Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Hello. In this video, I'm going to walk through each of the steps I've taken to take this more or less straight out of camera image of early, all the way through to this beautifully finished portraits. The image was shot for a hair salon, so it's going to be some hair retouching. There's gonna be some skin work. We're going to do some blemish removal. We're going to deliver it a dodging and burning to really bring out the magic of Ellie's features. We're then going to do a little bit of reshaping around the hair to show how you can get those beautiful clean lines. I'm going to add some texture to the background because I think it looks a bit flat on paper. I'm going to show you the fastest way I know of creating a reliable and beautiful vignette. And then at the very end, I'm just going to add the tiniest amount of special effects using Nick color FX Protein is going to be straightforward. I'm gonna take you all the way through it, every tool you need. I'm Paul and this well, this is mustering portrait photography.
2. 1. Planning And Cleaning The Background: Okay, So this is the image of LE that we're going to be working on in this class. I'm going to step through each of the stages that I normally go through when I'm retouching a portrayed. Now just to bear in mind, this is a portrait retouch video, not a high fashion, high-end retouch video. So for instance, I'm not including frequency separation in this video. That's for another day. Whenever I'm retouching a portrait, I'm looking for that balance between speed and quality. I want the image to look natural. I don't want it to look artificial. I want the person obviously to look as best as humanly possible to look perfect. Everyone wants to look perfect, right? But I'm a portrait photographer in this instance working as a portrait retouching. So some of the decisions I make are not necessarily quite the same that I would make if I'm retouching for, let's say, the cover of a fashion magazine. And so we're going to step through each of the little bits, some of the thought processes and some of the tools are trying make sure explain each tool I'm using and how and why. And as I go, if you have any questions at all, feel free simply to drop me an email or put it into, add some comments to the class down below. And I will happily answer or investigate. And it just before we get started, If I mentioned a tool and it isn't showing up for you, go to the bottom of your toolbar here where you see those three dots, click and hold. And it will bring up an edit toolbar option. Click on the option, and this will list all of the things you have in the toolbar. But more importantly, the things that Adobe have decided not to put in your toolbar or that you've at some point and removed from your Toolbar. The thing about the updates from Adobe Photoshop is a can almost seemingly randomly add or remove tools that you were not expecting. This is where you will find them. So if you need a tool that you cannot find that I'm talking about, then go in there and haul it back so that you have access to it. Okay, now, always when I sit down with a portrait is I will have a quick think about what it is that I'm wanting to do. I'll expand it up. I'll have a quick pan around and have a look. And then maybe in my head at least I'll make some notes. But let's, for the purposes of this class, I'll bring up the notes layer. Here we go to the notes. Let's use, I'm going to use green, I think as a brush color. Nice and bright. Nice small brush. Here's a quick tip. If you ever want to change the shape and hardness, softness of your brush. Obviously you can just use the square brackets up and down. You're going to use the square brackets with the Shift key to change the softness or hardness. If you hold Control and Option or Control and Alt, take your mouse or your pen. In this instance, click and drag. If you move the pen or the mouse up and down the screen, that will change the hardness if you move it up and down, left and right, that will change the diameter of your brush. Okay, so small brush is to the left, big brush to the right, hard brush is down. Soft brush is up. I want to fairly hard brush, I want a fairly small brush. It's gotta do this. Okay, so what I'm going to have a look at, then it's suitable what my way around, I'm going to draw on my notes layer now layers. If you haven't done layers, we'll deal with those as a deep dive in a different video. But basically what it means is I'm going to stack up all of the bits of the image. So if I draw in here with my green brush, for instance, I can then remove or hide that layer by clicking the eyeball. It makes it very versatile both for doing things like making notes, but also in the retouch. I can add things in, take things out. It's non-destructive. I always leave my background layer alone. This is really important. Leave the background layer where it is, if you can. For me, that background layer is nearly always the raw file after it's gone through color correction. And I've converted it to a Photoshop file. So that background layer is essentially what came off the camera. You'll notice that the background layer has a lock icon next to it, and that's so that I can't accidentally, so I click on the Move tool here. I can't accidentally drag it around. In fact, photoshop would throw a dialogue telling me I can't move it because the layer is locked. That's a really good idea. Keep it that way and we're going to build the image up. And eventually you can actually hide the background layer. It won't be part of the final image. So let's just clear that layer. So I'm going to hit Command a to select everything. That's, you can see my marching ants around the whole limit and we just zoom out a little bit. If I hit backspace or delete everything that's on that layer inside that selection. Okay, so hold down the Shift key and it's going to zoom in and have a quick look and start to mark up some of the things that I think I'm going to need to work on. So really, I'm showing you a thought process. This isn't something I normally do. I have no desire to spend ages marking up an image unless it's for competition or is for a magazine cover or something where I really, really, really need to make sure I don't miss a trick. I might form a note slayer. So I've got loose hairs around here. Ellie was looking a little bit tied on the day and the makeup and the lighting combined didn't really correct that. I have to make a decision about this little mark. And that's not a mark, it's a little crease here that she has either side of a math. Sometimes