Master Retouching in Affinity Photo

1. Class Introduction: Welcome to your retouching Masterclass. Affinity Photo has everything you need to retouch your photos like a professional. In this course, you'll learn how to harness the full power of these incredible tools. We'll start off nice and simple and learn the foundational skills that you need for retouching. Even if you've never done any retouching before, we'll cover everything you need to get started. We'll learn all about in painting, cloning, sharpening, liquefying, frequency separation, color correction, and dodging and burning. Then after learning the basics, we'll build on those skills as we learn how to retouch like a professional. We'll edit a ton of photos together, so you can see how all of your new retouching skills fit together. During these projects, you'll learn exactly how to retouch a photo from start to finish. That way, you'll be totally prepared to edit your own photos after you finish the course. But before we jump into affinity, I want to mention that this course comes with some important exercise files. I encourage you to download these files because practicing what you learn is the best way to retain all of these new skills that you'll be learning. You can download those files in the next lesson, and then we'll jump right in to your retouching master class. 2. Download the Class Files: Before you begin this class, I recommend you download the exercise files. These files will be necessary for you to follow along with the tutorials to download the files, come to the Project and Resources tab. Then click on the download link. The files will then be downloaded to your computer and you'll be totally prepared to follow along with the rest of the class. 3. Inpainting Brush: In this first chapter of the course, we'll learn about the best retouching tools that affinity photo has. To start in this video, we'll learn all about the in painting brush. I want to start with this tool because it's the tool that I always start with when retouching. It does an amazing job of getting rid of all of the little blemishes and distractions. All you need to do is paint over an area and boom, no more blemish. Before we can use this tool, there is a little bit of setup that we need to do. First, I'm going to add a new pixel layer. We'll use this blank layer to paint on top of so that we don't destructively edit on top of the actual photo layer. This also allows us to turn this layer on and off so that we can see the before and after. Once you have that, you can go ahead and select the inn painting brush tool. You may need to click on this little triangle to open up the list of tools, and then select the in painting brush tool. Once you have that selected, every time you select a different tool, it will still be there to select. It will also be there every time you open the program. Now that that's taken care of, we just need to go up to the context toolbar and change this from current layer to current layer and below. This is super important. If you leave this set to current layer, well, the current layer that we're working on is a blank layer. The printing brush won't quite work right because it's not able to sample the information from the lower layer. You paint and nothing happens. So instead, if you set it to current layer and below, it will be able to pick up on the information of the lower layer to remove the blemishes. Now we're ready, and I already gave you a sneak peek by painting over that. All you need to do is paint over your blemish, and affinity photo will fill in that blemish with information from the surrounding area. I like to use a brush that's slightly bigger than the blemish and maybe paint around it a little bit. That way, it can fully be filled in. If you just paint over part of the blemish, I'll use a small brush here. It might be able to take care of that small part, but it's not going to take care of the entire blemish. You just need to make sure you're painting over the whole thing. As I'm doing this, I'm actually keeping my fingers over the bracket keys on my keyboard so that I can make my brush bigger or smaller depending on what blemish I'm painting over. When you're zoomed in like this, you can see a lot of blemishes, and it might be a little overwhelming to be honest. Sometimes what I like to do is just zoom out a little and then see what blemishes stand out the most. If you can see those and take care of those, the little blemishes won't matter quite as much. I mean, you can still take the time to get rid of those if you want to. But as long as you have the big blemishes gone, it will be a huge improvement to your photo. Here's the before and after so far. I think this is already a really nice improvement. Now, as I was painting, something happened. I painted over a blemish, and now we have these two spots of repetition. Sometimes affinity will do this because it's the only good information that it can pick up on. But if this happens, what I like to do is just paint over both of those areas to get rid of both of the areas of repetition. That's just a little trick if you run into that because sometimes affinity makes little mistakes like that. You can just paint over both and no more repetition. I mentioned earlier that you should try to keep your brush about the same size as the blemish you're trying to remove. If you see a whole area that you'd like to remove and you break your brush very big to paint over it, Affinity won't have very good information to fill it in. It'll create some weird discrepancies because you painted over too much at a time. I'm going to undo this by pressing command Z on a M or Control Z on a PC. Instead, when you're tackling a large area, start from the outer edge and work your way inward. That way, it has the good information out here and as you work your way in, you're bringing that good information into the area. Okay, let's take a look here. Here is the before and after so far. I think this looks really nice. You've seen that the painting brush works really well with acne, but it actually works really well to remove just about anything in your picture. As long as there is good information around a blemish, you can remove it. So I want to come up here and remove some of these flyaway hairs. There's good information surrounding it. You can see this black background area. As I paint over this hair, you can see it was easily able to remove that. I can also do it up here in the white background area, just going a little bit at a time to remove the hairs. On a fuzzy background is pretty easy to do this. On trickier backgrounds, it might not be this easy. But I'll show you strategies to work with trickier backgrounds later on. We've done acne, hair. Let's take a look at removing wrinkles. I want to remove this wrinkle right here. I'll need to make my brush a little bit larger to make sure that I fully cover the whole wrinkle. You can see that's gone. That actually worked pretty well, didn't it? Here's the before and after of those wrinkles. Very nice. Okay, as you can see, the painting brush is such a great tool for quickly removing blemishes. I chose this photo because this model has a lot of beautiful blemishes that we can clean up. It's a very good practice file. Go ahead and take some time to practice using the painting brush to clean up this photo. The more you practice with it, the faster you will be at knowing where to paint and how much to paint. Remember the two shortcuts, command or Control Z to undo, and you can use the bracket keys to adjust your brush size. As you practice, leave the forehead alone. We're actually going to use that in the next video. Go ahead and practice a little. Leave this photo open, and in the next video, we're going to use this photo to learn about the clone Brush tool. 4. Clone Brush: Let's learn all about my favorite tool, the clone brush tool. If I'm ever having a hard time with the in painting brush in an area, my next step is to turn to the clone brush tool. For this tool, you will sample an area that you like and then paint that sampled area over your blemishes to remove them. Just like with the in painting brush, I'd like to paint on a new pixel layer. We can go ahead and make a brand new one just to keep our edit separate. It's not necessary though. Now that I have a new pixel layer, I'm going to select the clone brush tool, which is this tool right here that looks like a stamp. Once you have that selected, go ahead and go up and change it to current layer and below. Now we can go ahead and zoom in and use this tool. It's really big right now. I'll just use the bracket keys to make my brush smaller. Then to use this tool, all you need to do is hold down Option on a Mac or Alt on a PC. You'll have this target appear. Then you can click on an area that you like and paint it over an area that you want to remove the blemish from. You can see as I paint, the target area moves right along with it. You're not going to stamp the exact same area over and over again. The brush will move right along with it so that you can clean up the whole area. Here's the before and after of that little painting that I just did. Another nice thing about this brush is it gives you a preview of what you're going to paint over an area. That can be really helpful. Just you can make sure that it matches up nicely. If you sample an area too far away, you'll be able to see that the colors won't match up, which is nice to see. In this case, I would need to sample a color a little bit more red like that, and now I can clean up that area. I like to try to sample as close to the blemish as I can because of this because sometimes colors on skin can vary quite a bit, and it'll look just wrong if you sample a color that isn't right. As I've been doing this, I just did it automatically, but I do want to point out that I'm keeping my hand hovered over the alt or option button so that I can sample different points as I go. Holding it down, laying down a new sample point right next to my blemish. And that's how I work in this. It can take a little bit of practice, and if you mess up, remember that you can hold down command or control Z to undo. I really like the control that you have when using the clone brush, since you can tell affinity exactly what information you want to use. The painting brush just guesses what you want based on the surrounding area. Because of this, sometimes it won't do a perfect job. I'm not saying the clone brush will always be perfect, but I do like that you have more control over the results. I've done quite a bit of painting on the forehead, so now we can see the before and after of this area. All Zoom out. You can see it a little better before and after. Next, I want to show you one of my favorite techniques to do with the clone brush tool, which is sampling edges. The in painting brush can really struggle with edges, but the clone brush is perfect for them. First, for this technique, I'm going to add a new pixel layer. Then I'm going to clean up this bumpy edge of his shoulder using this area that's good. I'll hold down Alt or Option and I'll sample right on the edge. Then I'll go ahead and line it up. This is where the preview comes in handy. And I can paint it all the way down to straighten this out. That already looks a lot better, but there are a few issues with it. First, I'm going to make it so this lines up better on this edge by using the mesh warp tool. With this tool, I can drive on the corners to get this to line up better. That looks pretty good. Once you like it, go ahead and press apply. Then I want to get rid of this blue area. You see how this doesn't quite match up with this darker background. There are a couple of things you can do to remove this. First, we can try to erase using the eraser tool to bring back as much of the dark blue as we can. Good. Now to finish this, I'll grab the clone Brush tool. I'll sample a point right above and using a smaller brush. I'm just going to paint right along the edge to get rid of that light blue area. You can see the target point is following me right along the edge, which is so n. Now we've gotten rid of all of that light blue, and this shoulder area looks really nice. Here's the before and after. This is such a good technique to use when you want to clean up the edges and we'll use this technique throughout the course. I wanted to make sure to show this to you. Go ahead and practice more with the clone brush on this picture. Remember to sample an area, just hold down Alt or Option and click, and then you're ready to go. Go ahead and keep this document open. We'll use it in the next video, where I'll show you how you can use the simple paint brush tool to clean up your photos. 5. Paint Brush: Learn about the paint brush tool. The paintbrush is a super simple tool that lets you lay your colors onto your image. But I'm excited to show you how you can use this tool in so many different ways throughout this course. Before I show you how to retouch with the paint brush, I think it's important to review the settings that you can change in the context toolbar. The more you understand all these settings, the easier it will be to customize your brush for different situations. I'm going to add a new pixel layer. Then I'm going to grab the paintbrush tool. And we can go ahead and look at a few of these options. To start, I'm just going to bring all of the values up to 100%, and I'll change my color to a nice bright color. When you have opacity, flow, and hardness, all set to 100%, you get full coverage of paint with harsh edges. If you change the hardness to 0%, you get full coverage of paint, but now you have soft edges, so you can see the difference there. I generally keep my hardness at to 0% whenever I'm using the paint brush, just so we can blend the paint with the surrounding areas easier. Something that we'll do quite a bit throughout this course to also help with blending is lowering the flow. You can click and drag on the word flow to lower it down. Once you have a lower percentage, you can click and drag to apply less paint. The more you go over the area, the more you'll build it up. Like when you color with a color pencil lightly, and then you just gradually go over it more and more. The more you go over it, the more paint appears. This is a very natural way to paint. I really like using it this way. When you lower the opacity, It's pretty much the same as flow. But the more you go over the area, it doesn't actually build up the paint. You'll always be painting with 34% of the paint or whatever percentage it is until you lift up your mouse, and then you can apply more paint. I don't really like using this in the context of this course. I'm always going to keep the opacity set to 100%, and I'm just going to stick to lowering the flow to different amounts and keeping the hardness at 0%. Those are the settings that we'll use throughout this course. I also want to show you a few useful shortcuts for the paint brush. You can hold Ault or option on your keyboard and click on an area to sample its color. You can see I just sampled that color. You can hold Ault or option and sample his skin color, and you can do this all throughout your painting. This is super handy. To return to the default colors of black and white, you can press D on your keyboard. You're going to need black and white later on when we do masking. And to switch between these two colors. You can press x on your keyboard. Okay. Now that we've done all that, I'm just going to delete this pixel layer, and I'll add a new one. I want to show you how you can use the paint brush to do retouching. Let's go down here. You see on his shirt sleeve, how it's a bit wrinkly all throughout this area. This area would be really tricky to fix because there's not a lot of good information surrounding it. This whole area is just really wrinkly. We can actually fix this by lightly painting and a sampled color over the area. I'll make my brush slightly smaller. I'll hold Alt or Option, and I'll click right there. Now we've sampled that color, and I can just paint it over the area. Now, that looks like way too much paint. I'm going to undo with command or Control Z. Instead, I'm going to lower my flow so that we can gradually build up this paint over the area. I'll do it with this lighter section next, sampling the color with alt or option, and then painting it down. Last, I'll do it with this darker color, painting it down. You can see this area already looks a lot smoother. Here's the before and after. When you seem out, that looks pretty nice. However, when you zoom in, you can see that most of his shirt has a lot of noise on it, but the area I just painted is more smooth. This is a problem that you'll run into with the paintbrush tool. I want to show you how you can add that texture back in. It's actually pretty easy. All you need to do is go to your filters and then click on Add Noise. This will allow you to drag up the slider to add noise to the area, and you can add as much noise or as little noise as you want, and it will only be applied to the layer that we just painted on. I think something like that looks pretty good. Now you can see that looks pretty natural. Here's the before and the after. Maybe I did a little too much noise. I'm just going to click right here to open that up again, and I can lower that intensity down. Later on in the course, we'll use the paint brush for a few other situations. I just wanted to prep you for that by teaching you how to use the paint brush better in this video. We're finally done with this picture. Go ahead and practice as much as you want on it. In the next video, I'm just going to give you some recommendations if you're interested in doing retouching with a drawing tablet. 6. Tablet Recommendation: This video, I want to tell you about what tablet I use. You do not need a tablet to do anything in this course. My husband works in affinity photo all the time and only uses his laptops track pad. But if you want to use a tablet, then here's the one that I use. I'll leave a link to that tablet below this video if you want to check it out. It's a great tablet. It's super easy to set up, and I would definitely recommend it or any walk o tablet. That company knows what it's doing with tablets. Also, I want to mention that I used to have an XP pen deco. That was my very first tablet. I used to recommend it to people and it is a good budget option. It did have bugs where it would freeze up sometimes. It wasn't the best tablet. But if you want a cheaper option just to try out using a tablet, then I'll leave a link to that tablet below this video as well. I personally like using a tablet because it feels very natural to use a stylist to paint and do retouching over images. Again, it's not necessary, but it is helpful. If you find yourself doing a lot of tricky edits and retouching, it could be a nice tool to have. Now you're done with the first chapter. Way to go. Now that you know all of the tools that you need to clean up images. You're ready to take on some practice projects in the next chapter. 7. Beginner Project: Now that we've learned how to use the retouching tools, let's practice using them. We'll use the retouching tools on portrait photos throughout most of the course. But in this chapter, I want to show you how you can use them to clean up a photos background. In this video, we'll start with a beginner project where we'll practice cleaning up this beach photo. To start, I'd like to clean up the sand a little bit. There's a lot of little distractions here. I think it'd be pretty impossible to fully smooth out this sand, but I do think it's worth a shot to just remove some of the distractions. I'm going to add a new pixel layer and I'll double click and rename this sand. Now we can go ahead and select our retouching tool. I'm going to select the in painting brush, and I'll make sure that it's set to current layer end below. Then we can go ahead and zoom in and get started removing the distractions. As I paint, I'm just going to try to remove all of the largest distractions I see, so we have seaslls, and shadows and sticks and things like that. I'm going to try to be careful to avoid repetition when I see it. So remember my little trick. If you see areas of repetition and no matter how much you paint, the area sticks around, just paint over both areas that are repeating to fully remove them. I just finished painting, and now we can go ahead and take a look at how this looks. Here is the before and after I think this is a pretty big improvement from where we started. I'm happy with that. Now that that's cleaned up. I want to remove this other person right here. I think the star of this picture is this man doing a cartwheel. I'm going to add a new pixel layer so that we can clone away this person. I'll double click and rename this. Then we can go ahead and select the Clone brush tool and I'll just make sure it's set to current layer and below. Then we can zoom in here and begin to remove our person. The reason I chose to use the clone brush instead of the in painting brush is because we have clearly defined lines going across this person. I want to sample and paint them across nicely. I'm going to hold Alt or Option and I'll click right here on the line. Then with a larger brush, I'll just paint this across. Now for this first part, I'm actually going to show you a non example of something that could go wrong. That looks pretty good. But if I keep going, eventually, I'll sample the person again. Isn't that strange? I removed him. He wasn't there, but he shows up again if I keep going across. What's happening in that situation? Is I've added my source point and Affinity will remember the picture as it is as long as I'm holding my cursor down. If I'm painting across and I never lift up my cursor, affinity will continue to see the picture as it once was. Now to avoid this, you can set your source point, begin painting, and as you go, lift up your cursor and then continue. You can see the source point is still following us nicely, and now it's reset its image of what it's sampling. So we won't sample the man again. I, I just sampled his surfboard, but that's still there. But as you can see, if you lift up your cursor as you go, you won't accidentally paint in your subject or blemish again. That's a habit that I like to get into. As I paint across, just lifting up my cursor as I go, especially on big areas like this that I need to paint across. Now that I've done that, I think I did mess up the line a little bit. I'll just resample it and bring it across. Sample it on the other side and bring it across. There we go. That looks pretty straight. Now we can continue on down. I can see we have two white lines of waves right here, but they merge into one over here. This is a little bit tricky. What I'm going to do is I'll sample from over here where it's a thicker line. I'll paint that in first. Then I'll just try to blend it together. That actually looks pretty good. Using a smaller brush, I just want to remove this repetition. I'll pull some of this white in with a smaller brush. There we go. Now I'm going to bring this over. With a smaller brush, I can control a little bit better how it merges together. There we go. Holding alt or option to sample as I go. I think that looks pretty good for the waves merging together. Now we just need to remove his legs. I'll sample on this side, lifting up my brush as I go. The white wave now. I think this looks pretty good. I'll turn this layer off so that you can see how it looked before. Here's the after. If you see any areas of repetition once you've done this, you can go ahead and go in to ase those. I can see this bumps up a little bit right here. Once again, I'm just going to try to fix that area, flattening it out. I think that looks better. I'm just going to zoom out with command or Control zero. Then I can select both of these layers by holding shift and clicking, and we can see the completes before and after for this beginner project. All right, great job. Now that we've done this simple project, we're ready to move on to a trickier project in the next video. 8. Intermediate Project: Let's do an intermediate project to clean up a background. There's a lot more to clean up in this background than in the last photo. When I'm approaching a project like this with a lot of tricky steps, I like to make a plan. I'll show you how I like to do that. First, I add a new pixel layer. I'll just rename this plan. Then I'll grab the paint brush tool, and I'm actually going to increase the flow and hardness all the way so that I can write with this paint brush and I'll choose a nice bright color to write in. Then I'll use the bracket keys to make my brush smaller so that I can write. With this first color, I'm going to circle all of the blemishes that I see on this back wall. I'll start with the bigger blemishes, and then we can work our way down to the smaller ones. Everything that I want to remove, I think that looks pretty good. Maybe I'll remove this down here. The point of this is just to take a closer look at your picture, and even if you don't end up removing all of these blemishes, at least you've seen them now, and you can keep them in mind. Also along this back wall, we have the bike tire, so I'm going to circle that. That's everything for the wall. I'll just write wall in this color, then we can change to a different color. The next thing I want to clean up is the ground. I'll just clean up any pebbles and things we have down here that are distracting to our image. I know it's a little silly to clean up the ground outside, just like it was a little silly to clean up the sand in the last video. But these things do make a difference to our final look. I think it'll be good to remove all of those little things. Now that that's done, I'm just going to write the word ground. Now, the last thing I'm going to clean up is this area. Now, this area might look a little impossible to clean up. There's not a whole lot of information here to fully remove the rocks and just have the wall and ground. But you see this area right here. I think we can use this area and painted across to fully remove these rocks, and I'll even remove the rocks that are right in here. We just have a fully clean area down here. This is going to be quite the challenge, that will be the last thing that we do, and I think it's going to really stretch your skills and show you what's possible with the clone brush. I'll just write the word rocks for that part. Now I believe we have our plan. We'll make a different layer for each of these three elements as we go to keep things separate. To start, we'll go ahead and work on the wall. I'll turn off the plan. I'll add a new pixel layer. I'll just pull the plan on top of that. It's out of the way. On this layer, I'll just double click and rename this wall. Now we can go ahead and begin. I'm going to grab the painting brush. I'll make sure it's set to current layer and end below, and we can begin cleaning up the little blemishes that we see on the wall. I'm going to switch to the clone brush to take care of this bike tire and I'll make sure it's set to current layer and end below. Then I'm going to clean up right along the dog's body to start. I'll hold ult or Option to sample out here. I'll lift up my brush as I go so that I don't sample the bike tire again. To clean up the transition with the dog's body, I'm going to use a smaller brush, a hold alt or option, and I'll just paint right along the edge. Then I'll sample some of the white fur of the dog, and I'll bring that along. I think that looks pretty good. Now we can go ahead and see the before and after of that bike tire and the before and after of the whole wall. Much better. Now that we've done that, we can go ahead and begin to clean up the ground. I'm going to add a new pixel layer and I'll re ground. Then using the painting brush, I'll begin to remove some of these little things. The grounds looks pretty good now. Here's the before and after of that. With that finished, we're ready to do our trickiest part, getting rid of the rocks. I'll add a new pixel layer. I'll re this rocks. Now we can begin this part. If you haven't already, try to clean up any little bits along the wall. I did that for the ground layer, removing the little white specs, the leaf right here, all of that. Now we have a cleaned up working space for this layer. I'm going to grab the clone brush tool, and to begin, I'm going to sample the orange part of the wall downward. I'll hold alt or option to sample that with a little bit larger of a brush. I'm just going to paint away this rock right here. I'll sample again. For this tricky part right here, I'll just use a smaller brush, and I'll get right up against the dog's leg like that. Perfect. We've brought the wall down for that. I'll do the same over here. While I'm at it. I'm also going to take care of the strings that are hanging down right here. I got a little distracted with that stuff, but now you can see that before and after cleaning up those rocks right there, and I'm going to do the same but opposite, bringing the ground upward. I'll just do that all the way across. Since I did that, I can see some repetition in this area. Using a larger brush, I'm just going to paint over that. I'll sample another area, paint over that, just to bring the variety back in. I can see some repetition over here as well, so I'll do the same. Here's the before and after removing those rocks. Now we're in a pretty good place to bring this all the way across. I'll hold Alt or Option to sample this area and I'll line it up like this. You can see if we sample that all the way across. We'll have this little bump all the way across. I'm going to sample this white part and I'll cover up that bump. I'll sample this new area, and I'll bring that across. I'll alter it a little bit. I'll sample it again and continue to bring it across. I'll reduce a little bit of this whiteness, maybe with a larger brush, just getting rid of it a little bit. Now I can do the same on the other side, sampling this area and bringing it across. I can see that this side needs some of this dark shadow for it to appear like a real transition between the wall and the ground. Using a super small brush, I'm going to sample this dark part of the ground. I'm going to sample it across like this. Doesn't that look more realistic? Just with a tiny brush, lifting up my brush as I went, I sampled that across, and I think that looks pretty nice. Now I'm just going to clean up any last areas that I think look weird. But that looks like the wall transition between a wall and the ground. I really h with that. The last thing we need to clean up is this area right here, and this is a little bit tricky because we have dog fur so we can't just smoothly paint across like we did for hit the leg. To start, I'm actually going to add a new pixel layer to keep things separate. Then I'm going to sample right out here. And to start, I am just going to paint this orange color right in here under the dog's belly. I'm getting a little close to the dog's leg with my sample point. I'll add a new sample point farther away so that I can continue painting without repeating the dog's leg. I think that looks pretty good for the wall, and now I just need to replicate the floor. I think I'm actually going to sample the transition area, and then I'll paint that across. I sampled the ground area and the wall. I'll take care of any repetition I see, but I think that looks pretty good for that part. The last thing I'm going to do to make this look more realistic with the fur is I'm going to sample some of the dog's fur and with a super small brush and a very low flow. I'm going to paint this end. I'm painting in the direction the fur is going. You can see up here, the fur is going do. I'm just painting in that direction to add that little fuzzy fur look. You can paint over the area a little bit more if you want more fur, a thicker look. I think that looks pretty good. With that done, we can see the before and after of that dog area. Now I'll just zoom all the way out. I'll select all of our layers, and we can see the complete before and after. This looks so much better. Great work. Now, that you've been able to clean up an area that barely has any information to sample. I think you're ready for another challenge project in the next video. 