop a little shine off of there, and maybe a little shine on the nose, right in there.1351

We turn it off; we turn it on; notice how that changed things?1357

If we look at the layer itself normally, there you see where I burned and made it darker than neutral gray by burning the gray.1362

That is why, under the Overlay mode, you see a little evidence of color and contour on a portrait.1373

In this lesson, we have wrapped up the retouch on people with more techniques for retouching the skin, teeth, and lips.1382

A lot with the Liquify tool; we did a little bit with cloning, once again, and the texture--the skin texture adjustment--we made by cutting and copying a piece and blurring it using the layer mask and bringing down the opacity on that layer mask to help us.1391

Let's zoom that up so we can see it; turn it off; turn it on; and it very subtly softens the skin out.1417

All these techniques--and non-destructive contouring at the end by using a layer of 50% gray with an Overlay mode, and using the Burn tool or the Dodge tool to add a little color and shape to the skin.1425

All of these--I would suggest that the last three lessons on retouching people...that you go back and review them a couple of times, because it does take some practice to learn how to do this.1441

And again, it is best with a Wacom tablet.1453

All of these little tricks of the trade on how to use the very simple tools: we used the Spot Healing brush; we used the Clone tool; we used the Liquify filter primarily, and we used a little bit of blending with gray, and that is it!1456

All of that to do more retouching, skin techniques, teeth, lips, skin texture, and non-destructive body contouring, all in Adobe Photoshop Elements 11!1473