I leave that in, sometimes I'll take it out with poor to j. If it's pure portraiture, I would leave it in. This is sort of in-between the two. This was actually a shot, a very natural lifestyle type shoot, but it was shot for a hair salon. So we have to be Uber pedantic about the hair and I can make decisions about the makeup. I have to make a decision about her little model here. There's some little blemishes that just will need correcting. While we were working, the hairstylists were cutting Ellie's hair was we went to get it absolutely perfect. And you can see here on a no, so lots of little bits as you can see it more on her shoulder. So I'll mark that up just so I know. Any cross hairs, these kinds of things. I'm going to have a work around that and get rid of any of those and maybe haven't looked at any gaps in that fringe just to make sure the hair looks absolutely perfect. And while I was posing her, I'm not sure I got the opposing quite right. You can see it's left a little bit of a bump on her shoulder and I'm going to have a quick look at that. By default, normally with a beauty sort of fashion. The beauty research like this. And I'm going to look at her eyes and just bring out the absolute best of those. And then I also need just to have a look across that background to make sure the background paper to make sure that it's clean. There's nothing on there that I've missed. I like a dark spot or something. And that broadly speaking, I think is everything if I just I'm just gonna draw a couple on its own there, just to remind me to check that the shape of the bob is exactly as I would want it. Oh, and there's one other thing I did notice I do need to go back to the makeup artist, has smudge the edge of Ellie's lipstick here so that just needs addressing. More or less. There we go. Those are things we're going to look at in this video. I'm going to step through each stage by stage, but we're going to start by cleaning that background paper. So let's just hide that layer. So I'm gonna click on that high on the eyeball. I don't need my notes just for a moment. I've said already that I don't want to work on the background layer itself, so I'm going to duplicate it. To duplicate the layer. I can go to the Layers panel menu here and I can go straight to Duplicate Layer Background copy. Or if I want to, I can hit Command or Control and J and that will do exactly the same thing. I'm going to just put cleaned paper as the name. Normally when I'm working quickly. Such a compromise when you're working as a professional photographer because time is of the essence. I don't have the luxury of sitting in naming or my layers unless it's such a complicated research that I know I'm gonna get confused. So I'm naming all my layers and I'm taking my time really to make sure that it's clear for you as you're watching it. Hopefully, hopefully that works. If not, feel free to shatter Me and cleans paper. So I'm gonna do, is I'm going to bring up a tool that actually lots of people don't even realize is inside Photoshop and that's the raw file. So the Adobe Raw filter, if I go to Filter camera Roar, it will bring up a dialog. Now, essentially this is exactly the same as the Adobe rule engine that in Bridge and also many of the tools on things like Lightroom, Classic. Lightroom itself is slightly different, the new version, but certainly in Lightroom Classic. And I'm going to want to use the healing tool here because all I've brought this up for is because it has a really very effective way of previewing or visualizing spots and dark spots and marks on your background. Much better than anything else I've found. It's very quick. So I just click on the heel option here, the Spot Removal tool and a half heal as the mode I'm going to visualize. So I click on the visualizer and you can see immediately it's giving me a view of everything in a very particular way. It's hard, it's very hard to replicate this any other way. But inside the camera raw filter, now I can move this slider to increase the sensitivity to what it's showing me. And then if I just because I'm inhale mode, I'm just gonna make that a little bit smaller by using square and just move the square, square bracket down, square bracket up to make the brush bigger or smaller. You can't just click here and drag it size up and down if you wish. And I find it easier just to hit those square brackets so you get used to how use Photoshop. There's no easy answer to what's the best way there isn't one. You just get used to what is familiar to you and is quickest for you. And most effective and over time that evolves. But there's some things that I've never, I've never changed. I still use the square brackets to make my brush bigger and smaller and Shift square brackets to make it harder or softer. So I'm just clicking around. It's going to increase the precise this one here that I'm hovering over, that's a dust spot on the background. And let me just let me just undo that. You can see it. It's not doing a particularly good job of showing me ways that tool. Let's go back to the tool. Sorry, tool is the tool with the fuck is the tool. So you can see I've zoomed in and you can see that there's a dose mark there on the background. If I turn off visualize Spots, sorry, let me just remove that. You can't quite see it. Sometimes it's easier to see defects if you move your image around, hold down the Spacebar and drag. But I know it's there because there was a dust spot throughout that shoot. It happened about halfway through changing the lens and then it appeared in every shot subsequently. So I'm just working my way around. If you find having those little overlay where you've clicked, having them visible is annoying. I do. Then just click off that checkbox on overlay and now I can work clean. I can just see the defects, and I could just work around the image, making sure that I've got the worst of it. It's not critical because we're gonna do some other things as well, but it's worth just getting it a little bit clean and then that's just the tip of a hair strand. I think I'll get rid of that as well. Okay. Hit Okay. And that will apply it. So now we know we've got a background that's reasonably free of any dust spots. But there's actually another technique you can use which is really, really effective if like me, you use a plain paper background. What I'm going to do to start with is I'm going to create a new layer. So I'll just hit Command J or Control J. I'm going to call this blurred paper. And that command, I've copied the cleans papers. I know that still I've got no dust spots on here, which is really good. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to do a couple of selections to start with. So firstly, I'm going to go to Select, and I gotta go to subject. Now the AI engine inside Photoshop is now really very good at recognizing what subject is, particularly when it's on a neutral background like this, you can see it's made a pretty good job of selecting the outline of Ellie. But rather than every time I want this outline, and I'm gonna have to go back to select and subject. I have to be on a layer that has Ellie on it. So I can't just, for instance, be in a vignette layer and create and hit Select Subject. He won't know what the subject is because it's not on this layer. What I can now do is go to select, and I'm going to save that selection. I'm going to call it Ellie. Outline. And that's all it is. It's just going to be the outline of early as defined by Select Subject hit. Okay, and I, anytime now I can come back and load that selection in. What I'm now going to do those I'm going to expand that selection because I don't really want it to be so tight on how I want a little bit of a gap. So again, I'm going to go to Select and then go to modify. And I'm going to expand it, and I'm going to expand it by about 40 pixels. So it's just pushed it away from Ellie's outline. And I'm now going to very quickly just check that these stray hairs and things are inside my selection. I'm doing that by using the last sue tool. And that's all. It's just here in your toolbar. I'm hitting law sue, and then holding down the Shift key and the Shift key means I'm adding to that selection. And I'm just gonna make sure those few strays are kept inside my selection. Why? What I'm going to blur some of this in a moment and if I blur those red hairs, I'm going to see smudges of that red in the blurring and I don't want that I want to be able to correct that. I'll correct that properly and carefully later on. All I'm really doing is just making a selection that allows me to blur everything but Ellie, very carefully so that it has a really smooth finish to the background. Incidentally, if ever you're in this mode normally what you can do is you can hold down the space bar and you can drag around, drag around, drag around. There's a quicker way, an easy way of doing that, hold down the letter H and then when you click and drag, it shows you exactly where you are. This is really useful if you're doing detail retouching, press H, click and drag, and it will take the window and allow you to move very quickly around your image. Okay, Let's zoom out. So I've now got a selection of ELE. So what I will do is I'm going to invert that selection because really I'm blurring the background. I don't want Ellie to be Bird. I want the background to be blurred. So we're going to invert that selection. And to do that is Shift Command and I or shift control and I, or you can do it here from the Select menu. There it is, inverse. What I'm now gonna do though, I'm going to save that selection. So I'm gonna go to Select and then go to Save Selection. This time I'm going to go Ellie, background. Just in case I need it later on. I'm certainly going to use it in a moment. What I'm also gonna do is I'm going to change this layer to be a smart object. Now, smart objects, really clever in it allows me, I can't paint on that layer, but I can do things to that layer. So what I can do is I go down here to my layers panel, click the little burger menu, and go to Convert to Smart Object. That's now a Smart Object. And a smart object allows me to do the following. I can take a filter and this instance I'm going to use a blur. I'm going to use a surface blur. I'm going to use reasonably big radius. You can keep the threshold where it is and I'm previewing it so I can see what's going on. Let me just put a preview here, just on the edge. It's not blurring, Ellie. It's blurring everything except Elly. Okay. So now when I zoom in, I don't know whether you can quite see it. You can just see here the transition. There's the transition between the original image and the blurred image. This is really useful now if I decide I've got that wrong, what I can do is I can double-click on that surface blur. And it will bring up the settings and I can change the settings and it will reapply them. Hey, some very clever in the way it does that, so that it retains any filters I apply to a smart object layer. It retains those settings, allows me to double-click on it, go into the filter settings themselves, do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again, but it always does it again from scratch. If I tried to do this on a normal layer, every time I hit blur is going to blow it some more and broke some more. And that's not what I want. What I want to do is be able to fine tune what I'm doing. So let's just zoom in a little bit on here because the next thing we're gonna do are there you can see it a little bit better there around the hair. I don't know if it's entirely visible on the video, but there's where it's blurred. There's now no grain, whether before a blurred it and there's a grain. What we now need to do is add some of that grain back in just a little bit. So again we go, we've got the smart object, smart layer selected. We've got a Filter. Noise. Add Noise. Now, please. If you don't want that much noise, usually I'll use monochromatic rather than colored noise. And we're just going to soften that down and let's try 1%. Not bad, probably need a bit more. And all I do is just very quickly if I just hit the up and down keys in while I'm clicked inside any one of the dialog boxes I've seen Photoshop. If you're in a numeric dialog box, you can use the up and down keys here, my upper down arrows to change the amount. If I hold down the Shift key, it goes in much bigger steps. What I'm looking for is that moment when it all sort of blends together. Yeah. But at 1.7 ish, it's not it doesn't have to be massively accurate, but about there. And now what it means is that when I look at the image and it come out, you'll start to see that it looks like I haven't done anything to the background and that's exactly what I want. But in fact, I've applied a really big blur to it, smoothing across the whole surface. I've added some grain back in so it looks completely authentic just as the rest of the image would be. And now I can start to work on the rest of the image. So what I want to do is just park those a little bit. So I'm gonna just, by holding down the Shift key, I'm going to select both of those layers. And then going to hover over in the bottom of the Layers panel, you can see there's this, create a new group. But if I hold down the Shift key as I click on it, any layers that are selected will automatically be added to the new group that I just created. Just a quick way of doing it. So a group now I'm going to call this background cleaned, cleaned and the layers that I was just working on an arrow in it. And you can see that simply because what we've done is fairly subtle. I tend to work on my background first and get it clean first because it means that I can trust everything I do later on. You may have a very different way. You'd like to work a different order, but this is what works for me. And I can now hide that layer, hide those layers or, or show those layers as much as I want. I can hide that background layer if I wish to you as well, because those layers have all the information from that background layer now showing, and now we move on to the next step.