9. Advanced Project: In this video, we'll do one more project to practice removing distractions. This is a really fun picture with a lot to remove. I think this is going to be really fun to see how much you've learned so far. To start, let's make an action plan. I'll add a new pixel layer, and I'll double click to rename it plan. Now we can go ahead and select the paintbrush tool. I'll use a bright color to write things down and start, I'm going to clean up the wall. This wall is pretty bright and there aren't a ton of distracting elements, but I do think it's important to remove things that intersect with our subjects like these lines do. In any areas that are big and distracting like this, maybe I'll break them up a little bit. That's the main area of the wall. But I'd also like to clean up down here. We have a lot of little cracks and holes like this that we can clean up, as well as the plants at the bottom of the wall. This is pretty similar to our last project, removing the rocks along the wall, we should be able to do this well since we had practice. Once we have the wall cleaned up, we can go ahead and clean up the sidewalk. For the sidewalk, this will be anything left behind with the plants, any other little spots we see. I'd also like to clean up this crack and remove all of the little white stuff that's in it. Once we have the sidewalk cleaned up, we can go ahead and clean up the grass. I'm not going to remove the grass, but I do think we could trim some of these areas that are coming into the sidewalk. We can also take care of this yellow patch right here, filling it in with some of the green. To finish, we'll clean up the door. Now, we have this door over here that looks very worn down and I don't want to mess with it too, but I do think we could remove some of the more destructing areas of the door. Maybe I'll remove these letters as well. And with that, I think we have our plan. This is going to be a really big project, but don't worry. You have everything you need to handle this. So I'll turn off the plan and we can go ahead and start by cleaning up the wall. I'm going to start with the painting brush, but I'll switch to the clone brush as I go as needed. So I'm just quickly going to go through the wall now and clean up any areas I find distracting. One thing I haven't mentioned yet is when you're doing a lot of retouching like this, it's a good idea to clean off your computer screen. Sometimes you might have little specs or smudges on your screen that you're trying to paint over without realizing it's not actually part of the picture. It's your screen being a little bit dirty. It happens to me a lot. If this is the case for you, I would just go ahead and clean off your screen a little bit so you can see better. The first time you use the clo brush again, make sure to reset the flow back up to 80% where it originally was, since we lowered it in the last video. If you find yourself switching between the painting brush and the clone brush a lot. There's actually a shortcut you can use on your keyboard if you'd like. If you have painting brush out and you want to switch to the clone brush, you can press K on your keyboard to quickly get out the clone brush. I'm not sure why it's K. If you want to switch back to the painting brush, you can press J on your keyboard. That could make it a little bit easier if you're switching a lot between the two, K for clone, J for painting, I just finished cleaning up the wall. Here's the before and after. As you can see, that made a huge difference removing all of those plants. I'm just going to make a new pixel layer and this time we'll clean up the sidewalk. I think I'll start with the transition. I'm going to take these good parts and duplicate them all the way across where we still have some plants. I'll use the clone brush to do this carefully sampling and painting as I go. There ended up to not actually be enough good information. It just doesn't look quite right. I'm going to try a different approach. I'm going to paint the wall down and the sidewalk up until they meet in a good point. Then I'll go through with the paint brush in a little bit to darken this and make it look more realistic. But I think I'll do that all the way across just to make it easier. When you have to go right up against your subjects, it's a good idea to use a smaller brush. That way, your brush doesn't look too soft as you're painting it in. That's one strategy you can use. For painting close to your subjects, just use a smaller brush. I just finished painting the sidewalk transition area, and I think that looks so much better. But to make it look more realistic, I think adding a shadow using the paint brush could really help to make this look more real. I'm going to add another new pixel layer and I'll rename this transition. Then using the paint brush tool, I'm just going to lower my hardness all the way and lower my flow quite a bit. I'll zoom in here. I'm going to sample the color of this crack right here. I'll hold Alt or Option and I'll click right there. Then I'm just going to carefully paint this across. It's not quite as dark as I wanted. Maybe I'll just manually make it darker and lower the flow even more. That way, I can go over it quite a few times to build it up. Here's the before and after of that part. I think that looks good, but maybe it would look better if I used a different blend mode. We haven't really worked with these yet in the course. We'll work with them more later. But you can go through the list and watch the area to see how it changes. Think soft light usually looks pretty good. It just makes things a little bit more blended. I'm going to keep the layer set to soft light as I continue to paint this across. That looks so much better in my opinion. Here's the before and after. Adding that subtle shadow makes it look more realistic to me. Let's go back to the sidewalk layer, and now I'm just going to clean up any last blemish areas and the sidewalk crack right here to finish cleaning this up. For this sidewalk crack, I'm going in and trying to find an area that doesn't have any white in it. I'm just slowly expanding that sampling lots of different places as I go to remove that white area that's in the crack. Going to fully clean up an area and then bring it all the way across. I think this will make it look a lot less distracting. Okay, the sidewalk is officially done. Here's the before and the after so far. Let's add another layer for the grass. This will be a quick one to clean up. I'm just going to take care of any grass that's too long, and then I'll sample and paint over that yellow area to make it green again. Very fast. Now we can finish by cleaning up the door. I'll add a new pixel layer and rename it door. Then we can begin cleaning this up. Here's the before and after of the door. Just cleaning it up a little bit. Now I want to show you what all of it looks like. I'll hold shift to select all of our layers, and we can see a complete before and after I think this looks pretty incredible. We can focus on our subjects more now that all of those distractions are gone. I would definitely encourage you to try this for yourself so that you can get better and better at using these tools. You can do this. Now that you've made it to the end of the chapter, and the next one, we'll learn all about a really cool technique called frequency separation, and we'll start that in the next video. 10. What is Frequency Separation?: In this chapter, we'll learn all about frequency separation. This technique is a total game changer for retouching. I think you're really going to like it. Let's go ahead and start with answering the question. What is frequency separation? Frequency separation separates the high and low frequency parts of your image onto two separate layers. But what does that mean? High frequency is the texture of your image. This includes anything like bumps, hair, or texture of clothing. Anything that adds texture and detail to your image is high frequency. Low frequency is the color of your image. The best way to see the low frequency is to look at your image and then just squint your eyes. All of the details will fade, and you're just left with the blurry general shape and colors of the image. Why would we want to separate these? Well, it's actually super useful to separate them onto individual layers. By creating a layer with only color on it. We can easily paint over an area to correct color issues while keeping all of the skin texture intact. And by having a layer that's just texture. It's very easy to correct the skin texture without worrying about cloning the wrong colors for an area. Of course, as we go through this chapter, you'll be able to understand these concepts better as we put them into action. But for now, just know that frequency separation is very important for retouching and can save you a lot of time. I'm excited to show you how to do this so that you can really take your retouching to the next level. In the next video, I'll show you how to separate your layers. 11. Set Up Frequency Separation Layers: Let's learn how to set up the layers for frequency separation. To start, let's duplicate our photo layer. To do this, I'll press Command J on a MAC or Control J on a PC. When you use frequency separation, your original layer that you have selected will disappear, and you'll be left with two layers. To make sure that we always have access to the original fully intact photo, I like to have a duplicate copy here. Now with a duplicate layer selected, we can go to the top of the screen to filters, and then down to where it says frequency separation. Now we can have our first look at what these two layers will look like. The high frequency layer has the texture on it. You can see that great texture of the hair, and the low frequency has all of the colors. Now, this might look a little weird because our high frequency layer is grayed out like this, but that's only because it's taking texture, not color. At this point, we can make a little adjustments to the radius to adjust how much texture or color is being shown. So down here for the radius, I'm just going to raise this up so that you can see how intense we can make this. Here you can see so much detail, and over here, we just have the colors that are bleeding together. This is too high of a radius. We still want to see some of the color variation. You see this highlight on her nose. As we raise this too high, we lose that. So I don't want to raise it too much. But I do want it raised enough that we can still see some texture with it low like this, you can barely see the texture, and you can see that the color side has a lot of texture still. I'm going to raise this until the skin just starts to look soft with the colors, and we can see the pores and texture of her skin over here. For this picture, it's around five pixels, but every picture will be a little bit different. Just try to get a nice balance between having good texture and good colors. Once you like how this looks, you can press apply. And now you can see that that duplicate layer has been split into the high frequency and low frequency layers. To see what these look like better, I'm just going to turn off the high frequency layer. Now you can just see the low frequency colors. And if I turn off the other two layers, you'll be able to see the high frequency layer with all of its texture. One thing to note is that this high frequency layer is set to linear light for its blend mode. This means that even though it looks gray by itself, when you put the colors underneath it, they'll blend together to form the whole picture. Now that we have our layers all separated out, we can go ahead and get started with retouching by doing some cloning in the next video. 12. Cloning: Let's do some cloning in this video. I primarily like to do cloning on the high frequency layer. That's because the clone brush is great at sampling textures and placing that texture on a new area. We've used the clone brush before, but we're actually going to use it slightly differently for frequency separation. Instead of having this set to current layer and end below, we're going to change this to just current layer. That's because we don't want the colors beneath sampled. We only want to clone on this high frequency layer. I'm also going to raise our flow all the way to make sure that we're getting the full texture as we're cloning. Now we can go ahead and start by removing any areas that have strange texture. I'm going to zoom in here to the forehead and we can get started. If it helps and it does help me, so I'm going to do it. You can turn off these two layers so that you're only left with the gray layer. That way you can really see the textures that you're cloning. With a little bit of a smaller brush, I'll hold alt or option and then I'll click to sample an area. Then we can paint that over any areas of texture that we don't like. You can see I just removed that whole scar super easily. Now we can go in here and remove any bumps and blemishes that we see. This is also a great way to take care of little stray hairs. Since hair shows up as a texture, you can just paint over it, and you don't need to worry about any color left behind. I'm just sampling as I go and painting away any areas of texture that I don't like. I really like doing it this way and not needing to worry about the colors that are left behind. Since the colors are on a separate layer, the colors really don't matter for this. We can just focus on removing any texture issues. I just finished doing that frequency separation on her face. Now, I'm just going to turn on the other two layers so that we can see the before and after. Zooming into the forehead. I'll select both of our frequency layers by holding shift and clicking and we can see the before and after. It might not look like we've done that at this point, especially because we still have a lot of the colors left behind. But that's where the low frequency layer will come in handy and we'll work on that in the next video. 13. Painting: Let's improve the colors of the image by doing some painting. We don't want to paint directly on this low frequency layer because that's a destructive way to edit. We only painted directly on the high frequency layer for our cloning, because that's really the only option with the way the layers are set up. But because this layer is separated from that, we can actually put a new pixel layer right on top so that we're painting on top of the low frequency layer. I'm going to turn off the high frequency layer so that we can see the nice blurry colors of our low frequency layer. Then I'm going to grab the paintbrush tool and I'm going to adjust the settings. I want 0% hardness and a low flow, so that looks good. Then with a little bit of a larger brush. I'm going to hold Alt or Option and then I'll click to sample the colors in an area. Then I can lightly paint over that area to blend that color in. Now, I can't use this dark color over the whole face because there's different highlights and mid tones throughout the face. As I go, I'm going to sample new colors and paint to blend those with the colors I previously painted. We have this highlight area, so I'll sample that color and paint it around. Mainly, I'm looking at this scar area. I'm trying to bring the two colors together, this midtone and that highlight color so that we can cover up that scar. Sample sample sample all around. I think that looks pretty good. Here is the before and after of painting those colors, and we're already off to a great start. I'm going to continue this down the face, smoothing out any of the colors that I see that are a little bit off like that. The scar was one area. Another area I see is this inner corner of the eye, looks a little bit gray. I'll sample a color right beneath it. Then I'll just bring this up to smooth that color. We also have a little bit of a transition. There's some redness on the nose, and then it becomes a lot lighter right here. I'll select that highlight color and bring that down a little to blend those two areas. All right, that looks pretty good. I'm going to continue to do this all around the face, sampling and blurring colors as I go. As I'm painting, I also want to mention that I'm trying to avoid painting my colors on the edges. So the edges of her face or areas like around her eyes or the line of her nose and lips. If you paint your colors over those areas, those colors will blur into those edges, and I don't think it'll look very good. I try to avoid the edges as I'm doing my painting. And just to make sure I really didn't get anything over the edges. Now that I'm done painting, I'm going to grab the eraser tool, and I'm just going to erase around the areas of the edges. So with a lower hardness and 100% flow, I'm just going to paint this over the eyes and the lips and this edge of her face right here. Now we can turn the high frequency layer back on and we can turn this pixel layer on and off to see the before and after. Here's what we looked like before, and here's the after before and after. Isn't this amazing? It's such a big improvement, all we did was paint colors under our texture layer. So good. Now I'll just select all of these layers so I can show you the complete before and after of our frequency separation. This just looks so much nicer, and I'm really excited that we still have great texture on her forehead, even after removing that scar. The texture and colors look really good and natural. So these are the techniques that I usually use when doing frequency separation. But if you don't have a tablet, I actually want to show you one other technique you could use instead of sampling and painting the colors like I just did. So we'll do that in the next video. 14. Blurring: Let's use an easy blurring technique to soften the skin. Like I mentioned in the last video, this is an alternative technique that you can use, that's slightly faster than painting the colors. To show you this, I'm actually going to delete this pixel layer that we painted on. I know it was a lot of work, but just to demonstrate this, I will need to delete it. Now we're going to assume that you've already done cloning on your high frequency layer, and you're ready to adjust the colors. This easy technique begins with adding a filter. Go ahead and go to the very top and apply a Gaussian blur filter. I'm going to drag this filter, so it's sitting in between the high frequency and low frequency layers like this. Then we can raise the radius to begin blurring the colors. Because this is underneath our high frequency layer. You can see that we still have all of the texture, the colors are being blurred. You can see this looks pretty bad on the edges. But good news, we're actually going to paint this exactly where we want it. We don't need to worry too much about the edges. Just focus on how the skin's colors look. Once you have it in a place where you like it, check on preserve Alpha and then close out of this. Now we're going to paint this exactly where we want it. To do that, I'm going to invert this layer so that it's being applied to nothing. To invert a layer, just press command I on a mac or control I on a PC. This inverts the layer and adds a black mask to it. Now if we paint in white paint on the black mask, we'll reveal the blur. That way we can apply the blur exactly where we want it. Using the paintbrush tool, I'm going to go up here and let's reset our colors to the default by pressing D. Then because I need to paint in white, I'll press x. Now we can paint in white paint over the skin to reveal the blurring. Now, we have a very low flow, so we can raise this to speed this up. And I'm avoiding the edges so they don't get messed up. But you can already see how that blurring has taken care of the forehead. Here's the before and after of that. We can continue to go all the way down the face, adjusting the size of our paint brush as we go and blurring the colors that we see. With that done, we can see the before and the after of blurring the colors. I think we could reduce this a little bit to make it look more natural. I'll click on the Layer icon, and we can adjust the slider now to reduce it a little bit or even make it more intense, whatever you think looks good for your image. You can see that that was a lot faster than sampling and painting colors on. I don't use this technique every time because I actually really like sampling and painting the colors on. I find it a really fun process. But if you don't have a tablet and you want to save some time, then using the blur filter is a great way to do that. Now we can go ahead and select all of our layers and see the complete before and after using this technique. Now that we've finished learning all about frequency separation. In the next chapter, I'll show you some great techniques for correcting colors in your photos. 15. HSL: This chapter we'll learn all about color correction. When I'm editing, I always start by cleaning things up, and then I take a look at the lighting and colors. We'll start with colors in this chapter because it's a little simpler, and then we'll take a look at lighting in the next chapter. Let's start things off by learning how to color correct using the HSL adjustment. Let's take a look at our photo. For this photo, we have some intense orange lighting on the left side of our model. This is a very specific area. She's not fully orange all over. It's just in these areas. I want to use the HSL adjustment to target these areas and then I'll paint it over the areas to make sure we're only affecting that part of her skin. Let's go ahead and start by adding an HSL adjustment. Then we can target this area by using the color channels right here. We need to choose the color that looks most similar to this orange. I think that would be this red color. Then we can use the picker option. Just click on that button. Then we can click on the area of our model that we want the colors to be targeted to. I'm going to click right here on this orange color, and these sliders have actually slid over and instead of being a red channel, we've now adjusted this to being an orange channel. This should work even better for reducing the saturation of this area. Let's start by reducing the saturation. Even though this is affecting all of her skin, I'm mostly looking at this area right here and up here to reduce the saturation, the amount that I think looks good. We can also adjust the other sliders. We have the huge shift up here. If I move it to the left, we're adding green so we can reduce the redness by adding a little green, or if we increase it, we can add a little bit of red. I think I'm going to put it just barely into the negative numbers to add a little bit of green to counteract this orangeness. Last, we could also adjust this luminosity slider to brighten or darken the skin. I don't really like this slider, so I'm going to double click to reset it. I'd rather brighten things up in a different way, so I leave that one alone. Now that I like the color that we have here, I'm just going to close out of this. Then I'm going to invert this layer so that we can paint it only over the area where we want it. I'll press command or control I. We now have a black mask hiding this HSL adjustment. I'm going to grab the paint brush tool and I'm going to paint in white paint over that area. I have a flow of 35%, and I think that's perfect for this. Just gradually painting this over the area to reduce the color. I'm also going to bring this up here on this part of her face and on her forehead. Then one last time with a larger brush, I'm just going to paint once over the whole area to reduce it. I think that looks a lot better. Here is the before and after so far. Now that we have that improvement, we can do a few other things to really take this to the next level. So Let's start by doing a little bit of cloning to fix this area right here. You see how this looks a little bit gray. I'm not sure if this is her skin or the inside of her shirt, but either way, I don't really like how this looks. I'm going to add a new pixel layer. I'm going to bring this underneath the HSL adjustment so that we're only sampling from the original photo layer as we do our cloning. I'll grab the clone brush tool. I'll change it to current layer and below. Then we can go ahead and clone this area to remove this gray. To start, I'm going to hold Alt or Option to sample over here with a bit larger of a brush, I'll bring this on down. I can see I have full flow right now. I'm actually just going to undo that with command or Control Z, and I'll lower the flow so that this blends a little bit better. I brought the skin over to cover the gray and I brought the shirt over, so they're meeting in the middle to create a better transition area. We're almost done. There's just one last thing that I want to correct. You see how this area right here looks a little bit splotchy. I want to fix this to smooth it into the other colors. To do this, I'm going to add another new pixel layer. This time, I'm going to use the paint brush to paint over the area. I'm going to use a smaller brush, a lower flow. Then I'll sample the color on the outside by holding alt or option and clicking. Then I'm just going to paint to blend the transition area. That looks better, but it's very smooth right now. I want to show you that you can actually use blend modes to make this look better. I'm going to go down to the color blend mode, and you can see in the before and after that this has changed the color, but kept all of the texture. Now that I've changed the color, it does look a little bit more gray in that area. I'm going to sample this bright or orange color with alt or option. Then with my low flow paint brush, I'll just paint over that area a little bit. To be honest, I don't think that this has blended as nicely as I wanted. It definitely fixed the blotchy color in that area. But there's still some bad transition lines, if you can see that right here. I think I'm going to have to do some cloning to really fix this. I'll add another fixe layer, and then I'll grab the clone brush. I'm going to really lower the flow so we can blend these together. I'll sample out here. With a larger brush, I'm just going to paint over that transition line to break it up. Here's the before and after of fixing that transition line. I think that looks a lot better. Now we can see the before and after of that whole splotchy area. Here's the before and the after. I think that looks a lot better. Now, I'm just going to o out a little bit so we can select all of our layers and see the complete before and after of this color correction. All right. With just the HSL adjustment, a little bit of paint, and a little bit of cloning, we were able to correct the colors in this image. This is a great strategy to use, and I use this one quite a bit. But there's actually another strategy that you can use for a different situation, and I'll show you that in the next video. 