- Liquify Filter: Retouching Facial Features the Easy Way
- Feather & Free Transform: Making Facial Features Symmetrical
- Feather Selection: Trimming Eyebrows
- Brush Tool: Removing Eye Veins
- Healing Brush & Patch Tools: Removing Blemishes
- Apply Image & Gaussian Blur: The Secret to Great-Looking Skin
- Liquify Filter: Liquify’s Other Killer Tool for Retouching Body Parts
- Liquify Filter: Creating Beautiful Teeth
- Pinch Filter: Reducing Jaws and Jowls
- Puppet Warp: Repositioning Body Parts Using Puppet Warp
- Free Transform: Covering Studio Mistakes
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Feather & Free Transform: Making Facial Features Symmetrical
More often than not, the features on your subject’s face won’t be perfectly symmetrical (one eye might be higher than the other, or their nose might be a little crooked at the nostrils or the bridge, or one side of their smile might extend higher than the other, and so on). Luckily, you can bring all these misaligned features back into alignment using just a few tools, and some techniques you’ve already learned (but we do get to learn a helpful new tool this time, as well).
Step One:
Here’s the image we want to retouch, opened in Photoshop, and there’s a very common problem here (well, when it comes to facial symmetry anyway), and that is our subject’s eyes aren’t lined up perfectly symmetrically. There’s a surprisingly easy fix for this, though.
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Step Two:
Get the Lasso tool (L) and make a very loose selection around both the eye and eyebrow on the right (as shown here), because we’re going to need to move them together as a unit. Of course, at this point, if we moved this selected area, you’d see a very hard edge (a dead giveaway), so we’ll need to soften it by adding a feather to the edges that will help it blend right in. So, go under the Select menu, under Modify, and choose Feather. When the Feather Selection dialog appears, enter 10 pixels (as seen here), click OK, and now you’ve softened the edges of your selection.
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Step Three:
Press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to copy your selected eye area (with its soft edges) up to its own separate layer. Here, I hid the Background layer, so you can see what just the eye area looks like. What’s nice about seeing this view is that you can see the area you selected has soft edges, instead of sharp, harsh edges (the checkerboard pattern shows you which parts of this layer are transparent). By the way, to hide a layer (like the Background layer, in this case), go to the Layers panel and click on the Eye icon to the left of the layer’s thumbnail. To see the layer again, click where that Eye icon used to be.
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Step Four:
Now, switch to the Move tool (V) and then press the Up Arrow key on your keyboard a few times until her eyes line up (as seen here). In this case, I had to hit the Up Arrow key 12 times until they lined up. Take a look at the before and after below to see what a difference this little move makes. On the next page, we’ll look at continuing our facial symmetry project by using a different (but also very popular) technique on her lips.
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Step Five:
Now let’s work on making her lips more symmetrical. If you zoom in (press Command-+ [plus sign; PC: Ctrl-+]), you’ll see that the left side of her lips doesn’t look as wide as the right, and they turn up a bit, but this is an easy fix (and when you see the final before and after, you’ll see it was worth doing). Click on the Background layer to make it active, then get the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) from the Toolbar and make a rectangular selection from the center of her lips to outside of the right edge of her lips (her right, as seen here; we looked at selections back in Chapter 1). Press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to copy just that selected area up onto its own separate layer. Now that I have three layers, I went ahead and renamed them with descriptive names (to do that, in the Layers panel, just double-click directly on the names themselves. This highlights the text, so you can type in a new name. When you’re done renaming, press the Return [PC: Enter] key to lock in your rename).
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Step Six:
Press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to bring up Free Transform (you can tell it’s engaged when you see control points around the area you put up on its own layer). Now, Right-click anywhere inside your Free Transform bounding box and, from the pop-up menu that appears, choose Flip Horizontal (as shown here) to flip your right 1/2 lip over to a left 1/2 lip (as seen here).
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Step Seven:
Once you’ve made the flip, move your cursor inside the Free Transform bounding box again, but this time you’re just going to drag the flipped lip layer into place over her left lip (as shown here). Now, just click anywhere outside the bounding box to lock in your horizontal flip. If you look at the edges of the area we just flipped, you can see the skin around her lips is a little lighter than the skin its covering. So, in the next step, we’ll have to erase those edge areas, so you don’t see a noticeable difference.
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Step Eight:
Start by clicking on the Add Layer Mask icon (it’s the third icon from the left—it looks like a rectangle with a circle in its center) at the bottom of the Layers panel. If you look in the Layers panel, you can see it added an additional thumbnail to the right of your lips layer. That’s the layer mask you just added, and that allows us to hide/show areas using the Brush tool (it’s kind of like an eraser that’s not permanent, if you make a mistake). Now, get the Brush tool (B) from the Toolbar, choose a soft-edged brush from the Brush Picker up in the Options Bar, press X on your keyboard to set your Foreground color to black, and then paint over the edges of your flipped lip layer, so it blends in with the skin from the original behind it. Lastly, paint a single black stroke down the center of her lips to better blend that edge (as shown here) to complete the symmetry retouch. A before and after of the lips are shown below.
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