3. 2. Retouching The Hair, Removing Stray And Cross-Hairs: Okay, So let's go on to the next stage. And incidentally, if you're wondering why everything is going to slightly yellow on my cheek is because the sun is setting through the studio windows in my studio is just lighting up. I can't do anything about it. There's no huge architectural windows at the top. There's no way of putting curtains in there. So forgive me if I started to take on a slightly luminescent yellow tone. He couldn't make this up, could you? Okay. So given this particular research was for a hair salon, I'm actually going to start with the head and normally I would leave the hair too much later because my priority is to make sure the skin work is all done. And then I'll do this. But in this particular instance, it was much more important that the hair looked spot on and then we'd work with everything else. So I'm gonna do first is I need a layer to work on lots and lots and lots of ways of doing this. So I'm just going to create a nice, clean layer, nice new layer, an empty layer. And we're going to use a couple of different tools. We're going to start with the normal healing tool. So there's two healing tools really that we're going to use. There's the spot healing tool and there's the Healing Brush Tool, spot healing brush tool, and the normal healing brush tool. The spot healing tool is really useful because you don't have to select anything. You can just have the tool active and then you can draw and it will clean things up. And it's a really, it's really powerful and it's getting more powerful with each release of Photoshop because it's using quite a lot of artificial intelligence behind the scenes to figure out what it should be filling in. So when you're using this tool here up at the top, just make sure content aware is selected and sample all layers is selected. Okay, those two important if you have an empty layer like this, because if I tried to sample this layer, there's no information on it. But now that I've made a couple of corrections, if I solo this layer into solo layer, I simply hold down the Option or the Alt key and click on the eyeball. You can see this is what it is drawing. So hit the Alt or Option key and the eyeball again, and it will reshow all of the other layers. So I need to do is I need to just work my way around this image, figuring out the best way of fixing each little bit. So we've just done the Spot Healing Brush, but the Healing Brush Tool is in some ways more powerful. And the healing brush tool allows me to select where I want the sample, where I want the intelligence to look. So what I can do is I can, if I select here just into that hair and to select you hold down the Option or the Alt key and you click, that's now become my source. And then it'll wait for me to click. And you can see as I'm working, that it has a tracker cursor that shows where it's taking a sample from. At the moment, I don't have the aligned clicked. So if I click on a line, everywhere I click, it will move the source around. Now I don't use this quite so much because you can see, particularly with hair, that it leaves some really nasty or can leave some really nasty artifacts, but it's great on skin. So again, if I do it here just to show you on the face or hold down the Alt or the Option key, select my source. This is where it's going to take the data from. Then when I click Round is blemish here, you can see that it's applying with some intelligence. Applying a fill. But it's telling, I've told you at all where I want to source the data from. And that means I can control what kind of texture is being applied to that area. Very clever tool. The one that I don't use as much as some of the others. The third and final tool I use in this mode is the clone stamp tool, which is here, very similar to the healing brush tool, except that it's going to do, all it's gonna do is clone, literally clone with a soft edge if I tell it to the area that I set as the source. So I'll show you that brutally. I'll click here and set that as my source. Move over to the skin. And you can see that it's using that as the source. Again. Try and remember that it's usually best to have aligned clicks because as you move around the image, it'll move where it's taking samples from. Okay, let's delete all of that. Now we're going to do is using those different tools is just work my way around the image. One of the things about the Healing Brush Tool is it feels like it should work really, really well. So the Spot Healing Brush tool, I mean, just take I've got selected is it feels like it should work really, really well. You know, I'm just going to very quickly went away up here. But actually what happens particularly on hair is it starts to create some interesting artifacts, little bits of error, all of its own. And it starts to look like someone's been missing. So you have to, with all of these tools and with everything in Photoshop, you have to use your eyes constantly to make sure whatever tool you're using is creating the effects of the drafter. Because very often you'll find it's not quite what you think it is and it starts to this, you get a sense for it. So be careful. So let me work out. Let me show you some of the logic of what I will choose in here, where I'm creating, where I'm trying to get rid of. I've gone across other has very often I'll use the stamp tool, so I'll clone tool. What I'll do is I'll set my source to be here somewhere that looks very similar. And then very gently in the direction of those hairs. I'll just paint in. I know it's slow. I know it's cumbersome. But for fashion work in particular, the result to this has got to be amazing. I very rarely use the other tools. So I will just work my way around constantly