16. Selective Color: Let's learn how to color correct using the selective color adjustment. Just looking at this photo. You can see that this one is a little different from our last photo. Instead of having extreme colors that need correcting, this photo looks a little bit dull. The skin looks a little bit gray. I want to use a different technique to bring color back into the face. Let's start by adding the selective color adjustment. I already know that I want this adjustment to only affect our model skin, not the rest of the picture. Before we even try to change the sliders to color correct the model. I like to prep my layer by painting the adjustment right over the skin. We're going to use a little bit of a funny technique to see what we're painting. First, I'm going to change this to the neutrals category. That's what we'll use to adjust the skin. Then I'm going to make this an extreme color, something like that that's very different from her skin. We're going to reset this and adjust it later, but for now, this is going to help us as we paint. Now I'm going to invert this layer with command or control I Then we can use the paint brush to paint in white paint over our model skin. I'm also going to increase the flow to about 80%. Then we can zoom in and begin painting. I like to paint with an outline around our whole subject first just to make sure that she's fully covered on the edges, and then I'll fill in the rest after. I'm going to try to avoid her eyebrows and eyes as I'm painting along with her lips. This should only be affecting the skin. If you paint a little too much, that's not a big deal at all. Just press x on your keyboard, and then you can paint in black paint over the area to remove from the area. Then just press x again to return to white and you can continue painting. I just finished my outline. I want to show you a little trick to make sure that you filled in the entire skin. All you need to do is hold down Alt or Option and then click on the mask icon. This will show you a strange preview, but it's actually really helpful. It shows you everywhere where you painted in white, and with this new view pulled up, you can actually continue to paint in white paint over the whole area in the outline that you created. I like using this trick just to make sure that I don't miss any spots. Now you can see why it was so important to get a good outline, especially around the eyes and the lips. Now you can just paint all over those areas without worrying about getting paint on the wrong parts. Now that we're done painting, all we need to do to reset our view is click on any other layer, and then we can go back to that layer. With that funny technique out of the way. Now we can click to open the selective color adjustment and actually adjust the colors of her skin. I'm going to hit reset on these sliders, and now we can go ahead and add whatever colors we want to her skin. Again, we're in the neutrals category that will pick up the skin color, and we can go ahead and adjust the sliders back and forth to see what looks good for this. I already know that I want to add more warmth and color to the skin. I think I want to decrease the cyan, which is pretty much adding red to the skin. So I'm just going to do that a little bit. We can also add or take away magenta. In this case, I think adding a little bit of magenta would look nice. We can add or take away yellow. I think adding a little yellow would look nice. As you can see, we've added quite a bit of warmth to the skin. Here's the before and after of adding in that warmth. This might be a little too warm, but I do like the colors. Because it's a little bit over the top, I'm just going to reduce the opacity by clicking and dragging on the word opacity. I think about there looks pretty good. As you can see, using the selective color adjustment is a really easy way to bring back some warmth into the skin. But I want to show you one more thing you can do to really make sure our colors are as natural as they can be. First, add a new pixel layer. Then we're going to paint on top of our model using the color of her lips. This is a little funny to do, but just make your brush a little smaller and then hold Alt or Option and click to get the lip color. Using this color, we're going to paint blush, some blood flow onto her face, just to make sure we have a little bit of color variation on her skin. This will make it a little more natural looking. I'm going to lower my f of my paint brush. Then I'm going to lightly paint this over the cheeks and nose. You can also paint this anywhere else like the ears or the hands, anywhere where you normally see a little bit of extra redness, this should look pretty nice. Once you have that painted in, we can go ahead and change the blend mode of this layer to color. Right now she looks a little bit sunburnt, but that's okay. We can just lower the opacity to make this more subtle. Here's the before and after of adding that blood flow. I think I'll reduce it a little bit more. We want this to be pretty subtle. Now you can see the before and after of that before, after. I think he skin looks a lot better. Let's just select both of these layers by holding shift and clicking and we can see the complete before and after. I love using the selective color adjustment for grade out skin. Now you have two different techniques you can use for color correction. The HSL is great for extreme colors, and selective color is great for adding colors back in. Great work. In the next chapter, we'll take a look at correcting the lighting in a portrait. 17. What is Dodge & Burn?: In this chapter, we'll learn all about dodging and burning, which is a great technique to refine the lighting. We'll start in this video by learning more about what it means to dodge and burn. What is dodging and burning? Dodging and burning is one of the most powerful ways to retouch a portrait. By using this technique, you are gradually adjusting light in specific areas of your image to smooth the skin, draw attention to parts of the face, and even reshape and contour the face. Dodging is when you lighten the image. You can think about this like you're in the sunshine and you want to dodge the shadows to stay in the sunshine. Burning is darkening parts of the image. You can think about burning by thinking about a dark burnt object like some toast. Nice and dark. The best thing about dodging and burning is that by gradually painting lightness or darkness on an image, you have so much control. Here are some examples of before and afters. You can see that these images look so much better by controlling the light where avoiding unflattering light or dark spots. Now that you can see what dodging and burning is doing. I want to let you know that there are two steps to this technique. First, we smooth the skin. This involves taking any dark or light areas on the skin and blending those transition areas back together. We want to avoid any harsh areas on the skin. Any areas that quickly change from light to dark. The next step is called cono. We'll be talking a lot more about where to contour later on in this chapter. But for now, it's important to know that this is always done after we've smoothed the skin. To contour, we take the smoothed image and strategically play shadows and highlights onto the face. With contouring, we can brighten the under eye area, darken the neck to enhance the jaw line, and add a nice highlight to the cheekbone area. It can be a little easy to go overboard with this step. But as we talk more about contouring later, I promise that I'll help you to keep your images as natural or as dramatic as you'd like. Now that you know what dodging and burning is, we'll start putting it into action by learning how to set up the layers for it in the next video. 18. Set Up Dodge & Burn Layers: Let's learn how to set up our layers for dodging and burning. To dodge and burn properly, we need to create a specially designed layer that we can paint on. If we set up this layer just right, then we can brighten and darken our images naturally. It'll look so good. I want to walk you through the steps on how to make this perfect layer. To start. Let's add a new pixel layer. We'll use this layer to paint on and to prepare it. The next step is to go to this new tool we haven't used before, this fill bucket tool. We're going to fill the entire layer with a special color, and that color is 50% gray. To get this color, I'm going to watch these values over here, and I want this L to turn into 50. I'm going to click and drag this straight up until it hits 50. You can see our values now are zero, zero, and 50, the perfect 50% gray, and we can just bring our bucket over and click to fill the layer so that we can see our subject again. I'm going to change the blend mode of this layer to soft light Soft light will make this layer invisible on the image. You might be wondering what the point of this invisible layer is. Let me show you. The goal of the soft light blend mode is to blend things together. When you have a color like 50% gray, this will fully blend into your image. But if you change your colors and paint with something that's brighter than 50% gray. Then you'll be able to naturally brighten your image. You see how we still have all the texture. This is the most natural way to brighten and if we paint with a color that's darker than 50% gray like black, then we'll be able to darken our image. I'm just going to undo this with command or Control Z. Now that we have the layer back to normal, we can go ahead and continue with our steps of creating these layers. This layer is perfect, and I want to duplicate it. I'll press command or Control J to make a duplicate copy. We're going to use these two layers for the two steps for dodging and burning. I'll double click to rename the first one smoothing, and I'll double click to rename the second one, contouring. Last, to finish up all these layers, I have one more layer I like to add. That is a black and white adjustment. This black and white adjustment, will let us see the light levels of our image a little bit easier. I'm going to drag the red slider down to make this even easier. The more contrast I can add between the dark parts of her face and the bright parts of her face. The easier it'll be to see all these dark patches that we need to brighten up. Depending on your subject, you may need to darken this slighter or brighten this slider. But either way, human skin has a lot of red in it. This slighter should be helpful to better see the contrast. One thing that I noticed after adding this black and white adjustment layer is this dark spot on her cheek right here. I really didn't notice it before adding this adjustment. I think this is super helpful for seeing things like that. Now that we have all the layers set up, we can go ahead and do a little bit of practicing to fix that dark spot. Just for some quick practice, I'm going to select the smoothing layer. I'll press x to switch to white paint. Then we can paint over this to brighten it up. But you can see in my preview, this is way too bright. I actually like to paint with a very low flow for dodging and burning, like two or 3% barely any flow. Then we can zoom in here. With a very small paint brush, we can carefully paint on this dark patch to brighten it up. You want to be careful here to only paint on the dark parts of your image. If you spill over onto the brighter skin that's surrounding the area, then the dark patch will still stand out. We're trying to smooth out the transition. Only paint where it's dark to brighten it up. Don't paint on the bright skin. You may need to go over this quite a few times, maybe even using a smaller brush to get some of the extra small dark spots. But I promise it's worth it once you see the final result. Okay, I just finished brightening that up. I'm going to turn the smoothing layer off so that we can see the before and here's the after. Such a big difference. We can also turn off the black and white layer so that we can see this in color. Here's the before and the after. Great job. I know that setting up these layers has a lot of steps to remember, but don't worry. We'll practice setting up these layers more throughout the course. In the next video, we'll continue to practice smoothing out the skin. Yeah. 19. Smoothing Skin: In this video, we'll smooth the skin with dodging and burning. To start our skin smoothing. I want to show you the areas that stand out to me on this face and the areas that we should leave alone when we're smoothing skin. First, I want to point out a few of our models defining features. If we change these features, it won't look like her anymore. You can see she has nice dark eyebrows that contrast with her skin. We shouldn't lighten those up. To make sense to be dark. I also see she has a n s, straight nose right here. We don't want to adjust the shape of the nose too much in this step, and she also has a slight cleft chin. We need to make sure we leave those key features alone, and as we're smoothing the skin, mostly focus on dark spots on the skin. For example, I can see a dark spot right here. We already cleaned up that one there. She has another dark spot right here as well as right here. As we move around the face, we'll be able to pick up more on where these dark spots are so that we can smooth them out. We don't only need to focus on the big dark patches. If we really zoom in, we can also go to the pore level here and fix any of these little areas that are extra dark here and there on the face. To smooth these areas, I'm just going to make sure I have my smoothing layer selected and a nice low flow on my paint brush. Then I can go ahead and get started painting these away. Since we already did a little bit of practice in the last video, I'm just going to quickly go through some of these areas and you already know that the more that you go over the areas, the brighter the area will become because you're adding more paint to them. I'm just going to continue painting over dark areas as I'm painting. I'm trying to use a brush that's the same size as the area that I'm painting on. If you try to use too big a foot brush, like I said in the last video, you'll end up lightening the surrounding areas, making the dark spot stand out even more. I like to paint with a very small brush to get the small details first. Then I'll make my brush bigger to paint over the whole dark patch to remove it. I'm also trying to always keep this process gradual. We're just trying to make little improvements, not create brand new highlights. That will come later. Right now, the focus is to smooth things out and make all of the lighting even and soft on the skin. If you ever mess up and brighten something too much, you can change your color back to black by pressing x on your keyboard, and then you can just paint over the area to darken it again. Make sure you do not use the eraser tool. This is a gray layer. If you use the eraser, then you're removing that gray information and you won't be able to blend your paints properly later on. I know this process is pretty slow going, but the results you'll see in the end will make all of this worth it. Also, I think with smoothing the skin, you really could be dodging and burning all day long, making the skin look smoother and smoother. Before you begin, ask yourself how important the image is and how much time you're willing to spend on it. I find this process really satisfying, if I'm not careful, I may accidentally spend hours on a photo. That wasn't even that important. After all that work, I've now completed what I wanted to do for skin smoothing for this picture. You might be able to notice some dark spots still here and there, but I got rid of the most noticeable ones. Now we can go ahead and see what this looked like before and after it's so much better. I was using such a small brush. It was hard to tell what difference I was making. But now that I'm seeing it like this, I'm very proud of my work. We can also turn off the black and white adjustment to see the before and after in color. Here's the before and the after. Isn't this technique amazing? I feel like it really helps you to get to know your picture and edit in a totally unique way to smooth things out. Once you have the skin all smoothed out and nice like this, you can begin to add your own little refinements and contour the light. Make sure to save this image because we'll use it a little later. In the next video, I'm going to walk you through where you shoo. 20. Where to Contour: Let's learn where you should contour the lighting on someone's face. Contouring is the process of enhancing or receding parts of the face. We're going to mimic how makeup artists contour the face as we do our dodging and burning. We'll also be doing things slightly different than makeup artists though because we can also contour inside the eyes where makeup can't reach. It can be hard to just look at a face and know how to do this. Along with the many example images for this course. You will also find this checklist that you can use as you edit to make sure that you're lightening and darkening the right areas. You can find this in the exercise files. Here are some example images of what contouring can look like in photo editing. Here's the before and the after. You can see that contouring really enhances facial features. Look at the difference this makes around the eyes, nose, and forehead. Contouring like this might not be meant for every photo. But with portrait images like this, it really works. Here's another example. Every face is different and because of the way the face is already highlighted or shadowed, you might not want to do the same type of contouring on every image. In this one, I decided not to contour very strongly on the right side of the face since it's in shadows. Here's one last example image. If you want to keep contouring subtle, then you can go a little lighter with it. Even subtle changes like this can really make a nice difference. Now that you've seen the difference that contouring can make, I want to go over the checklist with you. Highlights are the areas we want to enhance. We generally want to draw attention to the center of the face. You can see that a lot of the highlighting is done in the center. We want to highlight the forehead, nose, some of the lips, and the chin to bring the focus inward on the face. You can also see that we want to add some highlight around the eye. The eyes are an area we really want to have a big impact. Adding more contrast to that area, will help the eyes stand out. Last, you can see that this biggest area that we want to highlight is under the eye extending to the cheek bone. This also helps to enhance the eye area and generally looks good on any image. The shadows are areas that we want to recede or draw less attention to. Unlike the highlights that are very centered on the face, the shadows are mostly placed on the outer edges of the face. The part that is in the center of the face is actually on the outside edges of the nose. Again, outer edges One thing that I want to point out is that while adding shadows can make things look less visible on the skin. I also like to add shadows on the eyebrows, the outer edge of the eye, and even the edges of the ris. Unlike the skin, these dark areas will stand out even more with more shadow added to them, which is exactly what we want in the eye. There's a little bit of an alternating between shadows and highlights in the eye. With all these shadows and highlights next to each other, it can help to draw your eye inward toward the eye. I know this can be a lot to remember. I recommend that you use the list as we're just starting out with contouring. We'll use it in the next video to make sure we're contouring the right parts of the face. Before I made this check list, I would just wing this part and it didn't always turn out that well. Hopefully with this check list, you can go into contouring a little more prepared. Now that you know where to place the contouring. We'll add that lighting to the face in the next video. 21. Contouring: Let's do some contouring in this video. I'm excited to get started with adding a little more definition to the face. Contouring is really fun. I'm going to add the check list exercise file into our document so that we can reference it. To do that, I'll go up to the top of the screen to file, then down to place. We can select the check list. Open that up. Then I'll just click and drag to add it down here. Now we can go ahead and get started with adding highlights to our model. Now, I just want to give you the option here because you may want to have your highlights and shadows on two separate layers for extra control. If you want to do that, go ahead and duplicate your contouring layer with command or Control J. Then you can rename these layers to highlights and shadows. You could do it all on one layer or divide it like this. Either way works just fine. Now I'll select the highlights layer. I'll make sure I'm painting in white paint. There we go. With a nice low flow, even though we're contouring and doing a little bit more of extreme edits, I still like to have a low flow so that I can slowly build up my paint. The first thing we're going to do is add some highlight to the middle of the forehead. Then we're going to do the inside corner of the eye. I'll just use a smaller brush for this. Next, we're going to do under the eyebrow. I mostly like to do this just on the outside corner of the eyebrow right here. There we go. Next, we can do the top of the eyelid with an even smaller brush. I like to only do this in the center of the eyelid, not all the way across. It just draws more attention to the central focus of the eye instead of spreading the whole highlight out. That's what I like to do. Then we can add a highlight to the bridge and tip of nose. That's just this part right here. I'll use a little bit larger of a brush. So right there, and then the very tip. She already has two little highlights here. So maybe I'll brighten those a little bit extra. Next, we have cheekbone. Now, cheekbone was that really big area that I showed you in the last video. So we're just going to go under the eye and draw a sort of triangle shape right here. Again, under the eye down and little triangle. Next, we're getting down to the lips and chin. We have above the top lip. That's this Cupid's bow area right here. In the center. Then we have middle of bottom lip. I'm just talking about right here, and there's usually a little bit of a natural highlight there. And last, we have the chin. Okay, with that, we've done our highlights. I might have gone a little bit overboard, but you can see that before and after of adding in those highlights. Let's do the shadows layer next. I'll switch my color to black, and then we can go down this list. Starting with the hair line. I like to use a larger bruh, maybe not that are, but a bit larger for brush. I just paint right in between the skin and hair, right, right along that hair line. Then we'll do the outline of the eye and eyebrows and around the rim of the iris. I'll just zoom into the eye so we can do this. With a smaller brush, I'll darken the eyebrows. Around the rim of the eye is mainly just looking at the eyelash line. I do it a little more heavy on top and then go around the bottom as well. Then around the rim of the iris. There we go. Okay, looking good. Now we just need to do the outside edge of the nose, under the cheekbone and the bottom of the lip. For the edge of the nose, I'm just lightly going to do this on the very edges like that. Then we'll do under that bone triangle that we painted. Just a little bit. The last one was the bottom of the lip. And there we go. Just finished the shadows. Here's the before and the after of this. Now, I'll select both of our layers, so we can see the before and after. I like the shadows, but I do think I overdid the highlights. Luckily, since we have these on two separate layers, I can just lower the opacity of the highlights to make them more subtle. All right. Very nice. I think this looks really good. Before we had nice smooth skin, and now we just gave the face a little bit more shape. Now I can select all of our dodge and burn layers to see the before and after. What a difference. This still looks like our model. We just gave her better lighting to flatter her face. Now that we've finished all of this beautiful work with the lighting, we can finish up this project by doing some color correction. So let's do that in the next video. 22. Color Correction: Let's work on some color correction. Whenever you lighten or darken an image, sometimes this will affect the colors. Since we did so much adjusting of the lighting with doing our smoothing and our contouring, I definitely think we need to bring back some of the right colors into this image. Let's start by adding our selective color adjustment. I'm going to make sure that I'm in the neutrals category for this because I only want this affecting the skin and to really make sure we only have this on the skin. We're going to do the funny trick of making the colors really abnormal so that we can go in and paint this only on the skin. I'm going to invert this layer with command or control I. Now that we have a black mask, I can switch to white paint to reveal this green color. I'm also going to increase the flow so we can see this better. I'm just going to start by making an outline only on the skin, adjusting my brush as I go. I'm also going to trace around the lips, eyebrows, and eyes, so that we don't get the paint on those areas. If you ever paint too much, remember you can press x on your keyboard, to switch your color to black so that you can remove your painting. Now that I've got my outline done, I'm going to hold Alt or Option and click on the mask so that I can fill in the rest of this paint. Now, I'll just click on any other layer and then I'll go back to our selective color adjustment, and I'll open up the layer icon so that we can adjust the colors of only the skin. I'm just going to reset these sliders, and I'd like to bring back some of the warmth of her skin. I'm going to lower the cyan to add more red into the skin. I'll also increase the magenta a little bit and the yellow. Now, this has added quite a bit of warmth. I'm going to lower the opacity down until I think this looks pretty good for her skin. Here's the before and here's the after before, after. I definitely see more warmth. I think this looks really nice. Now that we've done that. We can go ahead and add a little bit more blood flow to her face by adding a new pixel layer. I'm just going to sample the color of her lips by holding Alt or Option and clicking. Then with a lower flow, I'll just bring this back down to 2%. Or three. That works to. I'm just going to paint this lightly over her cheeks and her nose. Then we can go ahead and change the blend mode so that this blends in with her skin texture. Now, last time we did the color blend mode, which very naturally changes the color on the face. But you could also use soft light. It's my favorite blend mode and works for most things. Here's the difference, Soft light, color. Soft light, color. I think color gives a little bit more redness, so I'm going to stick with that one. But just know you could also use soft light if you like the look of that better. To finish, I still see some gray splotchiness on her skin. I'm just going to add one more pixel layer. I'm going to sample this color on her forehead with ult or option and clicking. I'm lightly going to paint this color over her skin. I'm doing this to even out those gray tones. Now I'm going to change this blend mode to soft light, and you can see the before and after of this. You see how that grayness has gone away because we added this extra color. I think that looks nice, but it might be too intense. I'll just lower the opacity down. But here's the before and after of reducing that grayness. Now I can select all of our color layers, so you can see the colors before and after. I think I made the red a little too intense. I'll just lower that opacity as well. But I think this looks pretty great for our new colors. Much warmer and brighter. Now I'll just select all of the layers we worked on for this project so that you can see a complete before and after. I know the Dodge and Burn process might take a while, but look at the results. I think the Dodge and Burn technique is one of the most powerful tools that you have as a retoucher. Now that you know all about dodging and burning, I think you're ready for another powerful tool called liquefying, and we'll learn all about that in the next chapter. 