Transcription
How to Retouch Skin in Photoshop - Beginner's Guide
Hey everyone in today's Photoshop video, I want to show you how to professionally retouch skin inside of Photoshop and it's going to be a quick two-step process. The first step is removing any imperfections, blemishes, and things like that. I'm going to show you that first, then we'll do an overall softening of the skin using a multi-layer process, and I'll show you how to do that exactly and the whole thing takes about a minute. If you do it quickly, the first time around it takes a few minutes. But once you get used to it, you could go to the step. So I'll try my best to name this step. Step one, step two and step three. So you could follow along any time you need to retest skin.
Let's jump into the computer and Photoshop and I'll show you how to do the process from scratch. So before we softened the skin in here and retouch, we're going to remove any imperfection that we see, that we want to remove the fastest way is using the spot healing brush tool. So, yeah, if you click this, it's the first option on top.
Also, the command J will get you this, but you want a spot healing brush tool and on top here, you want to make sure the type is content-aware. So make sure that's selected here. Everything else is the default and you want to also change the size of your brush depending on the resolution. So if you see the circle, not the red one, that's just my highlighter, the one right here.
That's how big my brushes. So I could zoom in and let's say I wanted to remove a mall. You wouldn't typically want to remove moles in my opinion, but it's up to you, but if you just click and drag here, Just like that you could remove more for you once we soften the skin in the next step, that's going to be even less noticeable.
So you could do the same thing with some of these makeup spots here. You basically just go ahead and drag and click and it'll just help with those imperfections. So go ahead and look around your image and anywhere you like to apply this, just go ahead and drag and click and he should apply it pretty well.
You could also do this with kind of fine lines under the eyes if you want to. But a lot of times that's not going to look natural and the next step is going to help us get rid of fine lines and wrinkles, and we don't have to do it in detail. So I'll fast forward through this process of the spot healing brush.
Then I'll show you how to soften the skin in the next step. Now for doing the retouching as softening the skin here, the first step is to take your layer, click on it and duplicate it command J will duplicate the layer for you or control J on a PC. Now, once that layer is duplicated, this top layer wants to select it, press command or control eye, and that's going to invert the layer. And finally, we're going to go to the blend mode here. You see this normal dropdown, bring it all the way to vivid light. So we should get this kind of gray look and don't worry about what this looks like just yet. We have a few more steps to do here.
The next step is we're going to come over here to filter and then go to other and then choose high pass and high pass somewhere between 24 and 25 is the magic number here. So go ahead and choose either 24, 25, and press okay, and finally, we're going to go back to filter again. We got to go to blur and we're going to do gauzy and blur. Choose that option and then this number is very important here. Anywhere between three to five, I notice is a good number. So if you go close to zero, it's a significant amount of blur and it's going to look very fake and if you go all the way to a hundred, it's going to be too little. So somewhere between three and four, I usually choose four, and that gives me a good place to start. I could always dial this back through a passage. I'll show you that in a minute. So this obviously doesn't look good, but. Were you going to fix it in the next step? So with layer one selected. Go down here and you see this option, that's called mask add a layer mask.
If you hold option or alter on a PC. So I'm holding an option on a Mac here and clicking and when I do that, it creates this mask here and by holding option is the inverted mask. So I don't want this to be white. I want it to look black. So now let me come over here to this site and choose my brush. So I just choose the brush option here.
The shortcut for it is B. You could go ahead and change your brush size, here again, this depends on the resolution of your image, but in my case, I need to be somewhere around 400. I have a very high resume and. That black circle here in the middle is my brush size. Hardness is zero normal mode opacity at a hundred and flows at 50%.
Those are my settings and I want to make sure this over here is switched with the white in the foreground of black in the background. So this little arrow switches that, or the option X switches that between white and black. Now I could go ahead and paint here, watch this as I paint, it's gonna smooth out her skin, just like that.
So yeah. This step is super fast and you could take your time or you could kind of do it as quickly as you want to. If you don't have much time and it's going to smooth out the skin just like that. So I could do it over her bridge of the nose, under her eyes right here over the lips on her chin, super simple process of just brushing it.
If you make a mistake, if you press X, it's going to switch this back and then you could basically. Brushback the section you made a mistake on. If I press X again, it's going to switch it again and I could brush over it again. So go through this and smooth out as much as bit as you like. Don't worry if it's too much just yet.
We're going to fix that on the very next step. Now, in order to see the before and after, if you come to this layer, we made layer one. If you. Click the eyeball you could see before and now you could see after if this seems like it's too much for you for your taste or for your image, you could just go ahead with this layer selected and bring down the opacity somewhere closer to 50%, 70%, whatever you like.
This is really more to taste and what you're going after. If you want a really high retouch-looking model image maybe a hundred is fine. It goes zoom out to get a better picture here, but again, that's your opinion of what you want. They'll pass it to be. I usually take it somewhere between 80 in the case of this image, it looks pretty good and I didn't take too much time removing blemishes and really taking my time with the finer brush. Retouching some of these parts, my brushes relatively big, but this process only took a couple of minutes when I do it without explaining it. So it's a very fast process of doing high-end retouching inside of Photoshop.
I hope you found this quick video useful. Please give it a thumbs up and subscribe for easy to follow social media tech and Photoshop videos and I'll catch you next time. Thanks for watching.