collecting, or sorry, clicking Alt or Command Option or Alt clicking to set my source. And then just painting in. And this will give you most reliable result of all. Just hold Option Alt, sorry, or Option click that sets your source and then just paint. And I'm just going to work my way around all of the hairs that are inside the haircut, not the not the hairs are gone into the background, not the hairs that gone into the face, just the hairs on that background. And at this stage, I'm going to very quickly speed up this video, warm around, and then I'll come back when we go to the next bit. Okay, So at this point, I've got rid of pretty much all of those Illinois and crosshairs. That were inside the bulb. And just to remind you the two tools as predominant using or the stamp tool, the clone tool, where you hold down the Option or the Alt key click and that becomes your source. And then the next click when you release the Option or the Alt key, then next click with your mouse or with your pen, that's going to be the target. They take some a source and it clones it on top of the target. I've also used a little bit of the Spot Healing Brush just in areas where there was no texture really, it's just in the shadows by gotten annoying hair because it's very good. The tool is very good in those instances. Now what we're gonna do is look around the outside of the hair and similar kind of tools. You just have to be a little bit more careful and of what you're doing. Because what can happen is you can suddenly find yourself with clear indications. You've been messing around. So we don't wanna do that. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna use the clone tool to start with and see how we get on. As with everything, you try it. If it doesn't work, you try a different method. I'm going to make sure that the clone tool has a soft brush, so just making sure. So he sought to do that. I can go to the brush tool here and make sure that the transfer, so I'm using the pen pressure for the transfer and that the hardness is set to 0%. You can see that's more or less what I'm going to get in terms of when I press harder, it will be more opaque. When I press soft it'll be much less opaque. And I'm using the and I've got a very soft edge to that brush. Hold the Option or the Alt key. And I'm just selecting from the background, constantly reflecting so that the tone that it's applying is close to the area that I'm trying to apply it to. Otherwise, if I select from, I don't know, here, down here in the shadows and then apply it. You can see it's a completely different color. So I'm just picking bits of my background close to where I want to and remove the hairs. I'm just painting background in. People talk a lot about cloning out. You never clone out. There's no such thing as cloning out. What you do is you clone in. So what do I mean by that? Well, very often apply it with say, can you just Photoshop that out for me? And the problem is I've got nothing to put into its place. So if there's a lamppost somewhere that they want to get rid of, I've got to have some other content to put in its place. Um, I suppose I could freehand draw it, but you actually clone in. So here I'm not cloning out hairs. I'm cloning in background on taking the background and I'm putting it over the top of the hair. Nice big lump here that we're just going to get rid of. Here's a trick because I want really soft, smooth background. And I've made my stamp tool, my clone tool a little bit bigger and it's still really soft. I select from that, say here. And now I paint in, I'm just going to select from, I don't want that one that's going to certain cognitive and bits. And you can see clearly, I've moved the skin. The skin had quite a hard edge. And the problem is if I use a hard clone tool, everywhere else is going to be hard as well. And I need a soft grade where the backgrounds all blend into each other. I don't want to hard tool. So what do I do about that hard edge around the skin? Well, I'm going to use a mask. So what I do here, let me just name that layer. Retouch. And what I'm gonna do is gonna add a mask. I go down here to the Add Layer Mask, click on it, and that's come up as a white mask. And that just means everything on this layer is going to show. So I'm going to pick up a black brush and just paint. So anyway, that's on a mask that has black on it. So if I hold down the option key and click on the mask, you can see that's the black bits. The mask will stop the pixels from the main layer showing through. And that's all I'm doing. I'm just going to very quickly mass back until I can see that edge again. Then I'm going to switch to painting in white. And I'm just gonna use a smaller brush and very gently work my way in. As with anything, there are a million ways of doing this. I've just found this to be pretty effective and pretty easy. Let me just make sure that's all okay, I'm there. And adults got rid of those few strands affair. Very easy and I can carry on with the rest of the research. So clicking back onto the bitmap part of the layer, coming off the mask. Here, I can do a couple of different things. What I can do is I can use the spot healing tool. So I could just work my way around that hair. And that will work reasonably well with her. You don't I don't want it to look like Lego here. I don't want it to look so perfect that it looks like a wig or it's artificial. I just want to get rid of any strays. So all I'm doing now is I'm using the Spot Healing Brush Tool and just stroking in gently leaving some strands knocking around. I just don't want any bits that sticking out too far. And that the crown of the head here, this one, I'm gonna go back to my stamp tool. Select out here in the gray, slightly smaller and very gently just reduce the visibility and he strays. I'm leaving them showing a little bit so that it feels like real hair doesn't feel like It's artificial. So in here it's going to very gently just work my way around that. But this is much easier with a pen and a tablet that I've got here. It is possible with a mouse, but I think you'd be an awful lot of work. Okay, so let's have a quick look. So if I turn that layer on and off, so that was the original image and now they're on. You can see on the whole, everything is working and it's adding, it's adding finesse to the image, but I'm not really fundamentally changing it. Now what we need to do is we're going to work inside the skin here and get rid of any hairs that come across the face. Now for this, the Spot Healing Brush Tool will work pretty well. Again, just keep your eyes peeled. For any areas where when