23. The Ethics of Liquifying: This chapter, we're going to learn all about the liquefy persona. We'll start by talking about the ethics of liquefying. When I say the word liquefy, referring to photo editing. You might have extreme transformations come to mind. Liquefying could mean taking someone with little muscles and making them look huge or taking someone with curves and making the curves less defined. These are huge edits. Not because they're difficult to do, but they're huge edits because your subject doesn't look like themselves anymore. In this liquefied chapter, we are not going to do that. The goal of this retouching course is to make your subject look their best. I don't want to change the shape of their face and body to the point where they become unrecognizable. That's not our goal. When I'm liquefying, I have a couple of goals in mind. Number one is to smooth out any harsh edges. This can happen with the clothes and the hair. Smoothing out the edges isn't altering the subject, and it's a great way to eliminate visual distractions. One rule of thumb that I like to keep in mind is this. I like to focus my edits on fluid parts of the image. These fluid and changeable parts of the image, include things like fabric or hair. These things easily change all the time. They can be moved, bent, twisted, folded, all very easily. Because of this, you can liquefy these things to your heart's content. Gal number one is smoothing harsh edges. Gal number two is to fix any distortions in the image. Sometimes the angle of the subject or camera can make things look larger or smaller than they should be. This is a quick fix and can save those selfies that just don't look like you. That was just a quick overview of the ethics of liquefying. Changing the shape of someone can damage their perception of themselves and create unrealistic expectations. With these goals in mind to make people look naturally their best. Let's learn all about the liquefied persona in the next video. 24. Liquify Persona: Let's learn all about the liquefy persona. Right now, we're in the photo persona. The photo persona has its own set of tools and panels. But if you go to the top of the screen, there's actually a few other personas that have their own sets of tools and panels. One of these is the liquefied persona. Now, before we enter the liquefied persona and see all of the new amazing tools and panels, I'm going to prep my layer by duplicating it. I'll press command or Control J. Now I'll do liquefying on this layer and this layer will be left alone so that I can turn this on and off to see the before and after. With that layer selected, I'll just go back up to the top of the screen, and I'll click right here to enter the liquefy persona. If you ever forget which button it is, you can just hover your mouse over these different personas to see what they're all called. That's what I do. I usually forget which one it is. Now we're in the liquefied persona, you can see all these new tools. We'll go over each one of these in the next video, and we have all these new panels over here. By default, we have a default push forward tool selected, and you can just click and drag to adjust the pixels in your image. And over here, we have a few different panels that you can use. The main ones that I use are the mesh panel, the brush panel and the mask panel. Let's go through each of these really quick. First, the mesh panel controls this blue grid overlay that we can see on our image. The only reason I use this panel is to turn off the mesh. I find the mesh a little distracting. I'd rather see our image, not all those blue lines. That's how I use this panel. Since I don't use the mesh, I don't really use these other settings to adjust the mesh. We do have this cool slider in here called reconstruct mesh. If you lower this, you can see what the image looked like before. If you bring it to the center, here's what you did, and if you raise it, your edits will become even more extreme. This is a cool way to see the before and after of your work. But you can actually go to the top of the screen up here to more easily see the before and after with this slider. Either way works, I'll return to our normal view by clicking right here. That's the mesh panel. Then we have the brush panel down here. These brush settings are pretty similar to what we have in the photo persona with the paint brush tool. To show you these, I'm just going to choose a different brush. I'll choose the freeze, this little snowflake. Then we can go through some of these settings. First, we have size, which is pretty much the same as just using your bracket keys on your keyboard to make your brush bigger or smaller. I prefer to use the bracket keys, but you can use the slider. Then we have hardness. By default, our brush is pretty soft, but you can raise this up if you want a harsher edge for your painting. Next, we have opacity. By default, we have less opacity, and you can make this even less to make it an even softer lighter brush. But to be honest, I don't really use opacity in the context of this persona. Last, this is a pretty cool one. It's called speed. Speed is important for a few different brushes in here. Not every tool uses speed, but one that does is called the twirl tool. The longer you click with the twirl tool, the more things will twirl, and you can see this moves pretty slowly. If you want this to get sped up, you can increase the speed and then click and drag to make this go faster. Last, we have the mask panel. We'll go over this more in the next video. But basically, these red overlays that we've been painting are masks that you're putting on your image. It's telling your tools not to affect those areas. You can see by masking this area. As I click and hold right here, nothing happens because the area has been masked. This is really useful if you want to liquefy the hair, for example, and you don't want her face affected. You could paint a mask over her face. That way, you can adjust the hair without affecting the face. The mask panel is really simple to use. It allows you to invert your mask, mask everything or clear off your mask. That's a pretty basic intro to the liquefy persona. I want to show you one last thing. I'll press apply. In the beginning of the video, we duplicated our layer so that we could turn it on and off to see the before and after. Then we entered the liquefied persona at the top of the screen. But there's actually another way that you can enter the liquefied persona, and it's actually even better than this technique. I want to show you it. I'll delete this layer. Instead of entering the liquefied persona at the top of the screen, I'm actually going to use a special filter called the liquefied filter. When you click on this, it will automatically take you into the liquefied persona. This is pretty nice, but it's not even the best part. I'm just going to make a few changes here. Then I'll press done. This liquefied filter is its own filter layer that we can turn on and off to see the difference. We can click on the layer icon to go back into the liquefied persona. But the best part is that because this is a filter, we can paint on this layer to remove from our mask. I'm going to grab the paintbrush tool, and I'm going to paint in black paint with a full flow so that you can see what this looks like. In this area, we have exposed background right here. If I want to remove that, I can just paint in black paint to remove this part of our liquefy filter. Now that's gone. By turning the liquefied persona into its own filter. Affinity gave us a lot more control over how we're liquefying and letting us paint on it is just such a cool feature. I'd recommend you use the filter over just entering the persona at the top of the screen. But I did want to show you both methods in case you prefer one over the other. To prep for the next video, I'm just going to delete this filter, and I'll add a fresh one. Okay. Now that you know the basics of the liquefied persona, let's explore the tools in the next video. 25. Liquify Tools: In this video, we'll learn all about the liquefied tools. Okay. Let's start at the very top with this hand tool. This is the same tool that we have in the photo persona. Just click and drag to move your document around. Under that, we have the Zoom tool. You can click to Zoom in. You can click and drag to the right to zoom in, or click and drag to the left to Zoom out. After those, we get into the liquefy specific tools. Starting at the top, we have the push forward tool that we already saw in the last video. I like to use this tool to push in any bumps that I see to smooth out clothing. Honestly, this is the main tool I use for most things. I think it just works really well to shift around the pixels. Underneath that, we have a really bizarre tool that I don't understand, but I'll show it to you anyway. This is the push left tool. I'll show you how this works. If I click and drag upward, the pixels all move to the left. If I click and drag to the right, the pixels move upward. If I click and drag dow, the pixels move to the right, and as I click and drag to the left, the pixels all move down. This is pretty weird. I don't think I've ever used this tool, and I'm not sure how it's useful, but it's there, so that's that tool. Underneath that, we have the Twirl tool, which could be cool to use for special effects. We already saw that as you click and drag, this twirls your pixels, and Right now they're moving in a clockwise direction. But if I hold down ult or option before I begin, the pixels will move in a counter clockwise direction. Underneath that, we have two interesting tools. We have the pinch tool and the punch tool. Let's start with the pinch tool. You can use this tool to make things bigger. I'm going to click and hold on the eye and you can see that it gradually grows. The punch tool is just the opposite. If you click and drag over an area, the area will gradually shrink. I know these tools are a little confusing with their names, pinch and punch. I like to think about pinching like you're pinching your skin. The skin bulges out and looks bigger. Or punch when you punch a pillow, the pillow recedes and gets smaller where you punched. If that's still confusing, you can just look at the little icons. The center of this icon is bigger, so it will make things bigger and the center of this one gets smaller, so it makes things smaller. Underneath that, we have another special effect tool. This one, you can paint over an area, and the area will get wavy like water. This next tool is pretty cool. This is the mesh clone tool, which works very similarly to our clone brush. If you hold alt or option over an area that you've adjusted, it will sample that area, and then you can click on another area to duplicate the effect. This is really useful if you're trying to keep things symmetrical with these eyes. I was able to sample the larger eye and then put it on the other eye so that they're the same size. The next tool underneath is the reconstruct mesh tool, which is useful for undoing your work in a certain area. I'll click and drag over the lips to grow them again since we shrunk them. You can also do this over the wavy part to flatten it out again. There we go. That's that tool. Now we're almost done. We just have two more tools. We have the freeze tool, which I like to use to freeze over areas that I don't want altered. I'll just paint this over the face. Then we can get the push forward tool and we can add a little bit of volume to the hair over here without affecting the face. I didn't do a great job, but you can see that the face was not altered in any way. The thaw tool will let you paint over your mask to remove from it. Okay. Now that you know all about what all of the tools do, I think you're ready to work on a real project. So we'll start that in the next video as we work on a really fun photo that will teach us about adjusting flowy hair and flowy clothing. 26. Example 1 - Hair & Flowy Clothing: This video, we'll work on a little project to adjust some hair and clothing. To start, let's add the liquefy filter. I'll turn off show mesh. Then we can go ahead and get started. I'm going to grab the freeze tool, I'm actually going to freeze the parts of my model that I know I don't want to move. With a smaller brush, I'm going to roughly paint over our models head down her neck around her arms. You can see I'm not painting super carefully. I don't need to. In fact, it's better if you paint a little outside of your model to really make sure that they will not get moved by liquefying Okay. I will not freeze the skirt. That is something we want to move. But I will freeze her legs and feet like that, and I'll freeze the ground. With that all frozen, we can be confident as we go in with the liquefying push forward tool that we will not move anything important. All we're left with is the flowy fabric and her flowy hair, and we can go ahead and adjust those to our heart's content. I'm going to grab the push forward tool, and I'm just going to start with a very small brush to smooth out any bumps that I see. I'm pushing the fabric in and out to really smooth out this edge. Before I go in with a larger brush to really add volume to this skirt. Just going all the way around with a very small brush, adjusting my brush size as I go, depending on how big the bumps are. Now that it's all smoothed out, I'm just going to take a larger brush and I'm really going to push the skirt outward to create more volume and to make this skirt look more dramatic. After expanding the dress with a larger brush, I noticed that some areas looked warped, so I went in and just tried to smooth out those areas. Now I'm done with the dress, so we can go ahead and see the before and the after growing the dress to make it more dramatic, and I think that looks pretty nice. Now that we're done with that part, I think the next thing I want to work on is her. I see some fabric bunching right here that could look better if we straighten that out. I'm going to grab the tool, which will allow us to paint over that area to remove the mask. All right. Now that we've thawed that out, I can grab the push forward tool and use a very small brush to push in these little bumps and make them less dramatic. All right. A very quick fix, and I think that does improve this look. Now that we're done with that, we can move on to the hair, and I want to show you that for the hair, there are a couple of strategies we can use here. I'm going to thaw out this area just to make sure we can fully take advantage of this. One thing that liquefy persona does pretty well is reduce flyaway hairs by just pushing them inward. This won't fully remove the flyaway hairs, but it can make them look less dramatic by just pushing them toward the main body of the hair. I'm going to do this all around her head to reduce the flyaway hairs. Now that I've pushed in all the flyaway hairs, I'll just use a larger brush. I'm just going to move the hair outward to give it more volume because we already pushed in the flyaway hairs. We can do this without making the flyaway hairs look more exaggerated. I think this is pretty nice. I think I like what we've done, so I'm going to press done and I'll just zoom out so that we can see the before and after These changes are subtle, but I think this looks so pretty, very nice. To wrap up this video, I just wanted to mention that it's important to liquefy your image first. That's because if you add any adjustments or blemish removal on top of this layer and then try to liquefy this layer afterward, you'll only be able to move one layer at a time, this background layer. The adjustments will stay where they are. This can make things look a little strange if you've done any specific painting over specific areas. Just to demo this, I'm really quickly going to add a recolor adjustment. I invert this and paint this over her dress. Just so I can show you what this would look like. I just added this just to her dress, and now I'm going to click here on the liquefied filter to go back into the liquefied persona. Then I'm going to click and drag on her dress to push it outward. As I do this, and obviously, I'm pushing this way too far. But you can see that her dress goes back into black and white, the more I push it out, because this adjustment layer is not moving. Only the background is. This is why it's super important to liquefy first. All right. And with that, we're done with this project. I hope you liked this simple project. And now that you've done this, I think you're ready for a little challenge that we'll do in the next video by trying to liquefy something that has a tricky background. 27. Example 2 - Background Challenge: Let's do a background challenge. You may have noticed that the last picture had a very simple blank background. That was on purpose because it makes things easier. Liquefying a busy background can cause some serious distortion, making your image look fake. Is it even possible to liquefy an image like this with all of these straight lines? It is going to make it pretty hard, but not impossible. I'll show you how to edit an image like this. Without making these wood panel lines look wavy. To start, let's add the liquefy filter. I'll turn off the mesh. Then to really help us with this, I'm going to use the freeze tool to freeze the lines around our model so that we can adjust his shirt sleeves. I'm going to zoom in and use the bracket keys on my keyboard to make my brush smaller. Then I'll paint over the lines. I think that's a pretty good start for our lines. We can always paint more or remove as we go. You may be wondering why I didn't freeze the entire background, and that's just to give us some wiggle room because now I can push this sleeve in and out and this part of the wall will move without affecting the lines. If we were to freeze everything, we wouldn't be able to move things. That's why I did it this way. Let's go ahead and start with a push forward tool. I'll just make some small movements to bring in the wrinkles. Okay. For this part, I want to bump this out so the shoulder area looks smoother. I'm going to aw this and just see how this looks adjusting that. I want to be careful not to make this look too. I'm going to use a very small brush and just bump this out slightly. I'm paying attention to both the sleeve and the wall right now. I think that looks pretty good. The wall still looks straight, but this looks smoother now. Let's move on to the other side. I'd like to bring this little bump right here down and you can actually see we have a line right here that I didn't paint. I didn't notice that before. But I think we should still be able to move this bump downward as long as we're going in the direction of the panel, we're just pulling it downward where it would be anyway. I think it actually is pretty good for this area. We just want to be careful not to mess with his ear. And his ear looks the same to me, so I think that's pretty good. On this side, we have a pretty strong fold in the shirt. So I'm just going to slightly reduce it. I don't think it would look right if I fully removed it. Same for this area right here. Just bring it in a little bit. And there we have it. We were able to reduce the wrinkles in the fabric. It's not perfect. I didn't remove every wrinkle, but I think the wood paneling still looks very natural and the shirt looks a lot better. As one last step, I think I want to push in some of his flyway hairs here. I'll use a very small brush to do this just to make sure I don't affect the panels. But I'll just ph in some of his hair here. Okay. Now we can go ahead and press done. And we can see the before and after, here's the before and the after I think this looks really nice, and I want you to keep in mind that you can also always do cloning later on if there's an area that you couldn't quite fix and you want to continue to work on. That's always an option. Liquefying can just be your first step to make it easier. I think you've come so far in your liquefying skills. You've learned how to make things more dramatic in the last video and how to keep things more subtle and controlled in this video. Let's finish this chapter with one more practice project where you'll use both of those skills in the same picture. 28. Example 3 - Reshaping Clothing: This video, we'll do one more liquefy project with reshaping some clothing. For this image, I can see that the pants are a little bent out of shape, and the shirt has quite a few wrinkles all around it. Let's work on these areas in the liquefy persona. I'll open up our filters and apply the liquefy filter. I'll turn off show mesh. Then we can go ahead and start with the push forward tool. This background isn't as tricky as the last one. I don't actually think we need to do much freezing here as we get started. I'm just going to go right down here with the pants. I'll adjust the size of my brush, and I want these pants to look a little bit more straight. You can see on the other leg that these pants are a little bit more loose like a wide leg style. I want to mimic that over here. As you go, remember, you can always adjust the size of your brush using the bracket keys. If you ever do a little bit too much, you can press command or Control Z to undo your work. I'm just going to continue working on the pants until they look similar to the other leg. These pants look way better. Here's the before and the after. Now we can go up here and work on the shirt wrinkles. I'll start on the arms. I'll just zoom in here and begin working. For tricky areas, remember you can always use a very small brush to adjust these. The smaller the brush, the more control you'll have. And the smaller your movements, the more control you'll have to. So don't always click and drag with a sweeping motion. Sometimes the smaller motions can work a lot better for your tricky areas. Okay, we're off to a really great start. Let's just press done so that we can see the difference. Here's the before and the after before, after. In the last two projects, we just did liquefying. But when you combine liquefying with a little bit of clonine, you can really clean things up nice. Let's do some cloning to fix more of the clothing. I'm going to select our background layer and apply a new pixel layer on top of that. Then I'll go over here to get the clone brush. I'll make sure we're set to current layer and below. With a nice low flow. Then we can go ahead and fix up some of the wrinkles on the clothing. Let's start with the pants. You can see we have quite a bit of wrinkling going on right here and where I stretched out the pants, there's some warping right here. To start, maybe I'll fix up that warping, I'll sample an area nearby. I'll adjust my brush, and then I'll paint over that area to remove the warping. That looks a lot better. Next, I'm going to continue to clean up the wrinkles on the nicer parts of the pants. That way, I'll have a good large area to sample as I bring it up here. I'm just going to sample and gently remove some of these parts that are a little bit wrinkly. I'll do the same over here. Blending out the wrinkles. This area right here is a good example of where a low flow can come in handy. It quickly goes from light to dark, but with a nice low flow, I can gently paint over that area to bridge the transition, so it's not so stark. I just chose a lighter color and painted it over. Now you can see those areas are more blended together. Okay. Now that we have those areas looking really nice, I'm going to sample and bring up this good area over here. You want to be careful to avoid her hand. You also want to make sure you paint enough over the area so that it blends nicely. Since I have such a low flow, if I just paint once, it's not going to do. But I paint, there it'll blend together nicely. Wow, this looks so much better over here before and after. That's really good. Okay. I'm going to sample from up here and bring this down as well to blend this transition area out. Okay? And I think this side of her pants looks really good now. I'm pretty happy with that. Now we just have this little bump right here, so I'll sample from down here and bring this up. And I'll sample from the top down as well to blend it. The pants look so much better. Let's see the before and the after. I really like how this is going. Next, let's go ahead and add a new pixel layer and we'll use this layer to fix up the shirt. The reason I made a new pixel layer is because I'd like to do our cloning trick to fix this tricky area right here. Instead of attempting to smooth this area out with the clone brush, I'm just going to sample this better side and I'm going to duplicate it over. I hold Alt or Option. Then I'll just paint it in over here. I'll increase my flow. Just to make this a little faster. We've done that. I'll grab the move tool to move this in place. You can see this doesn't match up perfectly right here. We could try flipping it. If you'd like to flip an object, you can right click on it. Go down to transform and then flip it horizontally. Maybe that will look a little better. I'll lower the opacity so I can see the layer underneath it and match up the line right here. I think that looks pretty good. Maybe I'll grab the warp mesh tool so that we can stretch this out a little bit. Stretching it helps it to fit better, but it also helps to alter this side. It doesn't look like total repetition. I'll just press apply. I like how that looks. I'll increase the opacity again. Then to blend this better with the old shirt, I'm going to add a mask. Now, remember, masks allow us to add or take away from a layer. Now that I have a white mask, I'm going to grab my paint brush and paint in black paint to remove parts of the shirt that I don't want. You can see we have this strange area over here. If I paint in black, I can remove it and blend it into the shirt beneath it. I also have this strange line right here. It looks like that's picked up from over here. I can either paint over it to remove it, or I could always just clone over it later. Okay. I think that looks so much better. Here's the before and after. Oh, I need to fix this button, don't I? I didn't even notice it was messed up, but now that looks better. With that area, all fixed up. I'm going to add another pixel layer so that I can use the clone brush to clean up the shirt a bit more. I mentioned we have this strange line right here. I think this is just a piece of hair, but I'm just going to clone over it to remove it on both sides. I can also clean up the edges a little bit better. You can see that this doesn't match up perfectly right here. But if I take a nice small brush, and sample right along the edge. That looks better. Then I can bring this line down to mimic the button placket that we have here. I can do the same on this other side, bringing these colors downward. I did spill over a little bit, with a smaller brush, I'll just clean that up. If I'm being honest, I'm a little confused at what's going on in these areas. It also looks like I added a belt loop right here. I'm just going to clean up these