- 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
Apply Image & Gaussian Blur: The Secret to Great-Looking Skin
The problem with Lightroom’s method for skin softening is that it’s so soft it pretty much obliterates the skin texture, and your subject’s skin winds up looking pretty plastic. That’s why, when it comes to softening skin and keeping texture, we always head over to Photoshop. We’re going to do a technique called “Frequency Separation,” which is wonderful for fixing uneven, splotchy skin and getting rid of a multitude of problems, but without losing the critical skin detail. It’s pretty amazing, really.
Step One:
In Lightroom, select the image you want to retouch, then press Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E) to open it in Photoshop. Before we do any skin retouching, we always remove any large, obvious blemishes first. You can do that in Lightroom using the Spot Removal tool (Q) before you even bring it over to Photoshop, or you can use Photoshop’s Spot Healing Brush (J), which is awesome (see page 66). Basically, you make your brush a little larger than the blemish you want to remove (using the Left/Right Bracket keys on your keyboard), then simply click once over the blemish and it is gone. Once you’ve removed any major blemishes (either in Lightroom or here in Photoshop), you’re going to duplicate the Background layer twice, so press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to duplicate it, and then press it again to make a second copy.
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Step Two:
Click on the Eye icon to the left of the top layer’s thumbnail to hide it from view, since we’ll be working on the layer below it—the middle layer, Layer 1. Now, click on the middle layer to make it active (as shown here), then go under the Filter menu, under Blur, and choose Gaussian Blur. When the filter dialog appears (seen here on the left), we’re going to increase the Radius amount until the skin is blurry, so it looks like all the tones are blending together (I usually wind up around 7 pixels for my 30-megapixel camera, but if you have a higher resolution camera, you might have to go to 8 or 9 pixels. The higher resolution your camera, the higher this number will need to go). Click OK, and we’re done with that middle layer for now.
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Step Three:
In the Layers panel, click on the top layer to make it the active layer, then click where that Eye icon used to be (to the left of the layer’s thumbnail) to make it visible again. Then, go under the Image menu and choose Apply Image. When the Apply Image dialog appears, you’re going to input a few settings that you need for this technique. I would explain these in detail if I only understood them, but here’s what I do know: they work, so use these settings. From the Layer pop-up menu, choose Layer 1; from the Blending pop-up menu, choose Subtract; for Scale choose 2; for Offset chose 128; and then click OK. Your layer should look gray with a blurry version of your image (as seen here).
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Step Four:
From the pop-up menu near the top left of the Layers panel (where it says “Normal”), change the blend mode to Linear Light (as seen here). At this point, the image should just look like the normal image (not blurry, not gray, just normal, regular). Don’t worry, this gets a whole lot more interesting in a minute (apologies to my editor, who I imagine just shuddered reading the phrase “a whole lot”).
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Step Five:
You’re going to do your work on the middle layer, so go ahead and click on it in the Layers panel to make it the active layer again. Finally, we’re getting to the good part. Get the Lasso tool (L) from the Toolbar (this is the one that lets you draw free-form selections), and click-and-drag it around an uneven area of your subject’s skin. It can be a fairly large area, like their entire chin area or most of a cheek (like you see here, where I selected her cheek on the right), etc.
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Step Six:
Now that our selection is in place, we’re going to do something that we do very often in retouching—soften the edges of that selection you just made. Right now, if we did anything to this area, you’d see a very obvious, hard edge along that selection you made, and it would look pretty terrible (and obviously retouched). So, we soften those edges so they’re not hard and obvious, but instead, we get a smooth blend from the area we retouched to the surrounding skin. It’s called “feathering” your selection, and to do that, you go up under the Select menu, under Modify, and choose Feather. When the dialog appears, I usually enter 15 pixels as my Feather Radius (the higher the number, the softer the edge, and again, if you have a 52-megapixel camera or something like that, you should use 20 pixels or so. In this case, we’re going for a feather of 15). Click OK to soften the edges of that lasso-selected area.
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Step Seven:
Next, you’re going to apply a Gaussian Blur to your selected area (I usually wind up using 24 pixels, but again, higher megapixel cameras need a higher number, so try 32 and see how it looks), and once you apply this blur, that’s it, it smooths out the skin! It blends in perfectly, and there’s plenty of skin texture there, as well. It’s a pretty magical technique. Now, you’re going to repeat just the last parts of this process for other areas of skin (this includes the face, arms, chest, etc.): (1) Make a selection around another skin area with the Lasso tool. (2) Apply about a 15-pixel Feather Radius to the edges. (3) Apply a 24-pixel Gaussian Blur to finish the technique. Press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to Deselect, then repeat somewhere else on your subject’s face or other area of skin. I put a before and after below, so you can see the difference.
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