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Super Fast and Easy Facial Retouching
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Super Fast and Easy Facial Retouching
Kyle Pero on Mar 25th 2008 with 167 Comments
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In this tutorial, I will show you how to repair some image noise from a low-quality shot,
and I will show you an extremely quick and easy way to smooth out a person’s face. The
woman in this shot is not a model, and she has a lot of character so we don’t want to overdo
it with the smoothing. We will make it look real and natural.
The Image
You can get the image we’re using in this tutorial from Free Range Stock here. The
technique can be applied to a beauty shot as well, you would just have to adjust the settings
on some of the steps to get a more extreme smoothing effect.
Step 1
If you look at the blue channel, you will notice that it doesn’t look so good. There are a lot
of JPG artifacts that you don’t really see when looking at the RGB composite, but it’s good
to fix it for a variety of reasons. Importantly, it will reduce the color noise in the image and
give us more flexibility when making corrections later down the line.
Duplicate the Background layer. On the new layer go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.
Enter 10 for the radius. Hit OK. Set the layer’s blending mode to color. Double-click on the
layer to the right of the name to open the blending options. Under Advanced Blending,
uncheck the R and the G. This makes the layer only affect the blue channel no matter what
we do to it. Now go back and check out the blue channel. Looks better.
Step 2
Now I will use Curves to balance the color in the image. I suggest using Curves over Levels
for everything. Curves just gives you much more control.
Download my curve preset to your hard drive.
Create a new Curves Adjustment layer at the top of the layers palette, then click the little
button to the right of the Preset control, and select Load Preset and load the file.
Step 3
The technique that we are going to use to smooth out the face doesn’t require very much
cloning at all. I do want to use the Healing Brush Tool (J) on any major freckles or
blemishes, in this case her four large freckles.
Create a new blank layer just above the background copy. Select the Healing Brush (J) and
make sure that "Sample All Layers" is checked on the property bar. Paint over those spots
to remove them.
A good rule of thumb is to never modify your source image in any way. That is why we
used the healing brush on a new layer. You never know when you might need to go back to
where you started.
Step 4
Select the three layers below the Curve layer. Drag them down to the New Layer button to
duplicate them. Hit Command+E to merge the three duplicates.
Select the Polygonal Lasso Tool and click around her face until all the skin is selected. It
doesnt need to be too neat. Now go back, and while holding Alt, click around and deselect
anything that is not skin like the eyes, eyebrows, lips, and nostrils. Go back once more and
deselect any areas of detail that need to remain, like the edge of the nose, her dimples, her
collar bones, and the edge of her chin. This is what my selection looks like as a quick mask:
Hit Shift+Command+I to invert the selection and then Delete to delete those pixels. You
won’t actually notice a change because the layers below are the same as the layer we are
working on.
Step 5
Go Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Enter 20 for the Radius. Set the layer Opacity to 75%.
Select and duplicate the same bottom three layers just like we did before. Hit Command+E
to merge them. Put that layer just above the blurred layer. With the new layer selected, hit
Command+Alt+G. This creates a clipping mask, which is indicated by the arrow pointing
down on the layer. This means that the layer on top will use the bottom layer’s transparency
as a mask.
Step 6
With your new layer still selected, go to Filter > Other > High Pass. Enter 4 for the Radius.
Now you can really see how that clipping mask is working, but not for long. Set the
blending mode of the layer to Linear Light and set the Opacity to 40%. Done!
Rollover the image below to see the before / after…
This will pretty much work on any portrait, but the goal isn’t to make the person look like a
model, it’s just meant to smooth things out a bit yet still look natural. That is why it works
well on everyday average people.