areas. Removing the belt loop and removing this area. Okay. With that cleaned up, I think this looks a better for. So now we just have one last area to work on. If you're ready for a really big challenge, we're going to try to fix up her color. It's so wrinkled and messed up right now. I really want to try to fix this, but it will be tricky. So let's start by adding a new pixel layer, and we're going to duplicate and clone this good part of the collar and bring it upward. So I'll just sample right down here. Then with full flow, I'm just going to click and drag to paint this in. It doesn't really matter where you paint this in. Because we're going to move it with the move tool anyway. With a lower opacity, I'm going to grab the move tool and move this into place. Matching it up where the shirt is right here. That looks pretty good. Then we can stretch this with the mesh Warp tool so that it reaches the collar up here. Okay. I'll raise the opacity back up. I'll add a mask to this layer, and now we can paint in black to remove the parts we don't want from this. I'm going to remove down here. I'll switch my color to white by pressing because I did want to keep that part right there. We can always go back and clone a little bit more to fix that area. But right now I'm just trying to remove all the parts that I don't want. And I think that's about as good as we're going to get it for this time. You can see we've really increased that straight flat area of the collar. Now I'll add another new pixel layer and we can clone on this one to extra clean this up. Like I mentioned, we can go ahead and clean up this area. I'll just sample next to it. I have full flow right now. Let me just lower that down so we can blend better. I think that looks pretty good, but I need to blend the skin. You see how it's dark here and then goes to light. I'll sample some of the darker skin and bring it just so it matches better. Then maybe with a larger brush. I'll just blend in some of this lighter skin and I think that looks better blended. Let's continue this all the way up to match the top part of the collar. O As I'm trying to blend the skin, I think I need an even lower flow, so I'll just lower that down like that. I think this part of her shirt looks a lot better now. I'll just like both of those layers to see that before and after. Much better. Now that that's straightened out, we can go ahead and continue to work on this part of the shirt to clean it up. I'm just going to start from the very top, I'll sample this part of the collar and with a smaller brush. I'll remove this weird part. And I'll continue to remove the other wrinkles that I see. Okay, I left some wrinkles. I think it's okay to still have some wrinkling, or the shirts just going to look completely flat. So I think that looks pretty good. And now the last thing I need to do is just fix this button placket right here. So this should be a slightly lighter color all the way up. You can see that right here and on this side as well, because there's two layers of fabric there. So I'm going to sample this lighter color. And with a smaller brush, I'm just going to bring this all the way up. I'm also going to remove this button and we can put in our own buttons where it makes sense once we're done here. Okay, that looks pretty good. Now, before we did any of this, we had a button here and up here, and we have some buttons that we can use down here as well that we can clone and bring up. So I'm just going to add another new pixel layer and sample a button. Then I'll paint it right across from where I see this hole right here. I'll use the move tool and I'll rotate it just so it looks different from that button. Just to use a different button, I'm going to clone this one on a new pixel layer for the last part. I'll just sample that button, and I'll paint it right up here. And then using the move tool, I'll just rotate it. We did a lot of work on this shirt, so I'm just going to select all of those layers and we can see the before and after of fixing that crumpled area and we can zoom out to see all of our great work on this project. Here's the before and the after. I know that was so much work, but I think the results speak for themselves. We've really cleaned up this outfit. I think this looks so much better. Great job on this liquefied chapter. I know liquefying can be tricky, but you did a great job, and I hope you had some fun with it. In the next few chapters, we're going to zoom into the face and learn some special techniques for adjusting specific areas, starting with the eyes. 29. Sharpening Eyes: In this chapter, we'll learn all about retouching the eyes and we'll start by learning how to sharpen the eyes in this video. The easiest and most common way to improve eyes is adding sharpening. Sharpening will add extra contrast to the eyes, making the dark parts of the eyes even darker and the bright parts even brighter. To begin, the filter that I like to use to add sharpening is the high pass filter. This is a unique filter that adds a gray overlay on your image. You can raise the radius until you start to see your eyes, or you could raise it a lot to really sharpen lots of areas in the image. I like to raise my radius just a little bit because I don't want to sharpen too much of the image. You can see as I raise this up, we start to sharpen the white parts of the eyes and the skin starts to look really grainy. The lower you can make this while still being able to see the eyes. The better it'll look. I'm just going to raise this just a little bit, maybe two around 1.5 pixels. Once you have the radius set where you can just barely see the eyes, let's go ahead and check on monochrome. This will just keep the colors from getting oversaturated by the sharpness. Then we can change the blend mode to overlay. To see the difference, I'm just going to zoom in here and you can see the before and after before, after. This is incredibly subtle. In order to make this a little bit stronger, here's what I like to do. First, raise this layer, so it's outside of the group. It's all on its own there. Then we can duplicate this layer with command or control J a few times. You can see this has really up to the intensity. The reason I like to do this instead of raising the radius is I'm increasing the intensity of the sharpness in the small details rather than increasing the sharpness of everything. I'll hold shift to select all of these layers and I'll group them with command or control G, just to keep things organized and so that I can apply a mask to the group. I'll apply a mask and then I'll invert it with command or control I I know that was a lot of steps. But now we have a group that has all of these sharpening filters and a black mask. If I grab the paint brush tool and I paint in white paint with a nice low flow, I'll be able to gradually paint the sharpness wherever I want on the picture instead of having everything sharpened. I'm just going to paint this over the eye lashes. The ris of the eye, and you can see this really brightens up the highlight in there and the lower lashes. I like to avoid painting on the whites of the eye. Because if you sharpen those areas, it tends to look a little weird. You can see I got a little bit of paint right there, and it just starts to look grainy. I'll press X on my keyboard, and I'll try to erase that. That graininess might already have been there. I just don't want to add to that graininess. With that painted on, I'll just show you the before and after before, after. And it might look a little grainy when we're zoomed in. But as we zoom out, you can see what this looks like before and after, and how it just adds a little bit more punch to this image. Now that we have these wonderful sharpening filters all ready to go, we could also paint this over a few other areas. For example, we could paint this over the eyebrows, We could even paint this over his facial hair. Just to make those areas look a little bit more sharp. If we're painting it over all of that hair, we could also paint it over his hair up here as well. With all that painting done. Here's the before and after. For most photos, sharpening the eyes is really all you need to do to make the eyes look good. But for the next few lessons, I want to show you some advanced techniques that you can use to really enhance the eyes and make them look more professional. 30. Eyes Project - Make a Plan: From this video until the end of the chapter, we'll work on this photo. Let's start by making a plan. When retouching the eyes, we'll use methods that we already know to clean up the surrounding areas. Then we'll add in some new methods to add contrast and color to the eye. To make a plan, let's start by adding a new pixel layer. I'll grab the paintbrush tool. I'm going to increase my flow and my hardness all the way. Then I'm going to make sure my color panel is set to wheel. That way, I can easily adjust my colors as I change the color for this process. First, we're going to start off with blemish removal. I'm just going to write this over to the side in this color. Then using this color, we can circle any blemishes that we see. I see we have some flyaway hairs over here. Maybe we'll take care of those. I can also see that her bottom lashes are clumped together right here. I'd like to separate those and fix those. We also have an eyelash going into the eye and a few over here as well. We'll take care of those. We can also clean up any stray eyebrow hairs, and we can also take care of any obvious bumps that are around the face. And that'll be our blemish removal. Let's change colors and do our next step, which will be dodging and burning. To start dodging and burning, we'll begin by smoothing. We can smooth out any dark spots that are around the face. We have a little bit of darkness right here. An patchy darkness that we can see just going around the face, and we can even dodge and burn in the eye itself if we see any veininess that we want to brighten up a little bit. Then after that, we'll also contour a little bit. We'll darken the eyebrows. We'll darken the eye lashes. We can brighten up this highlight. I'll just put an arrow to represent that. All those things just to add extra contrast. After all of that dodging and burning, we can go ahead and move on to adding nice colors to make the eyes really pop. And we'll do that to this inner ris area. And finally, it we'll finish this all off by adding sharpness to the eye. That's sharpness to the eyebrow, eyelashes, and this inner area as well. Sharpening should always be your last step in editing, and we'll talk more about that later as we get to that video. With our plan all set up, we can begin with the first step blemish removal in the next video. 31. Eyes Project - Blemish Removal: Let's do some blemish removal. To start, I'm going to add a new pixel layer on top of our background layer. I'll just rename this by double clicking, and I'll call this blemish. To start, let's grab the painting brush. I'll go up to the top to make sure we're set to current layer end below, and then we can go ahead and get started painting away anything obvious that we see. I'm going to start over here and paint away some of these flyway hairs that I see. Little bit by little bit. There we go. Very nice. I think this one was bothering me as well. Okay. I'm also going to paint away some of these eyebrow hairs. This blemish removal part should be pretty easy for you because we've been doing so much blemish removal throughout this whole course. Go ahead and quickly take care of those hairs. All right, when we're done with that, we can go ahead and move on to any bumps that we see around the face. Now that I've finished that, I'm going to start to take care of these eye lashes that are going down into the eye. I'll just use a smaller brush to carefully paint this one away. We don't want any gray left behind. Sometimes it'll do that to try to blend the areas. Make sure to fully paint over all of that. If you're struggling to get rid of it, I think it would be a good time to bring out the clone brush to really help. I'm going to grab the clone brush, make sure it's set to current layer end below. Then I'm just going to zoom in here and hold alt or option to sample the white part of the eye. Maybe I need to get a little closer there. Then we can paint away any of that grace mudginess. That looks a lot better for that part, and now we have these eyelashes, and these are even trickier, so I'm glad we have the clone brush for this. They're overlapping on such detailed areas that I'm going to try to sample as close to the area as I can. To try to get rid of those. I'm sampling a lot as I go. Just to make sure I'm sampling the right area for each part of the eye that we're cloning over. I think this looks pretty good. I'm going to do the same over here. Trying to be super careful not to leave any smudginess behind. I'm also lifting my cursor as I go to make sure I'm always reloading what I'm sampling. We don't want to accidentally relo the eyelash we're trying to get rid of. I know these eyelashes are natural to have going in your eye like this, but to me, in a two d image, it looks like it's in your eye, which just looks painful. So that's why I like to remove them. Just to help our model not feel that pain, you know? No one likes an eyelash in their eye. Okay, so I just finished cleaning up those eyelashes. I think this looks pretty good. And now I'm going to clean up some of the inner eye areas that I see. So there's a strange reflection going on in her eye right here, and I think I want to get rid of that just so it's not distracting. Then I'm also going to try to get rid of a little bit of the veininess with the clone brush. It's tricky to do this because there's so much veininess going on. So I'll just lighten up some of the main ones I see. But maybe we can leave the rest of that for the dodge and burn step. Let's do a tricky step next. We're going to clean up these clumped eyelashes. You see how there's a bald patch here. That's because the eyelashes are facing the wrong direction. To fix this, first, I'm going to remove the eyelashes that are going in the wrong direction, and I'll use the clone brush to do this. Go ahead and take your time with this, use a very small brush. Luckily, this part of the eye is pretty evenly lit, so we don't actually need to get too crazy close, which is nice because this is a hard area. Okay. I removed a little more than I thought I would. Here's the before and after of the clump. Now, I think I want to add more eyelashes in. I just wanted to make sure that full clumped area was gone so that we can replace it with better eyelashes. I'm going to sample over here, and I'm going to bring these eyelashes into place. I'm going to try my best to trace the direction that they're going in. It can be a little hard, but just trying to trace this eyelash all the way down. That looks pretty good. Then I'll sample an eyelash from over here and I'll do the same thing, trying to trace it in the direction it's going in. Just so this doesn't look like repetition, I'm going to take care of thinning it out a little bit. I can add more eyelashes in. Just sampling different eyelashes you see to bring them in place and changing the eyelash that you sampled, to make it look a little more natural and different from the surrounding areas. I know this is a tricky step. Take your time. In the end, you should have something that looks like this. Now you can see the before and after of brushing out those eyelashes, so they're nice and straight. I think that looks a lot better. And to finish, we can do a similar technique if we want to fill in eyebrows. Her eyebrows are pretty nice and thick, but if you wanted to, you could sample hairs here and there, just like we just did with the eyelashes and bring them into sparser areas. One thing that's a little tricky with this picture is that it has a very shallow depth of field. There's parts that are very nice and focused and then it quickly becomes unfocused. You'll want to make sure to sample areas that are close to the same level of focus. You don't want to paint something too sharp over an area that's supposed to be a little out of focus, or it'll just look obvious that some editing was done in that area. So just another reason why it's important to always try to sample as close to your source as you can. Okay. And with that, I've finished thickening up the eyebrows. So here's the before and after of that area. Just cleaning it up a little bit. And now we can go ahead and zoom out and see the complete before and after of all of our hard work. All right, great job. Now you're ready for the next video, where we'll do some dodging and burning. 32. Eyes Project - Smoothing: In this video, we'll smooth out the skin with dodging and burning. We can go ahead and start by adding a new pixel layer so that we can create our dodge and burn layer with this pixel layer. I'll go over and grab the fill bucket tool and I'll change the color so that it's 50% gray. I'll click in our image to apply that. Then so we can see our image again. I'll change it to soft light. Now that we have this layer set. I'm just going to duplicate it with command or Control J, and I'll do this twice. Now we can rename our layers, starting at the bottom, I'll rename this one smoothing. Then I'll rename the next one highlights, and the next one will be shadows. I'm just separating our contour layers right now just to make this easier later on. And to finish our setup, I'm going to apply a plac and white adjustment on top of everything. And I'll drag the red slider down until we can start to see more variation in the skin. That looks pretty good. I'll just close out of that. And now we can get started. I'll grab the paint brush. I'll press D. We have our default black and white colors again. I'll lower the hardness all the way and I'll lower the flow down quite a bit like that. Let's start in white paint, I'll press X, and we can go ahead and get started painting in white to brighten up any dark patches and wrinkles that we see. Before you begin, make sure you have the smoothing layer selected, and then you can go ahead and get started. I think dodging and burning is such a great way to reduce the look of wrinkles. It's not going to completely remove the wrinkles, but it's going to make them look softer and lighter. I think this looks very natural and it makes the wrinkles less noticeable too. This might seem strange, but now that I've finished smoothing the skin, I'm going to smooth the inside of the eye to reduce the little red lines. That was a pretty quick video. There wasn't too much to clean up, but now you can see the before and the after. This looks so nice, the skin looks great, and so do the veins in the eye. Now that the skin is all smoothed out, we can add some shape with and we'll do that in the next video. 33. Eyes Project - Contouring: Let's contour around the eyes. To start, we can bring our checklist into this document. I'll go to the top of the screen two file, and then down to place. I'll just put this over here in the corner. And we can refer to this list as we go. I know that this is a very zoomed in image, so we won't be able to do any contouring of her lips or a lot of her face. But we can still reference this to make sure that the areas around the eyes are contoured properly. Let's start with our highlights layer. I'll grab the paint brush. We can begin with white paint to do these highlights. First on the list is the middle of her forehead, and we can see a little of her forehead. I'll just paint a little bit up here. Then we can do the inner corner of the eye. Next, we can do under her eyebrow. Just on this outer corner right here, brighten that up. Then we can do the top of the eyelid. Just right here in the center. We can also do the bridge and tip of her nose. We can't do the tip of her nose, so I'll just brighten right here. Next, we have that cheekbone triangle area. I'll brighten right here and downward. Then we just have the lips and chin, which we can't do. Now that we've done those contour areas, since we're so zoomed in, we can add a few extra contouring areas to the eye. The goal of this contouring is to add extra contrast to the eye, brightening areas that are bright or should be bright. First, I'm going to brighten the whites of the eyes to make them even brighter. Then I'll look at any highlights that are in the eye. We have a nice one right here, and I'll just make that a little brighter. And to finish, I'm going to make sure that under the eye is nice and bright. A lot of times we can have shadows or dark circles there. Just brightening that up, and I think that's it for our extra highlights this time. We've done the list. We've done the white, the highlight, and under the eye. And now you can see the before and after of these highlights. Very pretty. Now we can go ahead and add extra contrast with shadows. Let's start by just going off of the list. First, we have the hair line. I'll turn off the checklist so we can see the hair line a little bit better. I'll just darken right along here. Then we can do the outline of the eye and eyebrow. I'll start by darkening the eyebrow. Then outlining the eye, just going along the eye lash line like this. We also have around the rim of the ris. We want to make sure not to get this on the whites of the eye. We're just darkening the iris part. Next, we have the outside edge of the nose, a little bit there. Last, we have under cheekbone and bottom of lip, which we can't see in this picture. I think we're done with our list. Now we can add any extra contrast that we want to the eye since we're so zoomed in. One thing that I'd like to darken a little bit extra to add contrast is the pupil of the eye. This darkness will stand out against this bright highlight and the bright color of her eye. And last, we can darken her eyelashes a little bit more. I'm going to zoom in and with a very small brush, I'm going to go back and forth right up against the eyelashes, and I'm making sure to use a very small brush, so I'm only touching the eyelashes here. We can darken the individual eyelashes, especially ones that look a little too bright. Now that I'm done painting those eyelashes, we can go ahead and take a look at what this looked like before and after. I think these eye lashes look so much better. They were just so bright before, but now they have that extra darkness that they need to add contrast to the area. And with that, I'll just zoom all the way out. And we can select both of these layers to see the before and after of our conduring. I think this looks pretty nice, but I think I did go a little overboard with the highlight flayer. I'll just click and drag on the word opacity to lower that down just to make it more natural. Now we can see the before and after. Even without sharpening any of the eye, the contrast that we added already makes the eye look sharper, which is really cool. Now that we've finished doing all of that dodging and burning. I think it's a good idea to do some color correction on the skin, and we can do that in the next video. 34. Eyes Project - Color Correction: Let's do some color correction. Anytime we do a lot of dodging and burning, where we're brightening and darkening different parts of the skin. A lot of times the colors can look a little bit uneven on the skin. That's because when you brighten shadows, a lot of times you're brightening up a color that was dull. We have a little bit of gray left behind. We can fix that by adding a selective color adjustment to do this color correction. Once you've added that, make sure you're in the neutrals category, and then we can go ahead and change the color to something dramatic. Then we can invert this layer with command or control, and we can paint in white paint on this black mask. I'll increase my flow so we can see this better, and we can paint this only over the skin. Avoiding the eyebrows and the hair. I already painted too much. Remember you can press x on your keyboard to remove from your painting. Once you have your outline done, you can hold Alt or Option and click, and now we can fill in the rest of the area. With that, I painted in, I'll select any other layer, and then we can go back and click on the layer icon to adjust the colors. I'll just reset them. Now we can add extra warmth to the image. I'll lower the cyan slider, raise the magenta and raise the yellow. This warmth looks really nice, especially on those grade out areas. Here's the before and the after I think this is very subtle and nice. It really even things out. We can actually still see the redness from her cheek over here. I don't think we need to paint any extra redness on her face for this picture. At this point, with that done, we've now finished our dodging and burning. I'm just going to clean up my layers, I'll delete the black and white layer and the dodge and burn checklist. I'll group together all of these layers with command or Control G. I'll call this dodge and burn. And I'll call this one skin correction. I'm going to select all of our layers to see the before and after so far. Here's the before and the after. I think everything we've done so far looks so good. This picture is really improved. And now that we're done with all of that, in the next video, we're going to zoom in more to the eye, and we're going to enhance the color of the ris. 35. Eyes Project - Enhance Color: This video will enhance the colors There are three steps that we're going to take to enhance the color of the iris. The first is to enhance the natural color that's already there. In this case, we'll enhance the green color of this eye. Step number two is brightening around the pupil. This added contrast will make the pupil stand out more. Last, we're going to add variation and detail to the iris. Let's get started with enhancing the natural green color. I'm going to apply an HSL adjustment. Then I'm going to paint this over the ris. To make that easier, I'm going to change to a more extreme color. I'll press command or control I to invert. Then I'll grab the paint brush so that we can paint in white paint over the ei. I'm just going to paint this all over the ris, and I'll just paint it over the pupil as well for now, just making sure all of it's covered. Once you like how it looks, go ahead and press X to switch your color to black, and you can remove from any areas that you over painted and remove it from the pupil. With that all cleaned up, now we can adjust this color. I'll click on the HSL layer icon. Then we can change this color to whatever we want. Because I want to enhance the green color, I'm going to shift the Hell slider over in this direction, just to add that green color. I'm going to lower the saturation, just to make this less intense and lower the luminosity to make it darker. With that finished, I'm going to close out of this and then so that this looks more natural. I'm going to change the blend mode of this HSL adjustment to soft light. Doesn't that look nice? Here's the before and after. It's pretty intense right now. I'm going to lower the opacity down to make this blend even more. And that looks pretty nice. For our next step, we're going to brighten around the pupil. I'm going to add a new pixel layer. Then I'm going to paint in white paint, so I'll press x to switch to that, and I'm going to paint with a lower flow. I'm just going to paint this right around the pupil. I painted a little too much. I'm going to switch to the eraser tool just so I can get that off of the pupil. There we go. Now to make this blend better, I'm going to switch this one's blend mode to soft light. Now that I've changed it to soft light, you might be thinking that this just disappeared. But if I turn this off, you can see the before and after before, after that little extra light just makes the pupil stand out more. Now we're on to our last step. If I'm being honest, this step really is not necessary for this particular i. But the purpose of this step is to add more variation to the i. This i already has a lot of variation. It looks like it has some webbing going through the iris and it looks really cool already. But not every i is going to be this in focus and detailed. Here's how you can add extra detail to any i. First, let's add an HSL adjustment. Again, we're going to change it to an extreme color so that we can paint this on. I'll press command or control I to invert. Then I'll grab the paint brush tool, and I'm going to paint in white paint to create a sunburst pattern going around the iris. I'm just going to paint little lines going all the way around. I have a pretty low flow, so I'm going back and forth a few times. But now you can see we have this subtle little hint of color in there before and after. I'll open up the HSL adjustment, and now we can change this to any color we want. You can change this to a color that's very close to the eye color or a contrasting color. In this case, I think it would look nice if the color contrasted a little bit. I'm going to try to create a brownish color. Oh. Then the final step to make this blend in better is to change the blend mode to soft light, the best blend mode. Now you can see the before and after adding a little bit of color variation. Like I said, this I really didn't need this, and it might look a little strange because it didn't need it. I'm going to lower the opacity of this layer just to keep those flex of color more subtle before and after. Let's take a look at our work from this video. I'll just zoom out. And now we can turn these layers off and on before, after. If any of these layers look too intense, feel free to select the layer and lower the opacity. You always have that control before and after. The eyes look so good. But you know what would make them look even better sharpening. Let's do some sharpening to finish off this project in the next video. 