- 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
Pinch Filter: Reducing Jaws and Jowls
This is a retouch you usually do when there’s more than one person in the photo, but you want to slim just one of them. This is one of those techniques that, when you look at it, you think, “There’s no way this is going to work.” But, it actually works amazingly well, even though it only takes a few seconds. Go figure.
Step One:
In Lightroom, click on the image you want to retouch and then press Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E) to open it in Photoshop. Here, we’re going to reduce his jaw area and jowls.
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Step Two:
Get the Lasso tool (L) and draw a very loose selection around the jowl area that you want to reduce (as shown here, where I zoomed in a bit tighter just to help you see the area I selected better). I avoided selecting his chin because this technique would make it smaller, as well. If you want that, go ahead and select the chin area, too, but in this case, I think his chin itself looks fairly proportional to the rest of his face. Now that our selection is in place, let’s soften its edges to help hide the fact that we did a retouch by going under the Select menu, under Modify, and choosing Feather. When the Feather Selection dialog appears, enter 10 pixels and click OK.
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Step Three:
Now, go under the Filter menu, under Distort, and choose Pinch. When the Pinch dialog appears, drag the Amount slider to the right to the point where it reduces the jowl area, but without looking too obvious. In this case, I chose 58%, but depending on your subject, you might need to use more or less—it all depends on the photo. Unfortunately, this filter doesn’t show you an onscreen preview. So, to see a quick before and after of what the filter is doing, take your cursor and click-and-hold right inside the preview window (as I’m doing here) to see the before, then let go to see the after. Click OK, and the Pinch filter is applied to your selected area (a before/after is shown below). In some cases, applying the filter once just isn’t enough (it’s too subtle), so to apply the same filter again, using the exact same settings, press Command-Control-F (PC: Ctrl-Alt-F). When you’re done, press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to Deselect.
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