- 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
Healing Brush & Patch Tools: Removing Blemishes
Lightroom has a Spot Removal tool and it is well-named—it’s for removing spots. But, it’s not a serious retouching tool anywhere along the lines of Photoshop’s brilliant Healing Brush, Spot Healing Brush, and Patch tools—they are light years ahead of the pretty lame Spot Removal tool in Lightroom. But, the only way you’ll truly appreciate how much ridiculously better these tools are is to use them a few times, and then you’ll totally “get” why and you’ll know why it’s worth jumping over to Photoshop to use them (by the way, they are for way more than just retouching, as you’ll see in Chapter 8).
Step One:
Open the image you want to retouch in Photoshop. Here, we want to remove blemishes mostly from her forehead, cheeks, and neck. There are three “healing” tools that we work with, and what and where we’re retouching, helps us choose the right one for the task. All three sample an area from a different part of the face (well, only because we’re retouching a face here) to use as a basis for the retouch. It doesn’t exactly clone that area, it just uses it to help make its repair realistic. The Spot Healing Brush (circled here in the Toolbar) chooses an area to sample for you automatically—use the Left/Right Bracket keys on your keyboard to make your brush a little larger than the blemish and just click. So, while it’s the easiest to use, it’s the least accurate on faces, because in different areas, our skin goes in different directions. The Spot Healing Brush sometimes chooses to sample from an area where the skin’s going in the wrong direction, and you end up with a smudge. Not really a problem on body parts, just on faces.
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Step Two:
With the Healing Brush (circled here), you tell Photoshop where to sample from—choose a nearby area of skin to where you’re retouching and the result is much better, but it’s a little more work. Simply move your cursor over a clean area of nearby skin, press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key, and click once in that area to sample it. Then, move your cursor over the blemish you want to remove, make your brush a little larger than the blemish, and just click once. Don’t paint. Just click once and it’s gone. Note: Look at the middle image here. A preview of the retouch appears inside your round brush cursor, but it doesn’t apply it until you actually click.
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Step Three:
The third healing tool is the Patch tool (circled here) and, generally, it’s used for removing larger blemishes (like a long scar on an arm or a large birthmark), or for removing a bunch of nearby blemishes at once. You use it like the Lasso tool: Click-and-drag a selection around the area of blemishes you want to remove (as seen here on the left). Then, click inside that selected area, drag it to a nearby area of clean skin (as seen here on the right), and you’ll see a preview of how the repair will look. If it looks good, just let go of your mouse button and the selection snaps back into place and the blemishes are gone.
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Step Four:
This last step is for when you want to reduce something, rather than remove it. For example, if you want to reduce a mole, or an area of freckles, but not totally get rid of them. The secret is this: go ahead and remove the mole or blemish, but immediately after removing it (before doing anything else), go under the Edit menu and choose Fade Healing Brush (or Fade Patch tool, if that’s what you used last). This brings up the Fade dialog, which essentially is “undo on a slider.” Drag the slider to the left and it brings back some of the blemish or mole (in this case, the little mole above her lip), so you’re reducing it, not totally removing it.
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