36. Eyes Project - Sharpening: Let's finish off this project by sharpening the eye. Sharpening should always be the last step when you're doing a bunch of edits to a photo like this. The reason why this should always be the last step is because the sharpening filter that we use uses a lot of computing power. It can really slow down your computer. As you're going through the process of editing, and you're doing painting and adding layers. This can just really slow down your computer if you have the sharpening filter. That's why I put it at the very end let's go ahead and apply our filter. We're going to apply the high pass filter. Make sure this is set on top of everything. Sometimes filters will be applied as child layers to whatever layer you had selected. Make sure that it's on top. Now we can go ahead and adjust the radius. I think I'll adjust it to about right there. I'll check on monochrome, and I'll change the blend mode to soft light. This is sharpening the entire image which we don't want. Let's invert this with command or control I. Now, I'm going to grab the paintbrush tool and I'm going to paint this over the areas that I want sharpened. With white paint, I'll just raise the flow. I'll just paint this over the eyebrow, the eyelashes, and the iris of the eye. Now that I've done that, I can duplicate this layer as many times as I want to get the sharp look that I want. I'll press command or control J a few times. Then I'll select all of these layers so that we can see before and after. This is too much sharpening, so I'm going to delete one of these, and we can try that again before after I think that looks pretty good. I'm just going to group these with command or Control G. Then I can gradually lower the opacity of the whole group. I think that looks pretty good before and after, nice and subtle. Now we can see the complete before and after of all of our work on this, the grand finale. I'll turn them all off so you can see the before and here's the after. And we're done amazing work. The eyes are so important to portrait photography, and I think we made the eye look so good. In the next chapter, we're going to learn all about retouching the mouth. 37. Whitening Teeth: This chapter we'll learn all about retouching the mouth and all of its components. The teeth lips and surrounding areas. Let's start with the most popular thing to fix, which is whitening the teeth. Her teeth already look pretty good. As I'm making my adjustments, I'll be careful just to make subtle adjustments. To start, let's reduce the yellow tones on her teeth. This is pretty easy to do with the HSL adjustments. Once you have the adjustment open, go ahead and change the color channel to yellow. This will target those yellow areas of the teeth. You can see as I raise and lower this, only the yellow colors are being affected. I'll just lower this down. Now, I want to paint this only on her teeth. Skin has a lot of yellow in it, and we don't want that to become desaturated. I'll press command or control I. Then I can grab the paint brush and I can paint in white paint over the teeth. I'm going to carefully outline the teeth. Now I'm going to press Alt or Option and I'll click on the mask and I can fill in the rest. With that finished, I'll click on the background layer. Then we can go back to the HSL adjustment. At this point, I want to show you the before and after and remind you that you can always open up the HSL adjustment and make any fine tune adjustments now that you have it painted only over the teeth. Next, I want to brighten the teeth, and we already made such a good mask of the teeth that I'd like to reuse it. I'm going to hold down command or control and I'll click on the mask and this will load the teeth as a selection. Now I can go into my adjustments, all a fly a curves adjustment to brighten things up. As I raise this, you can see only the selection is being effective. This is so nice that we don't need to repaint this over and over. Now, we've brighten that up. I'll press command or Control D to deselect this. And now we can adjust this even more. I want to brighten the shadows of the teeth and the highlights of the teeth separately so that I can have more control. I'm going to use this first layer to brighten the shadow parts of the teeth like back here, but I don't want the highlights to become so bright. There's a great feature you can use to isolate the shadows and highlights areas for your adjustments. That's blend ranges. We haven't used blend ranges in this course yet, and we really won't use it very often, but it's so useful to use so that your adjustments can only affect shadows or highlights. Let me quickly explain this. We're going to use this graph right here. There are two nodes, shadows and highlights. They're both raised right now, meaning that this adjustment layer is affecting the shadows and the highlights fully. But if you lower one of these, you'll be able to remove the adjustment from either the shadows or the highlights. I just lowered the highlights node. I can even move it over to make it less intense. This graph is telling us that we're only affecting the shadows. The shadows are fully brightened, and the highlights are not. If it's a little confusing to remember which is shadows and which's highlights, just remember S. S for shadows, for highlights. If you can remember, then you'll be able to remember which node does what? This adjustment has beautifully brightened the shadow areas. You can see this especially in her back teeth. Now we can do this one more time to brighten the highlights. I'll load this as a selection with command or control. I'll click on the mask. Now we can apply another curves adjustment. This time, I want to brighten the highlights. I'm going to click on the Gear icon for blend ranges. I want the supplied to the highlights, so I'll lower the shadows and bring it over so that it's not affecting the shadows. I'll de select with command or Control D. Now we can see the before and after increasing the highlights. Now we can zoom out and see the complete before and after of whitening the teeth. At this point, we can always lower the opacity to fine tune this. I might lower this opacity a little to bring the yellow back and maybe I'll lower the opacity of the highlights. They look a little bright. Now you can see the before and after of our beautiful natural teeth whitening. All right, great job. Now you know the basics of whitening teeth, and in the next video, we can go ahead and start a new project where we'll fix up some very chapped lips. 38. Lip Project - Make a Plan: This project is going to be a lot of work. We'll start with this video, where we'll make a plan. I'll just zoom in here, and we can see that our model has very chapped lips. I want to be very thorough as I clean this up and show you all of the different techniques you can use for a situation like this. To make our plan, I'll just add a new pixel layer. I'll grab the paint brush and increase my flow and hardness. Now we can go ahead and get started with our plan. The first thing I want to do is blemish removal. I'm just going to zoom in here. Now, lips naturally have lines in them, so I'm not so worried about the lines. As I am worried about little dry flex of skin that we can see here and there, indented areas that don't look quite right. I'm just going to go through and try to clean up those types of things, as well as any bumps or blemishes that are surrounding the lips. If we get the lips looking perfect and then we have all these bumps going on all around them, the lips won't stand out the way we want them to. Once we've done blemish removal. Our next step is dodging and burning. For dodging and burning, I want to reduce the look of some of the deepest lines. Still leaving the lines behind, just making them less deep. Then we'll also do some contouring to make sure we have a good shape to the lips. We'll look at our contouring checklist to make sure we do this well. After that, we'll add a little more color to the lips. I guess I'll just outline them to represent that. Add color. And last, we'll add some sharpness to the lips. All right. We have our plan. Now that we're all set, we can begin in the next video with the trickiest but most satisfying part, blemish removal. 39. Lip Project - Blemish Removal: This video we'll remove the blemishes from the lips. The main thing that I want to remember is that I'm trying to get rid of the distractions, not every line that I see on the lips. It's so tempting to just remove everything, but I promise you that it won't look good because it won't look real. Let's begin by adding a new pixel layer. Then I'm going to grab the painting brush, and I'll make sure this is set to current layer and below. Now we can go ahead and remove blemishes. I'll just start on the outside of the lips. Now we can go ahead and start cleaning up inside the lips. This looks pretty good so far. I'm just going to grab the clone brush and I'm going to fix this part right here. I don't want the lips to look like they're connected. I'm going to hold alt or option on this part, and I'm going to bring that dark color across to create an opening there. I'll do the same on the other side, dragging this across until they meet. That looks pretty good. I'm going to do the same thing over here. We have a bunch of white specks in there. I'm just going to sample and clone this across to remove that. I'm having a hard time making this look like it's an opening. I'm going to borrow this dark color from over here and with a very small brush, I'm going to bring it over. That looks better. I'll just switch back to the painting brush now, and I'm going to continue to clean up any other little blemishes I see. As I'm cleaning up the little white specks on the lips, I want to be careful not to remove too much of the whiteness because that's probably a highlight area that makes the lips look natural. I'm especially looking at this in the center of the lips. I'm going to leave those highlights alone. But anywhere where there's a highlight or a white speck in shadow, I think it's a good idea to remove that because it's probably not a highlight. It's probably dried skin. I think I'm done now with removing the blemishes so I can show you the before and after of our work. Where the lips meat looks so much better now. I'm really happy we took care of that. And now that we're done with that, we can do even more. In the next video, we'll clean up the dark spots and smooth things out with dodging and burning. 40. Lip Project - Smoothing: This video, we'll work on smoothing out the lips. As we've already seen, dodging and burning is a great way to reduce the look of wrinkles or deep lines without fully removing them. We're going to do that for the lips to just make these deep lines a little more gentle. I'll add a new pixel layer, and we can go ahead and set this up as a dodge and burn layer. I'll change the color to 50% gray and I'll click. I'll change the blend mode to soft light. Then I'm going to duplicate this so we can use this later for contouring. I'll rename this one smoothing. And this one, contouring. Last, we can add up black and white adjustment and we can bring the red slider down. All right, selecting my smoothing layer again. I'll just grab the paint brush. I'll lower the hardness all the way and lower the flow quite a bit. There we go. Then I'll press D for default colors and x, so I can paint in white to brighten up the dark parts of the lips. I'm just going to quickly go through this, brightening up the dark parts. The reason why some of these parts look so dark is because the dark lines are right next to a bright highlight area, which just makes the area stand out more. Lightening this up will just smooth out that light to dark transition. Remember the shortcuts, bracket keys to resize your brush, x to switch between black and white paint, and you should be good to go. We've done this a few times. I'll just make this really fast. Okay Let's take a look at our work. Here's the before and after of really reducing those wrinkles, and we can turn off the black and white so we can see the before and after of that. You can see there's still wrinkles there, but they're just a lot softer now. I think this looks a lot better and a lot less like chapped lips. But maybe I did go a little overboard. We could always lower the opacity of this layer to bring back some of the wrinkles. Feel free to do that if you want, and now that we're done with that, we can move on to in the next video. 41. Lip Project - Contouring: This video will contour the lips. I'm so glad that we took the time to smooth everything out because now we can do the satisfying edits of adding strategic highlights and shadows over the whole lips. To start, I'm going to go to the top of the screen to file, then down to place. I'll select the checklist. And we can refer to this checklist as we go. And I'll just select my contouring layer and the paint brush. Let's begin with the highlights. I'm going to go down the list until we see one that applies to the lips. You can see right here we have above the top lip, and then the middle of the bottom lip. Those are the two highlights we have for the lips. I'm just going to do this Cupid's bow area, brighten that up, and then brightening the center of the bottom lip. So with this contouring, we're really trying to do a sandwich of highlights and shadows, highlights and shadows, alternating those two. You can see the keep its bows bright, and then this part of the lips is darker. It even gets darker down here, and then we get bright, and then we'll get dark again. This alternating pattern creates a lot of nice contrast for our lips. Speaking of contrast, let's switch our color to black and now we can do the shadows. On this list, we really only have a bottom of lip for the shadows. We can go ahead and do that, darkening right under here. Now, since we're so zoomed in, we can also add to our sandwich of highlights and shadows. We can darken the parts that are already dark to make them even darker. I'm going to darken this crease right here, especially because we had to do all that cloning. I think this will look nice in that area just to darken it a little bit more. We can also darken the top lip just a little bit more right under that Cupid's bow area. Now we can turn this off to see the before and after. It's amazing how contouring can really reshape the lips. You can see when I turn the layer off, the lips look more flat, and now they have a little bit more plumpness and shape to them. Okay. Now that we're finished dodging and burning, let's fix up the color of the lips in the next video. 42. Lip Project - Coloring: Let's correct and enhance the colors. What I'm about to show you in this video is completely optional. If you look at our before and after so far. You can already see we've made such a big improvement. But I want to show you how you can recolor the lips because sometimes dodging and burning creates discoloration and also it can look nice to add just a little bit more of a pop of color on the lips. I'm going to walk you through that in this video. Before I do, I'm just going to delete the checklist and the black and white layer. We don't need those anymore. We could also delete the plan layer as well. Let's add a new pixel layer. Using this layer, I'm going to sample and paint the lip color directly on the lips to even out the tones. Starting at the top, I'll hold Alt or Option, and I'll click right here to sample that color. Then I'll paint it across the top lip area. To smooth that out. I'll resample this lighter color and I'll paint that over here. I'll sample this darker color again and paint it. It's like doing the same painting technique we did with frequency separation, sampling colors as you go and painting them over the area. Of course, we're not going to leave the lips like this, but this will help us to get the colors a little more evened out. Here's the before and after of smoothing out the colors. Now, right now, the colors are fully covering the highlights, which I don't want to do. I want the highlights to stay nice and bright. I'm going to go up to blend ranges, and I'm going to lower the highlights node so that the highlights can appear again. Now these paints are not applied to our highlights, and you can see as I raise and lower this how much brighter they become. I can even move it over slightly to have more of the highlights come through. Now you can see the B for and after. It's mostly affecting the shadows now. Maybe I need to move this over a little bit more so it affects more of our lips, but you can see the B for and after blending those colors in the shadows a little bit more. That's one technique you can use if the lips are still looking a little bit, and do you want to smooth them out a more? Now we can do one more technique to recolor the lips to add an extra punch of color. I'm going to go down and apply a selective color adjustment. This time instead of neutrals, we're going to be in the reds category since these lips are more red toned. Now we can go ahead and change the color. I'm going to change this to a more wild color. We can see where we're painting. I'll invert this with command or control I. D for default colors, x for white paint. I'll raise the flow, and I'm just going to paint this over the lips. With that painted, I'll open the adjustment again, and we can change the color to whatever we want. If it helps, zooming out can give more context to the picture you're working with so that you choose a color that looks appropriate. Right now, this color is way too bright, so I'm just going to try to scale it back. I think something like that looks really nice and natural Attle bit peach. Here's the before and after. I think that looks pretty nice. We've just added a bit of a brighter, more saturated color to the lips, so they don't look gray, and I think that looks really nice. You can always reduce the opacity as well if you'd like. Now that the lips look really good. I think a little extra contrast would look really nice, and we can do that by adding some sharpening in the next video. 43. Lip Project - Sharpening: Let's finish this project by sharpening the lips. This will be our last step for this project. Remember that sharpening adds contrast. It's a good idea to add this last in this case, especially because if we were to add sharpness to the lips in the beginning, it would just make the chap lips stand out even more. But since we did such a good job removing blemishes and smoothing this out, this added contrast will look really nice. Let's add the high pass filter. Make sure it's above everything. Then we can go ahead and raise the radius. I'll raise it to about there. I'll check on monochrome, and then I'll change the blend mode. I think when I originally taught you sharpening, I applied the overlay blend mode, and then last time we did soft light. I want you to look at the difference here. There really isn't much of one. I find sometimes overlay looks a little bit more intense and soft light looks softer. But as you can see in this case, they look incredibly similar. You can use either one of these. Now we can invert this layer with command or control I, and we can paint this and white paint just over the lips. Okay, and now I'll just zoom in and we can see the before and after before, after. I like keeping it nice and subtle like this, especially for lips that I really don't want to look chapped again, so nice suttle sharpening. And now I'm just going to o out so we can see the complete before and after. Here it is before and after. Now that I'm looking at it, I think I'll lower the opacity of our color layer. Since it doesn't look like she's wearing any makeup. I think this will just make it look more natural. One more time. Here's the complete before and after. Just like with the eyes in the last chapter, if you take a lot of time to correct the lips and the teeth, it really makes a big difference. With that, we've finished this chapter. Great job. In the next chapter, we're going to learn all about making the hair look amazing. A. 44. Enhancing Highlights: In this short chapter, I want to show you three different ways to make the hair look better, and we'll start with the simplest way, enhancing the highlights. To add some highlights to the hair. We're basically going to dodge and burn. We need to set up our pixel layers for that. I'll add a new pixel layer using the fill bucket, I'll fill it with 50% gray. I'll change the blend mode to soft light. We can duplicate this layer with command or control, and then we can rename our layers highlights and shadows. The strategy for painting on these layers is actually pretty simple. We're going to paint over the existing shadows and highlights to make them stand out more. We're not actually going to add any new shadows and highlights necessarily. We're just enhancing what's there. Let's start with the highlights. I'll press D for default colors and x for white paint. Then we can paint with a 0% hardness and a nice low flow. Because I've done this a few times, I can see where the highlights are. It's just anywhere where the hair is a little bit brighter. But if you're having trouble seeing what's the highlight versus the shadow, feel free to add a black and white adjustment layer on top of everything to help you see this better. Now you can clearly see that these white parts are the highlights and the dark parts are the shadows. I'll go to my highlights layer, and I'm just going to paint over these highlight areas. You can see we're just making them even brighter. Now, you can see the before and after, and I'll just turn off this adjustment, we can see that again before and after very shiny and to make it look even shinier. Let's do the shadows next. I'll press x to switch to black paint. This time, I'm going to not turn the black and white adjustment on so that I can paint it with the colors still visible. I think painting either way is just fine with the black and white adjustment or without. I just want to show you what it looks like painting without this adjustment. Oh. Okay. And just like that, we're done with the shadows. Here's the before and after. Now we can select both of our layers by holding shift and clicking to see the complete before and after. So pretty. I think this looks so nice, adding this extra contrast to the hair. This was actually really easy because we didn't even need to do any retouching. We just painted it right on the hair, and it looks so good. Now that you know how to bring out some beautiful contrast in the hair. In the next video, I want to show you how you can add new hair. A 45. Adding Hair: Let's add some hair to our model in this video. Filling in hair like this is completely up to you and your subject. I don't want to imply that a receding hairline is a bad thing that needs to be fixed, but I do want to show you how you could add new hair to these areas to bring it in if that's something that you would want to fix. Also, remember that we can only fix areas that we have information for. If this man was completely bald, then I couldn't fill in the hair because there would be no hair to sample from. Because he already has quite a bit of hair, we can bring that hair in to fill in the area. Let's add a new pixel layer, and we can go ahead and use the clone brush to clone the hair in these areas. Make sure you're set two current layer below. I'll just increase the size of my brush. Then we can start by sampling this area and bringing it down here. I'm just going to paint this. With a smaller brush, you can also paint just a little bit little chunks of hair at a time. I think that looks pretty good, but you can definitely see some repetition and maybe this isn't exactly where the hair line would fall. Let's fix this a little bit more using this mesh warp tool. Now we can adjust the corners to adjust how this is placed. I still think that having that curve of the hairline is n. I'm just going to move this. It still curves up like that. I think I like this, so I'll press apply. And now you can see the before and after of bringing that hair down. Well, I think this looks pretty good. I do think I want to do a little bit more cloning. Just because this area looks so blurry, and you can see the hair right next to it is a little more in focus. So I want to blend the transition ale bit using the clone brush. I'm going to sample some of this hair that's in the middle of focus, and I'm going to lightly paint this in. Now, that's obviously creating repetition. Maybe I'll use a smaller brush to just paint little hairs in. The smaller the brush, the less obvious the repetition will be because you're only sampling little areas of hair. I'll do the same on the other side, bringing some of this hair in just to break up any repetition that's there. Can see repetition up here, so I'm just going to sample and paint over that. But I think that looks pretty nice now. Here's the before and after, bringing that hair line down just a little bit, and I think that looks very natural and nice. Now we can repeat the process over here, which is a little bit trickier. You can see he has some hair overlapping on this area. The hair back here is very out of focus. But I think we can still do a similar technique to get this done. I'll add a new pixel layer, and then I'm going to sample this area and with a larger brush, I'm just going to bring this down here. Now, obviously, I brought that down too far, but that's okay. I just wanted to make sure we had enough hair there. Now using the Mesh Warp tool, we can go ahead and adjust this. I'll just drag it upward and place it. I'm trying to get these to match. Maybe this needs to come down a little bit more. Something like that. I'll press a fly. Now we can take a look at the before and after of bringing that down and we can go back in with the clone brush to fix any areas that look a little strange. Just with a very small brush, I'm going to sample and paint some of this area. One thing that I think looks a little strange is you see how the hair is meeting the scalp right here and it looks a little bit more jagged where this looks very smooth. I think I'd like to fix that by sampling a little bit of his skin and just bringing it up. But you can see that looks very obvious. I'll undo that with command or. I'm going to use a very low flow to softly bring that skin. To make this look a little bit more natural. Now I'm just going to take some of the skin color, and I'm lightly going to paint this just to thin out the hair in this area. Now I'm finished with that. I'm just going to o out and now we can select both of the layers to see the before and the after. I think because we only moved the hair line in slightly, it looks more natural for this image. I'm really happy with how this turned out. As you can see, filling in hair is actually a pretty easy process as long as your subject already has some hair to work with. We're almost done with hair in the next video. We're going to do a quick project to flyaway hairs. 