you apply the effect it doesn't look quite right. Get hard edges. Sometimes everyone that always runs along a hair, but sometimes you get a better result going across it. Not always such, but just keep an eye out for that. So again, I'm just working on the hairs alone. I'm not going into any blemishes when you skin where it we're gonna do that later. I just want to get rid of these hairs that are around the main crown, the main part of the hair cup. Just just take a few of these carefully. Broadly speaking, call those and it's just a little bit there. Okay? Now what I want to do is I want to have a look at this fringe and we need to make a decision as to whether the, these gaps are what we'd want. Sometimes we can just clone them in. So let's start by using the stamp tool. Again. I'm going to put a source, may be, I don't know, hit the Option or Alt key to set my source. And I'm just going to very gently, nice small brush. I think. I'm just going to paint it in as if I was painting in individual hairs. Of course, I'm not really, I'm cloning in whole groups of hairs. But by doing it in this the same direction, it minimizes the visibility that I've been Photoshopping because that's what I want. I don't want this to look like I've been Photoshopping and I want it to look like it was always like that. So I'm taking my time and I'm running the brush or rather running the stamp tool in the direction of the hair so that it always feels correct. It always has that sense that it looked it is exactly the same all the way along. And just filling in those gaps. Not sure about that edge there just at the moment, but we'll leave it just for a sec. Is the feeling that one. Again, just remind you, I don't want this to look like Lego here. Okay, That's not too bad. What I now want to do is just remove these last few edges. For this, I'm gonna go with the stamp tool. I'm just going to set my source about here. Just very gently. Scene that's no good because the colors different. So you're going to change mode slightly. For this one, we're going to use the healing brush tool. So it's going to select the Healing Brush Tool. I'm gonna select my source. And now it's doing is it's helping because it's helping to match the color of the skin alone where I'm sampling from the skin color might be slightly different. It would apply the texture of the source, but it uses some intelligence as to what color to apply, and it just helps match things up. In this instance, this is a really good tool for this bit. It's not perfect for other things. And it's just around the edges of the hair from moment. So I know where I am not trying to change everything all at once. Lots of little steps as I go. Okay. I'll do for a minute. Just a little bit astray had there. So again, Spot Healing Brush, sorry, brush, the Healing Brush Tool. Select my source, set the target. There we go. Okay, that's not too bad.
4. 3. Removing Skin Blemishes: Next bit now is we're going to start to work on the skin. So although I have removed, removed a few hairs from the skin, they snare is a layer that's almost completely dedicated to skin blemishes. So we're gonna create a new layer, I'm going to call it skin blemish. We move on factors like how to spell removal. Moments of madness. I'm going to zoom in. And again, I'm going to use the Healing Brush Tool. I'm going to just click. Now one thing to notice, let me just undo that is you need to, whenever you're retouching blemishes on skin or marks on skin, you need to understand that direction, the light. So if I just bring this layer backup here, bring up a brush. The direction of the light is an X-Y, the CAP site and the eyes and you can see the shadows around blemishes is going in this direction, okay? Which means if the blemish is coming towards the camera, it'll be light on top, dark underneath. If it's a blemish is going in, so pop mark on the skin. If it's going in the skin, the shadow will be at the top and the highlight will be at the bottom. It's useful to remember that because when you retouching, just remember what we're trying to do isn't a change the skin texture. What we're trying to do is apply makeup. The whole of this process really is about applying Maker. We want the same sorts of ideas is if a makeup artist had done it. So I go back to my skin and blemish removal layer, hit J to go to the healing blastula, come here on the menu and go to the Healing Brush Tool source. And then I always do that. If I ever see a blemish, I'll do it in two halves. So first off, I'll get rid of the shadow, all the highlight. And then I go back and take out the highlight. And I just found over the years that it gives you a much more realistic result. Then simply selecting and then going all over it. Because what happens is the, you're giving the artificial intelligence the best possible set of data to work from. I'm not trying to make it to a whole area at once. I'm just trying to get rid of, let's say the shadow here. Just get rid of those shadows and then I'll switch the other side and get rid of the highlight. Then that way I find that you get a much more natural finish. It still feels like the skin was perfect in yeah, right. They might look like some great makeup was applied or that person's got flawless skin. But it looks like skin. It doesn't look like plastic. I get really annoyed when I see a research where you've got abuse will person beads will make it beautiful hair. But the retouch has worked too hard and has made the skin look plastic. So I'm just working my way along. Removing the worst of the blemishes. Just remind you I'm using the healing brush tool here because it accounts for the colors. The spot healing brush tool actually is very effective on skin. So if I just switch that mode, sorry, I switched to the spot healing brush mode. It's very good at certain things. But the problem is that it can instantly, you need to make sure sample all layers is selected at the top. If you're having trouble sample all layers at the top needs to be selected. If you have a blank layer and you're working with the spot healing tool, and it's all right if you weren't very carefully and very small. But if you get a little bit enthusiastic and get carried away very quickly, you'll start to see patches where it's very flat, there's no texture at all. So I really like. The Healing Brush Tool where I have to select my source because it forces me just to think, where did, what's the skin texture that I want to replace? The blemish width. Remember you never Photoshopping out. You're always Photoshopping in. You never taking something out. You're always putting something