The Basics of Photo Retouching

Here are a few tips that most professionals use that you can too if you are an enthusiast.

1. Techniques used to soften the skin

Professionals often spend a large amount of time poring over skin the skin of the face, and brush in skin tones and remove marks at a very fine level. You can easily use the adjustment brush which is loaded with negative clarity. This can clear up the face in a matter of seconds, and you won’t have to worry about spending that much amount of time on the face pores. The end results will not be 100% similar to professional pictures, but you will have more of less of a similar result

2. Removes spots and blemishes

This integrates the functions of four kinds of tools: the spot healing brush, the healing brush, patch and clone stamp tools. The Spot Healing Brush is good for spot removal if the spots are over clear areas. The healing brush has a similar setup, but you can clearly specify the source by pressing alt and clicking on the area of interest. The patch tool enables you to drag a selection to tidy up the detail within, so its usefulness is good for removing irregular marks.

3. Boost the eyes

The eyes are the focal point of any kind of facial photographs and portraits, so it is but logical to give them a lift. The adjustment brush within the Camera Raw plugin is deal for adjusting the eyes and enhancing the features so as to bring them out and highlight their beauty. You can make quick changes by painting over the areas. A few strokes over the iris after which you apply a boost in exposure, saturation and clarity and that is what is usually needed.

4. Shaping the body

This is a very risky area of retouching photos because if you’re not subtle enough about it, you can get easily discovered for trying to add shape to an otherwise shapeless model. First of all, there’s the Liquify flter, which basically allows you to use the Forward Warp and Pucker tools to gently use the pixel pushing features to adjust the pixels around. You have to work with a larger brush and gradual stroke build up. The other method you can use is to copy and paste similar areas from other regions of the image into the region of interest.

5. Lifting the skin

A change in color can add vivacity to the face. A rapid and simple way to do it is to give the skin tone a breezy, fresh look by lightening them. This function is best carried out in the lightroom or camera raw using HSL panel. Highlighting Luminance tab, then use the besieged tool and click and drag up to the skin to live the orange and the reds. Be sure to be gentle as you will have to maintain complete subtlety.

6. Selective sharpening

The tool is no new concept to any photographer or art editor. You can just generate a new layer in Photoshop, set and paint Sample Layers over the details. Try the High Pass sharp tool use tip one without inverting the layer.

7. How to repair yellow teeth

If you do manage to come across yellowish teeth, you might want to add a Saturation or Hue adjustment layer, after which you can select Yellow colors from the color drop menu. You can reduce the saturation of yellows and the menu backside to increase and master the lightness slightly. Take the brush tool and start whitening the tooth area but make sure you do not overdo it, and you will be on the safe side. Like all other aspects of photoshop, this also includes a level of subtlety that should not be crossed.

All in all, these tips will help you make changes like the professionals do, by taking half the efforts they take and working smarter, not harder. You might have to go through the whole exercise of staying on subtle terms, but remember that a perfect picture is one that does not reveal any kind of photoshop done by the creator.

-Article Written by Lauren Shapiro, frequent contributor at CHI, SynergyMaids, and CNN.

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