46. Removing Flyaways: Let's remove some flyaway hairs. I know that we've done a bit of cleanup already. I just want to spend some time in this video to review techniques, specifically focusing on the hair. We're going to clean up hairs that obviously stand out to us as being out of place, but we're also going to work on some trickier areas like these hairs that are overlapping over the eye. We can't always choose how the hair will end up looking in a picture. Sometimes the hair is in a terrible location like this. I want to show you how you can fix a situation like this. For cleaning up the flyaway hairs, I like to use a combination of the painting brush and the clone brush depending on the situation. Let's start by adding a new pixel layer. Then we can grab the painting brush to start. I'll change it to current layer end below. Then we can go ahead and start. As I'm in painting, I'm trying to use a nice small brush and I'll move my brush just a little bit at a time. If I paint too aggressively, then I know that that area might not blend properly. I just tried to paint a little bit to make sure it looks okay. If it doesn't, I can always press command or control Z to undo. When I think about flyaway hairs, I think about the hairs that are sticking out around the outside of our subject, but I'm also looking for any hair that's facing the wrong direction, making the hair look messy. If most of the hairs in an area are flowing downward, but I have a hair that's flowing off to the left, then that hair will look a little strange, so I'm going to remove it. As I'm in painting, I can see that the painting brush is actually doing a really good job with a lot of the hair, which is such good news because painting is a lot faster than cloning. No need to sample anything, just paint, paint, paint. Okay, let's take a look at the difference so far. Here's the before and after up here. I wasn't sure if I was going to remove much of the hair on the forehead just because there was so much. But I do think this looks a lot better removing that. As we go down, we can see more of this before and after. And before and after. Such a big improvement only using the painting brush, which is pretty amazing. Now that we've taken care of that, we can use the clone brush to really go in and make sure all of the areas make sense. We don't want any smudgines left behind. Also, I did struggle over here to remove these hairs. I think using a low flow clone brush in this area could really help with that. I'm just going to add a new pixel layer. Then I'll select the clone brush. Make sure it's set to current layer below, and we can go ahead and get started. I really like that we can use the clone brush to go in and refine what we did with the painting brush because well, the painting brush did a great job when it was surrounded by other hairs. Some of these areas where the hairs overlap on the background and on the face. My need a little bit of extra work because there wasn't hair surrounding the area to fill in nicely. I'm just going to go through here and make sure every area on the face looks good, and I think it's looking pretty nice. I did a little bit of cloning. It might not be all that noticeable, but you can see the before and after. I mainly took care of the areas of flyaway hairs on the outside of her head to lighten them, not completely remove them, but just lighten them, so they're less noticeable. I also took care of a few areas like around her eye. This muddy area right here. I just wanted to clone in some more eyelashes and help that shadow not look so light, and I also took care of some areas down here. Ve Now that we've done all of that cloning and all of that in painting, there's just one last area that I think needs more attention up here. We removed so many hairs from the forehead, which means that affinity tried its best to fill in those areas, and I tried my best to clone those areas, but we're having some major texture issues and color issues up here. Whenever that happens where I'm really struggling with the texture and color, I know that I should turn to frequency separation to fix this so that I can easily get rid of each of those problems separately. Now, we need a single layer to do frequency separation, since it will take one layer and divide it in two. I'm going to go over here and just right click on one of the layers. Then I'll scroll down until I see where it says Merge visible. I'll click that. Now we have a brand new layer that has everything that we can see on it. Now I can use this layer for frequency separation. I'm just going to go up to the top of the screen to filters, and then down to frequency separation. Okay. Looking at the forehead, I'm just going to raise the radius until we can see more texture on the forehead. And more colors on the other side. I think somewhere around ten pixels looks pretty good for this picture. I'll press Apply. Now we have two layers over here that we can work with, the high frequency and low frequency. Let's go ahead and start with the high frequency layer. I have the clone brush out, but I'm going to change it to current layer only so that I can sample and paint the texture on this layer to make this easier to see, I am going to turn off all of the other layers, so I'm only left with the high frequency layer that I can paint the texture onto. After adding the texture back in, I think that looks pretty good, but you can see that we still have some light patches of skin where it should be shadowed. That's where the low frequency comes in. I'll just add a layer on top, I'll grab the paintbrush tool. Using a nice low flow, I'm just going to sample and paint. I'll hold t or option to sample a color and then I'll paint it over an area. I'll do that until we have all our colors and smoothed out. With that painting done, I think the forehead looks so much better. Here's the before and after of doing that frequency separation. Now we can zoom out and select all of our layers and see the complete before. And after. This looks so much better and it might not be perfect. I could probably spend all day cleaning up the hair. But the improvements we have made made a huge difference. Good work. With that, you finish the chapter. In the next one, we're going to start our final course projects. This is really exciting because it means that you learned just about everything you need to know, and now it's just time to practice and perfect your skills. So exciting. I'll see you in the next chapter. A 47. Project 1 - Make a Plan: In this chapter, we're going to do a start to finish project together, Let's start by making an action plan. Before we make that action plan, I just wanted to mention something. Throughout this whole course, we've learned so many great ways to retouch images. For the next few project chapters, I want to show you a great workflow that you can use to clean up your pictures from beginning to end. To help with this, I made a checklist that you can follow. Not every picture, will need to follow every one of these steps, but I do think using a checklist can help you remember the types of edits that you can do. You can find this list and the exercise files of this chapter. For this first project. We're going to simplify the list and just use a few of the steps. Let's begin by adding a new pixel layer that we can add our plan onto. I'll just grab the paint brush and increase the flow and hardness and choose a nice color to write with. Step number one for this picture is going to be Blemish removal. For this picture, I can see her hair looks a little bit wild, and I honestly think that's the look that they were going for for this photoshoot. But I do still think some of the hairs that are overlapping on her face. Maybe a few of the hairs on the outside can still be cleaned up a little bit. There's also some hairs down here that are overlapping with this black strap, and I think they look a little bit distracting since they contrast so much with the black strap. I want to clean up those ones as well. Then as usual, we can clean up any skin blemishes that we see. Just anything that stands out to us as something that shouldn't be there. After that, we're going to take some time to zoom in to the eyes and lips. At this point, we will have finished our basic blemish removal. Now we can take some time to enhance the eyes and lips. We've dedicated entire chapters to cleaning up the eyes and lips. I think we can pull out some really good strategies to enhance these areas. After that, Our next step will be dodging and burning. We'll begin with smoothing out any dark patches we see. This picture is pretty well lit. I'm not seeing a ton of dark patches right off the bat, but we can always turn the picture black and white to see if any dark patches stand out to us. After that, we can always do some contouring. I won't circle anything here, but we will just follow our contouring checklist to make sure all of the contour lighting looks good. And we'll finish this picture by adding some sharpening. We'll just sharpen all of the basic areas we've been doing, the eyebrows, the eyelashes, and iris. Since we have cleaned up the lips, we can also sharpen the lips. With that, we now have our plan and we can refer to this layer as we go or not. Either way, it's nice that we took some time to look closely at this picture before diving into editing. Let's remove some blemishes in the next video. 48. Project 1 - Blemish Removal: This video, we'll do some blemish removal. Let's begin by adding a new pixel layer, and I'll just double click to rename this layer blemish. Now we can select our painting brush. Make sure it's set to current layer end below, and we can go ahead and get started with our painting. I'm going to start with the hairs overlapping on her forehead. I'm just going to use a nice small brush and go a little bit at a time to remove these. Now that we have those main forehead hairs taken care of. We can zoom into the hairline. You see how it looks like she has little baby hairs up here. We can fix this by starting from the skin side of the baby hairs and carefully painting up toward the hair line to remove those. Remember, if I were to start in the very middle or start on the hair side of the line, then I wouldn't have good skin information to sample from to remove these. Now that I've finished that, there are a few smudgy areas. I'll just use the clone brush to fix these areas and we can always lower the flow and use a larger brush to smooth the whole area. The hair on the forehead looks so much better. Let's continue to clean up the hairs on the outside of our model. Because the hair is going for a messy look, I'll just clean up a few of the hairs that stand out the most. I'm also going to make sure I save my work as I go by pressing command or Control S. Sometimes when you're doing serious retouching with a lot of layers and a lot of cloning and end painting. There is a small chance that your program might crash. Just make sure to save your work as you go. I've forgotten to do this a few times, and it's really frustrating to lose all your work. M sure to save. Continuing on, I'm going to clean up the hairs on the black strap. Now that the strap looks better, I think I want to untwist it down here just to make it look a little cleaner. Let's do that. I'm going to add a new pixel layer and using the clone brush, I'm going to replicate this part down here. I'll just sample right there on the edge. Then I'm going to try to match it up the best I can and paint it, lifting my cursor as I go. And now you can see the before and after of that. Well, that does look pretty good. I can see that it's not matching up where it's supposed to. I'm going to get the mesh Warp tool, and I'm just going to move this over Okay. I think that looks a lot better. I'll press a fly. And now to finish this, I'm going to remove the repetition I see. There's a little bit of a bump right here and it continues all the way down, so we have four little bumps. I'm just going to use the clone tool to fix this. All better. I'll just rename this layer strap. Then we'll get back to our blemish removal. Next, I'm just going to work on the skin and I'm just going to work my way around removing any skin blemishes that I see. Making small changes like this to the picture like moving the strap, removing stray hairs, and the small blemishes can make such a big difference overall. As I'm retouching the skin, I'm not going to go into too much detail with retouching the eyes or lips because we're going to do that in later videos. Just painting away any blemishes I see, and that'll be good. And now we can see the before and after. Great work. This is off to a great start with all of those blemishes gone. We can focus on the most important areas, starting with the eyes in the next video. 49. Project 1 - Eyes: 's enhance the eyes in this video. To start, let's add a new pixel layer that we can paint on. We're going to do some painting just to clean up any blemishes we see around the eyes. The eyelashes that are going into the eyes, as well as any stray hairs on the eyebrows. We can also do any cloning as needed. As we focus on the eyes and the lips in the next video. We're going to do a mini workflow by doing blemish removal and then doing dodging and burning and then doing color enhancements. We're going to do this together, all at once, just because that's how we learned it, and it's also nice to focus on one area at a time. Unlike in the eyes and lip chapters, though, we're going to save sharpening to the very end of the whole project just so it doesn't slow down our computer too much. Now we can see the before and after of the blemish removal before, after. I know it's very small changes, but I do think it helps, especially getting the eyelashes out of the eyes over here. Just opening the eyes a little bit more. Now that that's done, we can do our dodging and burning. I'll set up the layers for this new pixel layer, fill bucket, 50% gray. And soft light. We're just going to use this layer to do contouring. There's no need to duplicate this layer. I'm just going to type in contouring to name the layer. Now we can add in some extra shadows and highlights for this layer. Keep in mind that we want a pattern of light going from dark to light to dark again to add all that that we want. With a nice low flow, the default colors out. We can go ahead and get started. I'm just going to darken the eyebrows and darken the eye lashes. Darken around the iris of the eye and darken the pup. We can even take some time to o in and with a very small brush, darken the eye lashes. Okay. We did that a little backwards starting with the shadows. Now I'm just going to switch to white paint, and I'm going to highlight a few areas. So the top of the eyelid, the whites of the eyes, the inner corner of the eye, and the bright highlight spot that's on the ris. I'll also do the brow area. I think that looks pretty good for our contouring. Here's the before and after of that. So much more contrast. This looks really nice and to finish this all off. We can go ahead and enhance the natural color of the iris. I'm going to add an HSL adjustment. I'll make it an extreme colors that we can paint this right over the ei. I'll invert with command or control I. Then I can paint in white paint with a higher flow to reveal this over the ris. I'll just reset the sliders and now we can choose a color that looks good for our model. I think I'm going to raise the hue a little bit, raise the saturation a little bit. And I think I'll leave the luminosity alone. Now we can go ahead and turn this off to see the before and here's the after. It might be hard to tell, but the eyes look a little bit brighter and more saturated now with a little bit more blue, and I think that looks pretty nice. Now that we've adjusted the color, our next step is brightening around the pupil. With a nice low flow on my paint brush, I'll just paint right around the pupil to brighten up that area. Then I'll change the blend mode of this layer to soft light before and after. Finally, we can add variation with color around the eye. I'm going to add another HSL adjustment. Again, I'll change it to extreme color and I'll invert with command or control I. Now with a smaller brush, we can do a sunburst pattern all around the eye. Now to finish, I'm just going to change the color to whatever I want and so that I can see it better. I'm going to really increase the saturation as I choose this color. I think I'd like to choose maybe more of a brown toned color. I'll lower the saturation and darken it. Let's see what that looks like. Here's the before and after. I think that looks pretty cool. Maybe you'll lighten it slightly to make it a little less obvious. But now we can select all of those layers that we just did to see the before and the after of enhancing the colors in the eye before, after. Nice and subtle, but very pretty. And now I'll just elect all of our layers from this video to see them before and after adding so much contrast and sharpness to the eyes. This looks so good with the eyes looking amazing. In the next video will enhance the lips. 50. Project 1 - Lips: This video, will enhance the lips. We'll follow a similar process to the eyes. Let's start with blemish removal. I'll just add new pixel layer and we can begin in painting away the blemishes that we see on the lips. Luckily, we don't have too much to remove, so this is pretty quick this time. Next, let's dodge and burn to both smooth and contour. I want to do both because we have lines on the lips that we can brighten up to make them look less obvious. Now we can duplicate it, and I'll just rename them smoothing and contouring and to help us out. I'll add a black and white adjustment layer on top of everything just so we can see as we're smoothing. So Let's start by smoothing out to reduce the wrinkles a little bit. Of course, we shouldn't completely remove the wrinkles, just brighten them a little bit. Next, we can take care of any dark patches that we see. I can actually see quite a few patches on the inner edge of the lips, and I think this is a line separating the lip stick from the inner mouth area. So I'm just going to smooth this out so that transition looks better. Now it's time for contouring. Remember dark light, dark light. Let's make a contour sandwich to add shape to the lips. First, we'll add highlight to the center of the lips and to the Cupid's bow area. Then, since we have highlights in place, we can surround those areas with shadows. Here's a before and after so far with our blemish removal and our dodging and burning. I think this looks so good. With that all finished, now we can adjust the color. This is a fun one since she's wearing lipstick. We have more options for the colors, we could change this to. First, I'm going to add a selective color adjustment and I'll make sure that I'm in the reds category. I'll switch this to a more extreme color. I'll invert this with command or control I. Then I'll just paint in white paint around the lips. With that, all taken care of, I'll just reset the sliders and now we can choose whatever color we want. Right now, the lips look a little purple. If we want to enhance that, we could add a little more cyan and magenta, or if we want to completely change the color, we could lower the cyan, lower the magenta, and increase the yellow. We could even darken or brighten the color with the black slider, which we really haven't touched yet. But you can see this looks pretty nice. I'm going to be completely honest with you. I actually think the lips still look pretty patchy. I think we need to try a different adjustment. This is no big deal. We can just use what we've already painted for this new adjustment. Let's make a selection of the painted area by holding down command or control and clicking on the selective color layer icon. With that loaded up, we can add a recolor adjustment, and I'm just going to adjust the colors till we get to a color that looks good. Okay. And to blend this better, since this looks very uniform right now, we can change the blend mode to soft light. The recolor adjustment is like my secret weapon. I like using it to even out the colors, and I think this looks a lot better. I think I'll actually delete the selective color adjustment and just stick with the recolor adjustment. Now we can see all of our work from this video. Here's the before and the after. So good. I'm very happy with how this looks. Now that we have all of the blemish removal done, we can begin dodging and burning the entire face in the next video. A 51. Project 1 - Smoothing: Let's smooth out the skin with dodging and burning. To start, we can go ahead and set up our layers and I'll just speed through this part. We've already set up a dodge and burn layer so many times. For this video, we're going to have one layer for smoothing, one layer for contouring, and the black and white layer on top. With those setup, I'll just grab the paint brush tool, and we can paint with a nice low flow and white paint to begin removing the dark patches on the skin. Getting started, we can zoom in and lightly paint over any dark patches we see. I'll be honest, this picture really doesn't have too many obvious dark patches. Just try your best to take care of any dark patches you do see. But one area that I do want to make sure that you paint over is the under eye area. There are some wrinkles here that would look nice if they were lightened up a little bit, as well as some dark areas under the eye. Make sure to paint over those areas. After that, we can go ahead and continue down the skin. There's some darkness on her hand that we could take care of as well as on her shoulder area. Just going through and see what you can see. Again, there really isn't too much in this image. Once you've taken care of what you can see, I think it'll look pretty good. We can go ahead and take a look now at the before and the after. All right. Great job. With that all finished, we can contour the skin in the next video. 52. Project 1 - Contouring: This video we'll shape the skin with some contouring. For our contouring, I want to make sure we follow the check list because there are just too many areas to remember. I'm going to go to the top of the screen to file, and then down to place. I'll select the Dodge and Burn check list, open it up, and I'll just place it right here in our document. Okay. To get started, I'll just select my contouring layer. I'll grab the paint brush. And let's begin with the highlights. To start. We can brighten up the middle of the forehead, and she actually already has a highlight there. So I'll just do that lightly. Then we have the inside corner of the eye, which I'll be honest, I was supposed to do in the eyes video, and looking back at the video. I noticed I forgot this area. So let's do that. We have under the eyebrow and the top of the eyelid, which we already did in the eye video. Then we have the bridge and tip of nose. We have that cheek bone triangle area. Then we just have the lips, which we've already done and the chin. We can't do the chin because her hand is in the way. Instead, I'm just going to look at the rest of her body to see if anywhere else could benefit from some highlights. One thing I like to do is add extra she to jewelry. I'm just going to paint over the highlights that the rings have. Okay. And then we can also paint over any other highlights we see. If we wanted to, we could paint over her fingers a little bit since they're already a little bit brighter. We could paint over this collar bone right here, this part of her shoulder. Those areas were already bright, so I just brightened them more. Now we can go ahead and turn our checklist back on, switch our color to black and do the shadows. Let's start with the top one, which is the hair line. I'm just going to paint right at the midpoint between the skin and the hair all the way around. Next, we have the outline of the eye and eyebrow along with around the iris, and we've already done all of that. I'm just going to do that outside edge of the nose next. Next, we have under the cheek bone. I'll just lightly do that. Last, we have bottom of lip, but we've already done that. I'm just going to turn off this layer now, and we can take a look at other areas that we want to add shadows to. I'm just going to add shadow under the face on the neck along with right around the collar bone and on the back of the hand. Just areas where there already were shadows to add contrast. With that, I think we're done. We can go ahead and take a look at what this looked like before and after So much more contrast, I think this looks great. Now that we're done contouring, we no longer need the checklist. I'm just going to delete that layer. We also don't need the plan, so I'll delete that too. Now that we're done with all that dodging and burning, I think it's a good time to do some color correction on the skin. I'm going to add a selective color adjustment, and I'm going to switch it to the neutrals category. Then I'll change the color to something extreme so that we can paint it over her face. I'll invert this with command or control I. Then I can begin painting. I'll paint in white paint with a stronger flow, and I'll just do an outline around her face, avoiding her eyebrows, eyes, and lips. Now that I have the outline done, I'll just hold Alt or Option, and I'll click on the Layer icon. Now that we're in this view, I can just fill in the rest of the area with white. With that all filled in, I can click on any other layer and then I'll go back to our selective color adjustment. I'll just reset these colors, and then we can go ahead and warm up the skin. To start, I'm going to lower the cyan to add more red. I think I'll raise the magenta just a little bit. Just a little. There we go. Then I'll raise the yellow. You can see how much warmer her skin looks. Let's take a look at what it looked like before and after. This might be a little too warm. I'll click on the layer icon to open the adjustment, and I'll just lower the yellow. I think that'll help. Let's see what it looked like before and after much better. With that, I think we're done. I'm just going to select all of the dodge and burn layers. Now we can see what this looked like before and after. So much better. I'm really happy with all of our work we did with dodging and burning. And now that we're done with that, in the next video, we'll finish this project by doing some sharpening. 53. Project 1 - Sharpening: In this video, we'll do some sharpening. Let's just jump right in. The first thing we need to do is apply the high pass filter. Make sure this layer is on top of everything. Then we can go ahead and raise the radius until we can just start to see the details of the eye. I'm going to zoom in so I can see this better and I'll continue to raise this. I think that looks pretty good. Now, I just need to check on monochrome, and I'll change the blend mode to soft light. With that finished, I'm going to invert this layer, so I'll press command or control I. Now I can paint it only over the areas where I want the sharpness. With the paint brush, I'll paint in white paint with a pretty high flow over the eyebrows, the eye lashes, and the iris. I'll also paint some sharpening over the lips. Since we did such a good job cleaning those up, I'd like them to stand out more. With all of that done, we can go ahead and see what this looked like before and after. I'll be honest, I'm not seeing much of a difference. I'm going to duplicate the layer a few times. Just to make the stand now you can see the before and after. I'll just zoom in, so this is easier to see before and after. And for the lips, here's the before and after. I think this is a nice amount of sharpening. With that, at this point in the project, you can go ahead and change any of the layers if you want to adjust anything. I'm going to reduce the lip color a little bit because it's pretty saturated. But once you've finished with all of your layers, we can select all of them to see a complete before and after. Wow. This looks so good. We started with a dull messy photo, and now it looks very colorful and clean. Great work. With that, we're finished with the first final project of the course. In the next video, we'll get started with another example. But this time, we're going to throw in a few other techniques that we learned throughout the course. 