in. And this I just think there's a better job. So I'm going to work my way around the face. I am going to make some decisions about these little tiny creases here. Let's just have a quick look. I'm not too worried if a slight shadow stays, I'm going to get rid of this mole because this is a beauty retouching. I think I'm a makeup artist probably would have done the same thing. I'm just going to just work here and I'm gonna get rid of all of these hairs. So give me a minute and I'll come back to you when I've done that. Okay, so I think I've got rid of most of the little bits and pieces that I wanted to clean up, maybe call this a dry skin here and there. And one thing is to always come back to your image, leave it there for a while on, leave it for an hour to go, have dinner or something. We'll come back the next day and always go and have another look. It's amazing the things that you'll spot that you didn't spot, and also the things that you've overdone that you didn't think you had. Let me just change that one. Now and just having a quick look here, I'm going to use the healing brush tool first and just see if that works. Yeah, that's doing a pretty good job. I'm worried about is when it's sampling, it will start to try and pick up the colors around the target area. And what can happen? There you go. Just start to see it's going pink, where don't want it to. So our colonies that, so we're going to clone. You can use the clone tool instead rather than the healing brush tool. So again, Clone tool is just here and your menu, I've just hit S for the stamp tool, clone tool, stamp tool, and hold down Option or Alt for my source. And then when I click, that's where it's going to sample from us better. I want to get rid of that pink Enos because that's where it's smudged and it's also making it worse with the Healing Brush tool. Like I said, you always have to keep an eye on what you're doing. Particularly when you're using some of the more intelligent tools like the healing brush tools or Content Aware Fill. Because it's going to start to make assumptions for you and it doesn't always get them right. So I'm just very carefully working away in here, just cleaning up that edge. I don't want it to look too perfect because it is at the end of the day, lipstick on a face. It's not plastic. But I don't think that line was meant to be there. I think that's the makeup artist and I've made for bloods there and let's just change that. Okay. That's bad happened and we know that they're either okay. I mean, you can take this to the nth degree. You can spend days doing it, but that is good enough for what I need to get to the next stage. What we're now gonna do is start to even out some of the shadows and some of the ripples in the texture in the shape of the face and the shape of the skin.
5. 4. Reducing Red Skin Rash: Okay, so the next thing we're just kind of a quick look now, if you notice here on his arm where either she was nervous or the studio was cold or something. And we've got this slight read Plotinus. What we can do there is we can just take the heat out that a little bit almost like applying an antihistamine and the best way of doing it and it's quick. The best way of doing it is to very carefully retouch it. Um, but I'm not gonna do that. We're gonna do is I'm going to add a new layer this time it's going to be an adjustment layer. And adjustment layer is different to a pixel layer. And I can't draw on the layer. It just gonna, it's gonna apply some adjustments either to all the layers below this layer or to any layer that I link it to. So I click on the Adjustment Layer, new Adjustment Layer icon in the bottom of the Layers panel hit Hue Saturation. Let me just zoom in here. What I'm going to do is right-click here. This allows me to change the hue and saturation of the tone that I, that I'm about to click on. So I click on this. I go over here to find that the most clear red patch and click on there. And you can see that it's set the settings of this hue and saturation adjustment to be the reds. And let me just move this bit down. And you can see this here describes the colors that are the target of my adjustment. So if I desaturate, you can see that all of the pretty much everything in the picture because it's mostly weds is going to come down, but I'm just going to take that saturation down a little bit to about there for a moment. We're not going to do is click inside the mask for this layer, hold down Command or Control and hit backspace. And that's going to fill that mask with my background color, which is black. So basically what I've done is disable anything showing for this particular adjustment. What I want to be able to do is to paint back in. So I'm going to pick up my paintbrush. That's my brush. And I'm going to paint in the areas that I want that effect to work. So very slowly and very carefully. I'm just going to paint over those areas where it's got the worst of the readiness in it. Now you can see it's changing the color. I don't mind that for a moment because that gives me a really nice indication of which areas I've covered in which I haven't. Just painting the main region, the using the pressure of the brush to contain, sorry, to control how much effect I'm having. I'm painting in white onto that mask. Remember, anyway that's white on the mask is going to show anywhere that's black on the mask is not. Working my way around. Have made things worse. I've given them a purple rash. I don't know what ailment that would be. Something not very nice. Okay. Now I'll do for a minute. What I'm now gonna do though is click back on the Adjustment Layer icon, the layer thumbnail here. Go back to the reds because that's where I was working. So you can see that if I take the color out completely, so I'm just going to adjust that saturation first two until it blends into more saturation, less saturation. And I'm looking slightly just where it starts to show. And then I'm going to change the hue. So I'm going to push the color of those areas around a little bit, just left and right until it feels like it's just blending in, That's too purple to green. So round about there maybe again to pull and push the saturation you cover just between the two. They're paired there. And then maybe just adjust the lightness. There we go. And it's just starting to blend in. So if I zoom right out, I'll fine tune that, but you get the gist of it. I've just used a hue and saturation layer to take out the worst of that redness. I haven't fixed it completely. I just want to take out the very worst of it. It's there somewhere there or thereabouts. Okay.
