Skin Retouching: Masterclass: How to (part 3)

Smoothing

Last time, we showed you the professional way of you removing little blemishes, pimples or dimples on the skin of a sitter - but that's not the be all and end all of the situation.

A key to pro retouching is to smooth out as much of the face as you can. If you look at the original, hypercritically, you will find subtle blotches, patches and marks all over the place, er, face. A pro retoucher would spend a great deal of time working through this with a variety of brush sizes.

They work close up and zoomed in around distinct small areas, but periodically sit back and assess the bigger picture - even using large brushes to smooth out bigger patches.

This process takes a long time, but it is worth it. Continue to click your curved layer on and off, as well as alt+clicking the original layer to see your progress and make sure that you're happy with the way it is going. Don't overdo the brushing, otherwise you will end up adding new lines rather than taking away the unwanted ones! It's a subtle art that becomes more rewarding as you put more time into it.

As you work through an image, it will start to look much cleaner - but you need to be very attentive to look for patches that can be removed by dodging and burning.
As said earlier, given that your skin may be darker or lighter in places, doesn't change the fact that it is still one and the same skin and has the same tonality - therefore, it can be dodged and burnt to match other areas.

This applies even to seemingly different areas, such as red blotches, freckles and moles:

Copy Brushing & Healing

So the copy brush finally rears its head! Remember that the copy brush is not the be all and end all of PhotoShop, as some claim. It is, however, very useful in the right situations - here there's some subtle use of reshaping the left (facing) tooth, removing a stray hair that's going across the right (facing) eye and a couple of other little spots that were too 'strong' to be dodged or burnt.

So why not use the copy or the heal brush more? Simply because it softens things more than is acceptable, especially for larger scale work. It's fine for small scale work, when your eye won't be able to see all available details, but it's best to work on your largest working file size and work down from there.

Copy brushing works on the principle that you press alt then click the area that you are copying. Then you can click and brush an area elsewhere, which copies from your original copy/sample point.
So if you start brushing and move, say, left then you will begin to copy the part of the image from the left of your sample point to the new location. Sometimes you will be working a bit blind - but lots of subtle fiddling and you can get some good results. The healing brush or patch has its place, but tries to be a bit cleverer - here you select an area with alt in exactly the same was as with the copy brush.

The difference however is that not only do you brush the 'copied' area, the brush attempts to imitate the colour and tone of the area that you are brushing. Very clever, but there are flaws - it 'pulls' the surrounding colours to make a measure, and essentially gradients these away from the brush to give an integrated and smooth look - sometimes it can catch an edge however and do the wrong thing, like this:

The red lines have been added so you can see the shape - look closely below left the bottom red line and you can see how the tool has 'pulled' the purple colour excessively, yet integration further down the face is accurate.

This is a crude example to merely demonstrate the problem at its extreme - but it is worthy of being attentive to any detail, as something that has been clearly “Photoshopped” quickly loses credit if it doesn't look right.