54. Project 2 - Make a Plan: Let's start off this next project by making a plan. This is a unique project because we're going to try to do every step on the work flow checklist. I wanted to show you at least one project where we do this. Let's get started. For our first step, we're going to start off this project by liquefying. Now, she doesn't have much to liquefy. It's not like she has bumpy clothes that need to be straightened out. But for this step, I thought it might be nice to add volume to the hair. After that, we're going to correct the lighting. You may have already noticed this, but the background of this photo is really bright, and our model is a little bit dark. I'd like to brighten her up so that she stands out better. After that, we're going to do blemish removal. We'll start off just like with the last project by removing the stray hairs we see on the face. Then we'll move on to correcting any skin blemishes that we see, and after that, we'll clean up her makeup. In this case, that means we can add a little bit more color to the lips, and we can also take care of this chipped nail polish right here. After blemish removal, we're going to do some frequency separation. The reason I want to do frequency separation is because she has a lot of red splotchiness on her face, and I think if we could color underneath the texture layer, we could really help her to reduce that look. This will be a little bit tricky since she has freckles on her face. But I think we can do a pretty good job removing this redness with frequency separation. After that, we're going to do some dodging and burning. This is going to make a really great difference on this photo because her face is in the shadows. Adding some really nice contouring with adding some brightness to the center of her face is really going to help this look brighter and nicer. After that, we'll be finished with our model. We'll move on to cleaning up the background. I've written all over the background, but you can see it right here. We're going to remove this thing and anything else that we find distracting in our background. Once we're done with that, we'll finish this whole project by doing sharpening and that will be the eyebrows, eyelashes, and lips as usual. And with that, we will be done. There's our flan. I'm really excited to see how this picture turns out, so we can go ahead and get started with our first step in the next video where we'll do some liquefying. 55. Project 2 - Liquify: This quick video, we'll liquefy our model. Okay. Step number one, make sure you have the background layer selected. Then we can go to our filters and apply the liquefy filter. I'll turn off show mesh. And then we can get started by freezing her face. I'm going to freeze her face and the hair around her face just so those areas stay nice and not warped. With that all frozen, I'll grab the push forward tool. And with a nice large brush, I'm just going to pull this hair up slightly. So barely raising this up, just adding a little bit of volume. We don't want anything to become warped by pulling this too far. So I think that amount looks pretty good. I'll press done. And now we can take a look at what this looked like before and here's the after. Just adding a little volume. I think it makes a good difference. Very simple. This step really isn't necessary, but I just wanted to remind you of the type of edits that you can do with liquefying. So with that finished, we can begin to give our photo better lighting. So let's do that in the next video. 56. Project 2 - Correcting Lighting: Correct the lighting in this video. Correcting the lighting will probably make the biggest difference for this image. Well, maybe lighting or dodging and burning, but either way, the lighting is really going to help our subject stand out better. I'm really excited for this one. Basically, all we need to do is brighten the subject. I'm going to apply a curves adjustment. I'll raise the spline to brighten things up. That looks pretty nice. Then I'll grab the paint brush. We're actually going to invert this layer, so command or control I D for default colors, x for white paint, and I'm just going to lower the hardness all the way, but keep the flow up. Now, I'm just going to start by outlining our subject in this white paint to brighten her up. Once I'm done with that, I'm just going to hold Alt or Option and I'll click on the mask and I'll fill in the rest. Okay, that was really simple. Isn't it amazing what a little bit of lighting can do? This looks so much better. Now that we can see our subject better, I think our next step will be a lot easier. So let's do some blemish removal in the next video. 57. Project 2 - Blemish Removal: This video, will take some time to do blemish removal. This will probably be the most lengthy process of this project, but it will definitely be worth it. To start, I'm going to select my background layer and I'll apply my new pixel layer on top of that. Then I'm going to grab the painting brush, set to current layer and below, and we can go ahead and get started with our cleanup. I'll start with the flyway hairs, the hairs over her face and the hairs around her clothing. Feel free to also switch to the clone brush when you get to some tricky areas, and that should be good. Just continuing with all of the hair. Once the hair is done, feel free to begin cleaning up the skin because this picture doesn't have as high of a resolution as some other ones that we've worked on. There aren't as many blemishes on the face, so this is pretty quick to fix. Now we can go ahead and finish up this blemish removal by touching up the makeup. Let's start with the nail polish over here. We can clean up the areas that are missing nail polish with the clone brush. Using the clone brush, I'll just sample an area that has good nail polish and I'll paint it over the area. I think this little detail just makes the picture look a lot better. I don't know what it is about cleaning up small things, but I do think it makes a big difference. With the nail polish done. It's time to clean up our lips. We've already done blemish removal there. Really, I just want to enhance the color. I'll apply in HSL adjustments. I'll change the color to something extreme. That way, we can paint it only over the lips. I'll invert this layer. Then using the paint brush tool, we can go ahead and paint this in white paint over the lips. Now we can go ahead and go back and reset the sliders and change the color to whatever we want. I think I just want to make the lips a little bit brighter like that. It is making the lips look closer to the nail polish color, which I think looks nice. Okay. With that, we can go ahead and see the before and the after of our hard work. All right, this looks great, but it can look even better. So let's do some frequency separation in the next video. 58. Project 2 - Frequency Separation: In this video, we'll clean up the skin even more with frequency separation. For frequency separation to work. I'll need to have a single layer that I can divide into the high and low frequencies. To do this, I'm going to merge my visible layers, but I still do want some flexibility. I'm actually going to turn off these two adjustment layers up here. I'll select this layer and then right click. And then I'll press merge visible. Because these two layers were turned off. This merged visible layer only has the blemish removal and the liquefying applied to it. That way, we can go back and adjust these whenever we'd like. With that layer, I'll set up. Let's go to the top of the screen to filters, and then down to frequency separation. I'll just zoom in here. You can see this looks a little funny because we have the curves adjustment on. But this is the same as usual. I'm going to raise the radius. I think I'll raise it like that. I like the blurriness of the colors we have here and I'll rest apply. Now, normally, we would start by doing cloning on the high frequency layer, but I'm not noticing any texture issues. I really only want to use this to fix the colors on her face. I'm going to add a new pixel layer and I'll place this under the high frequency layer. Now we can paint on this layer with sampled colors to smooth out her face. I'll grab the paint brush, and I'm going to change the flow to a very low flow for this. I can slowly build up color. I'll make my brush a bit larger. And then I'll start by sampling a color with Alt or Option, and I'll click on an area, and now I can softly paint in the colors. Remember you can sample as many areas as you want as you go. If you think your flow is a little too light, you can always raise it as well. I'm just going to continue this until the red splotchiness looks more smooth. I think this looks a lot smoother. Here's the before and after of reducing the splotchiness. Okay. To finish, I'm just going to select the eraser tool, and I'm just going to erase outside of her face, just in case I got any paint in those areas. All right. That looks really good, and that's all we're going to do for frequency separation, smoothing out those colors. Now that we're done with that, in the next video, we're going to do a little bit of dodging and burning. But instead of smoothing out the skin since the skin already looks great, we're just going to use dodging and burning to do some. 59. Project 2 - Dodge & Burn: Let's shape the lighting with some dodging and burning. Like I said in the last video, we're only going to do contouring for this picture. To start, I'm going to grab our contouring checklist so that I can place this into our document. With that there, we can reference that as we go. Now we can go ahead and set up our contouring dodge and burn layer. With that in place, we can go ahead and get started with our contouring. I'll press d for default colors. I'm just going to lower the flow a little bit. And now we can go ahead and start with our highlights. With that done, we can go ahead and move on to the shadows. I'll just go down the list and do these. I'm not going to say them each time. I think you know you've done this checklist enough times. Go ahead and finish the shadow section. Finished with the contouring. Let's take a look at what this looked like before and after. We've added a lot of contrast to her face, especially since we smoothed out her face with very even colors. Instead of looking flat like this, now we have a little more shape. Of course, I may have gone a little overboard, so we can always lower the opacity of this. But I think this is a great improvement to give her face a little bit more of that contrast. All right. Now I'll just delete the Dodge and Burn checklist. We can go ahead and delete the pixel planning layer as well. And now that we've spent all this great time cleaning up our model, in the next video, let's take a little bit of time to make her background look its best. 60. Project 2 - Background: Clean up the background. My plan for cleaning up the background is just cleaning up anything that we find distracting back here in this blurry area. Then up front, we actually have this table that's a little bit more in focus, and I think cleaning up some of the marks on the table could look pretty nice. L et's go ahead and start with a new pixel layer. I'm just going to grab the paint brush and make sure it's current layer and below. I'll just start right down here with this table. For the table, it's not about making it look perfect. It's just about cleaning up some of the most obvious big marks that make the table look messier than it should be. I think that looks pretty good. You can see the before and after, just cleaning up a few marks here and there. Now I'm going to switch to the clone brush so I can clean up this area right here. I'll sample an area like this, this transition line, with a larger brush and a higher flow. I'm just going to match that up and paint it across, lifting my cursor as I go. I'll resample and continue my painting. That looks pretty good. Last, we can clean up this yellow area. I'm not sure what this is, but it does stand out among the other wrongs of this fence. I'm just going to sample this one and bring it over. Okay. All that background cleanup was actually easier than I thought. Let's throw in one more background cleanup item and try to reduce her straight hairs by lightly cloning over them. I'm just going to use a very low flow for this, and I'm going to sample right outside of the hair. I'm just going to lightly paint over the area and you can see how this lightens up the hair. I'm just going to do that sampling areas that make sense around the hair and painting over them to lighten them up. Okay. With all that done, I'll just zoom out and you can see the before and after. Okay, very easy to finish off this project. We're going to do some sharpening in the next video. 61. Project 2 - Sharpening: This quick video, we'll finish off this project with some sharpening. To start. Let's apply the high pass filter. This has been applied as a child layer, so I'm going to raise it above everything, and then we can raise the radius. I'll check on monochrome and I'll change the blend mode to soft light. Okay. Let's invert this command or control, and then I'll grab the paint brush tool and I'll increase the flow and paint in white paint over the eyebrows, eyelashes, the iris, and the lips. That looks pretty good. Here's the before and after a very subtle difference. I'm going to duplicate this a couple of times. With that, now we can see the before and after. Before after before, after. With that, I think we're done with our project. I'm going to select all of our layers, just as a trick, if you need to select a child layer to the background layer, you can hold command or control and click on just that one. Now we have everything selected except the background layer, and we can see the and the And we're done great work on this project. She looks so good. And can you believe it? We only have one more project left in this whole course. You can do this. Let's retouch one last photo in the next chapter. 62. Project 3 - Make a Plan: As we've been doing, let's begin this project by making a plan. Remember that you can refer to the workflow checklist to see what steps you want to include for your project. For this one, we'll start with liquefying. This image needs a lot of work with the clothing. It's draping pretty strangely with all of these bumps all over. We're going to smooth this out the best we can so that the clothing drapes nicely. After that, we'll correct the lighting. This whole image looks a little bit dark and dull. I'd like to brighten it up, and we can also brighten up her dark clothing as well just so we can see it a little better. After that, we'll do blemish removal. For this step, we'll clean up her hair, skin, and brighten up her teeth. After that, we can do some frequency separation. For this part, we'll clean up any strange texture issues that we may have and we'll also smooth out the colors on the skin. We'll also need to keep in mind that her arms are also visible for this picture. We don't want to only smooth out her face and leave the arms alone. They both need to be included. That way, things look cohesive. After that, we'll do some dodging and burning. Now, because we'll be smoothing the skin with frequency separation. We don't need to do the smoothing part of dodging and burning. So we're just going to contour. Okay, and to finish, we will sharpen. We'll do that to the eyebrows, the eyes, and the lips, and that's it. That's our flan. Let's begin retouching by doing some liquefying in the next video. 63. Project 3 - Liquify: Let's liquefy our model. To get started, make sure you have your models layer selected. Then we can apply the liquefy filter. I'll turn off show mesh, and then we can go ahead and get started. As I go, I'm using a smaller brush first to get rid of any small bumps. Then I'll make my brush bigger to shape the overall area. For this part on the right side, I want to start by pushing in the top part since it's bulging out, but the hand is in the way. I'm going to freeze the hand and the arm, and then I can go ahead and move that. I did make sure to freeze a little extra to really make sure that we don't liquefy the hand. Now I'm just going to go around the rest of her to clean up any bumps icy. There we go. I'll press apply, and then we can go ahead and see the before and after. This looks so much better already. It doesn't completely change her body shape, but it does make the clothes look a lot more flattering. To finish up this liquefy step, I think it would be good to do some just to clean up a few areas to make sure this all looks good. Let's fix this up with a new pixel layer. I'm going to grab the clone brush, current layer and below. Then I'm just going to zoom in here to clean up this area first. I'll hold alt or option to sample outside of this finger. Then I'm just going to paint, I'll increase the flow so we can see this better. There we go. With a nice small brush, I'm just going to go right up against the finger to remove that fabric. Then I'm going to clone this part of the arm and bring this down. There we go. That looks pretty good. I'll just continue to do this all around the finger using a small brush to fill the background back in. With that area looking a lot better, we can go around all of the other edges to straighten out any areas if they still look a little bit bumpy. Okay, I think that cloning really helped. So let's take a look at the before and after just cloning the edges to make them look a little nicer, especially the hand area. And now we can take a look at the complete before and after for this video. All right, V n. Let's continue this process by correcting the lighting in the next video. 64. Project 3 - Correcting Lighting: Video we'll correct the lighting. Like I said before, this photo looks dark and dull. Let's add a curves adjustment to brighten things up. I'll just raise the spline. Raising it a little bit. I think this already looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. To make this look even brighter and nicer. I'm going to add another curves adjustment for the dress. This time, I'm going to raise this spline and we'll come back to adjust this later. But for now, let's invert this with command or control I. Then using the paint brush, we'll paint this adjustment over the dress. Now that we're done painting, we can go ahead and adjust the curves adjustment because I brightened it a lot just so we can see where we're painting. Now we have a lot more control with how much we choose to brighten up the dress so we can see more of the detail. I'll just brighten it up a little bit like that. Now we can select both of these layers and see the and after of brightening things up. This was such an easy fix, and I think it looks a lot better, good job. Now that we're done with that, I'm going to group these layers together with Command or Control G. Then I'm going to rename this group lighting. Keep on top because we want to make sure these lighting adjustments stay above all of our pixel layers as we do blemish removal in the next video. 65. Project 3 - Blemish Removal: This video will remove the blemishes. To start, I'm going to add a pixel layer and I'm going to keep it underneath our lighting layer. Then I'm going to grab the in painting brush to start. The first thing we're going to do is clean up the hair. Now, luckily, because this picture is less zoomed in than the other pictures. We don't need to be as detailed with her blemish removal, but I still think practice makes perfect. I'll still try my best to remove as many stray hairs as I can. The ones that are overlapping with the background are not as noticeable, but I definitely want to clean up any hairs that are obvious, like the ones overlapping with her dark dress or with her face. I'll also use the clone brush to remove the large chunk of hair that's sticking out on the right side. I can use a low flow to gradually lighten up the fuzzy flyaway hairs around her. I think this looks a lot better. Here's the before and after. To me, this looks like a big improvement cleaning that up. Now that we're done with that, we can move on to cleaning up the skin. I'm just going to go through this with the painting brush, removing any little bumps or blemishes that I see. There's not too much to clean up here, so this so be quick. Once we're done with the skin, we can go ahead and move on to the clothing. Because we lighten this up with the curves adjustment, you can see a lot more little specks of dust and even the wrinkles stand out more. Feel free to use a low flow clone brush to gradually paint away the wrinkles. With all of that blemish removal done. I think the next area I want to focus on is the mouth. There's a few things I want to fix about the mouth. I want to brighten up the lips and whiten the teeth. Let's go ahead and start with the lips. I'm going to add in HSL adjustment. Then I'll change this to an extreme color. I'll invert with command or control I. Then using the paint brush, I'm going to paint in white paint over the lips. Remember, you can always press x to switch back and forth between white and black paint. Now we can go ahead and open up the HSL adjustment again. We can go ahead and reset the colors. Now, for this, I just want her lips to be a little bit more saturated. I'll just increase the saturation and the hue to create this nice berry color. I think this looks really nice. Now we can move on to the teeth. I'm going to add an HSL adjustment. Then we're going to go ahead and start in the yellow channel desaturating it. This already makes the teeth look better, but as you can see, the skin is becoming desaturated. I'm going to invert this layer with command or control I and all paint in white paint over the teeth. Without painting all finished, we can move on to brightening the teeth. I'm going to reuse what I just painted by holding command or control and clicking on the HSL mask. Then I'm going to apply a curves to brighten up the teeth. With that brightened just a little bit. I'm going to use this adjustment to brighten the highlights. I'll go to blend ranges. I'll keep the highlight node up and lower the shadow node so that this is only applied to the highlights. Now you can see the before and after of that. I'll continue by adding another curves adjustment and I'll brighten this and apply this only to the shadows. I'm only going to brighten the shadows a little bit. So this doesn't look too bright, and I'll lower the highlights node, so this is only applied to the shadows. With all of got done, we can select all of the layers, but I need to deselect. Fs command or control the. Now we can see the before and after. These teeth look so much better but still natural. They still have a little bit of yellow. Let's go ahead and select all of the layers that we worked on for this video. I'll just 00. We can see this better. Now we can see the before and after. Very nice. This looks so good. To continue our blemish removal, we can do some frequency separation in the next video. 66. Project 3 - Frequency Separation: Let's do some frequency separation. To do frequency separation, we need to merge our layers into a single layer. We need to decide which layers we want to have on because I don't really want to merge everything. That would mean we wouldn't be able to adjust any of our adjustments anymore. I'm going to go ahead and turn off the lighting adjustments, and I also put all of our mouth adjustments, which is recoloring the lips and the teeth. I put all of those into a group and I'll turn that off. Now we just have the blemish removal, the liquefy clonine, and the liquefy filter. All of those are on, and I'll go ahead and right click and merge those together. We'll use this layer to do frequency separation, and then afterward, we can turn these adjustments back on. With this layer selected, I'll go to the top of the screen to filters, and then down to frequency separation. I'll just zoom in so I can see the difference in texture and color better, and I'll raise the radius. I want the colors nice and blurred for this. I think around 12 pixels looks good here. I'll press apply. Now we can go ahead and get started with altering the high frequency layer. I'm actually going to turn off every other layer other than high frequency. I'll click on high frequency. Now we can go ahead and start cloning on the high frequency layer to remove any strange texture issues. I'm going to change this two current layer only, and then we can go ahead and get started with it. I'll hold Alt or Option to sample and paint over the textures. Maybe I'll increase the flow just so we can see a little bit more texture as we paint. This is also a good way to reduce these lines on the forehead. I'll just paint over those. Some parts of the forehead are smoother and some are a little more bumpy. I'm just going to go over some of the bumpy parts with a lower flow clone brush to help smooth them slightly. I don't want to completely get rid of the texture, but just smoothing them out a bit will make it look a little bit better. I'm just going to continue to smooth out the skin all the way down the face. There really isn't much to clean up here, but just taking some time to remove any of those extra skin texture bumps. Once we're done with that, we can go ahead and take care of the arms. Now, the arms are very smooth and nice, but I did just lighten up a few little hairs that I saw and little bumps here and there. At this point, we're done cloning on the high frequency layer. I'm just going to select all of the other layers so that I can turn them back on. Then I'm going to add a new pixel layer on top of the low frequency layer so that we can paint some n smooth colors on this layer. With the paint brush, I'm going to paint a low flow with a bigger brush. I'll just hold Alt or Option and click to sample colors as I go. I'm painting dark colors and bringing them slightly over into the light part. I'm taking light colors and bringing them slightly over into the dark part, Just blending transition areas between the colors, sampling so many colors as I go. I think this is going to look really nice when we're done here. Don't forget we can do the arms as well. And with that, we're done. Now we can go ahead and see the before and after. Let me just zoom in so we can see this better. Here's the before and after. Very nice. Very smooth. For the arms, here's the and after. Everything looks so good so far, I'm really happy with this. Let's continue by doing some dodging and burning in the next video. 67. Project 3 - Dodge & Burn: Let's do some dodging and burning. Because he skin looks so nice and smooth, we're just going to add contouring, no smoothing this time. Let's add our contour checklist. With that I'll set up, we can go ahead and add our dodge and burn layer. Now, I'm going to add this layer on top of the frequency separation group that I made. This is just a group with the high low end pixel layer that we made in the last video. With that selected, I'll add a pixel layer on top of that. Then I'll turn this into a dodge and burn layer. With that setup, I'll grab the paint brush and I'll make sure to change the flow to a lower number like 2%. I'll press D for default colors, x for highlights. One more thing before we begin painting. Let's turn on the adjustments that we have on top of everything. Because we have a lighting layer here. I think this will be helpful to see what the final product will look like just so we don't overdo it. Make sure you still have that dodge and burn layer selected, and we can go ahead and work our way down the list. Now, we've done this list so many times that I'm just going to go pretty fast through this. Now that we finished the list, This is a good time to remember that you can add shadows and highlights anywhere on your model. Let's add some contouring to the arms. Just enhancing where there already are shadows and highlights, and we can also add contouring to her hair. Let's do that too. I think adding contouring to hair looks especially nice when your model has wavy or curly hair. Okay, and we're done. So let's go ahead and see the before and the after. I tend to overdo contouring. So I'm going to lower the opacity, and I think that looks better. Okay, we're really close now. Let's finish this project by doing some sharpening in the next video. 68. Project 3 - Sharpening: Let's finish off this project with some sharpening. I'm going to delete our plan layer, and with our top layer selected, I'm going to apply the high pass filter. This has been applied as a child layer, so I'll raise this to the top and now we can increase the radius. I'll turn on monochrome and change the blend mode to soft light. Now, I'm going to invert this layer with command or control eye so that I can paint it only over the eyebrows, eyes, and lips. I'll increase my flow so we can see this better. Remember to avoid the white part of the eye. Also, just paint this over the lips, not the teeth. We're done painting, I'm going to turn this off to see the before and the after. Of course, this is too subtle. I'll duplicate this a couple of times. And now we can go ahead and see the before and after before and after. All right, with that, we've finished this project. I'm going to select all of our layers. Then I'll open up this group and hold command or control just to select this layer. Now we can see our final before and after This looks so much better. I'm so proud of this one, and I really can't believe it, but we did it. We finished the final project of the course. Great, great work. 69. Class Conclusion: Congratulations. You finished the course. I know that was a lot to learn, but now you have all the skills you need to retouch like a professional. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.