6. 5. Dodging & Burning (Lightening & Darkening) The Skin: Now what we're gonna do is we are going to apply some selective lightening and darkening to get rid of the shadows under the eyes, shadows around just under the lips here, and just smooth things out. And to do that, what we're gonna do is we are going to create a lightened layer and a darkened layer. They're both going to be curves. So we click down here for a new adjustment layer. We hit curves. And that's given me a new layer with a white mask. Well, I'm gonna do is click in the middle of the curve and just push it up to about a 155, somewhere around there. That midpoint, a 155, give or take. It's not you don't have to be too accurate about it. And then I'm going to click inside the mask. I'm going to hold down my command or Control key and hit backspace. And that will basically turn everything off. The layer is still there, the adjustments still there. But because the mask is entirely black, none of it's showing. And I'm going to do exactly the same thing. Again. I'm going to go to curves, right? And you curve. So I go to the adjustment, New Adjustment Curves, and this time I'm going to pull it down, somewhere around there, maybe 85, something like that. And again, I'm going to click in the mask, hold down my Option, sorry, my Command or Control key and hit Backspace. So this one I'm going to name darken. And this one I'm going to name lighten. What I'm now also going to do is I'm going to take all the color out of the image to make it easier to see what's going on. And the most reliable way of doing that it gives a really neutral D coloring is to use another saturation layer. So I'm going to go down here again, new adjustment layer hue saturation, and simply drag the saturation down to 0. I'm now going to select all three of those, sorry, all three of those layers. Again, as we did earlier, hold down the Shift key and hit New Group. And this is going to be lighten and darken. Now my, I tend to run my tones quite light on skin because I find it gives a very smooth finish. But to really understand and really see what I'm doing is usually better that I just have a slightly darker image just for a moment. So again, a new layer, new adjustment layer. I'm gonna go with the exposure layer, and I'm just going to bring that exposure down by moving the gamma correction to the right. And now you can start to see all of those areas that need a little bit of adjustment. So I'm going to start by lightning. I'm going to click on the lightened mask. I'm going to hit my brush now if I just paint now in white on my brush, you can see that's quite a dramatic change and I don't want that. What we're gonna do is change the flow up here to let say, I normally work at about 5% because I've got pressure sensitivity on here. If you really want to be careful, set that flow rather than the opacity, set the flow to about 1%. All I'm doing now is I'm just finding those areas on the face that look a little bit dark to me. And so carefully, really gently take your time. Just painting them in. And again, I've learnt all of this stuff by watching makeup artist more than anybody else. This is what makeup does. And I'm just very gently figuring out which bits looked like. They need to be lightened because they're showing ripples in the shape of the skin, right? So if the light striking the shape of the face where it's darker, that means it must have been a change in direction. And that's what gives the shape of some of these wrinkles may be or where there's a curve that you don't want it. And it's the same basic principle that people use when they're applying contour makeup. They are fooling the viewer into thinking, for instance, Someone's got really defined cheekbones by putting shadow in here because it's the light falls. It would strike the upper part of the cheek and that would be light. And then there'll be a shadow underneath. And that's what the makeup is doing. And we're sort of doing a similar thing, would just essentially applying makeup to smooth out some of those lumps and bumps that have appeared along the way. So all I'm doing is looking for those dark areas, just very gently lightening them up. And I'm being really careful if you suddenly find you get this effect with lots of lines, then undo it and start again. And just be really, really careful. Alternatively, what you can do is select your mask and apply a blur, just a Gaussian Blur just a little bit, and that will soften it and then you can start again. But the trouble with that is it also affects everything else you have done successfully. Sometimes you get a client who insist on pouting a lot, the trout, trout my thing. And, and changing the shadows here around the edges of the mouth can be a really effective way of reducing the visibility that you can't. You're not changing the shape, but you're changing the perception of it by lightening and darkening certain areas. I quite enjoyed this bit. This is quite, I find this quite cathartic and just sitting in painting, lightening up those areas. Okay, so again, I'm going to speed this bit up and I'll come back to you when this is done. Okay, so having done all of the lightning, now we're gonna do is all of the darkening. So simply I click on the darken layer mask and do exactly the same thing again. But now what I'm looking for are the light spots like these here. And I'm just going to paint in and painting in with a white brush because I'm painting on the mask, which is allowing that effect to show through. And that effect in this instance is the curve we said that makes things a little bit darker. So what I'm doing is exactly the opposite. And I'll flip flat between. And those two layers over and over and over, lightening bit startling bets, lightning bit darker. There were lots of other ways of doing this, but I found this to be really controllable and subtle. Sometimes if I'm in a hurry, I might do it differently. But I like the way that this almost always looks completely natural. It just looks like makeup and it doesn't affect the colors to March, he doesn't really look obvious. If you take your time and just work your way in. It just has a really, really natural sort of finish to it. Almost invisible, but yet still effective if you find you ever make a mistake. So let's say I over dark in this area here, what I can do is switch from painting in white to painting in black. I just enlarge the brush a bit and paint back onto that mask using a black brush. And I, we're all that's happening is it's masking it back out. Different way of correcting any errors. Okay. Just zooming out. You can see I've just got a couple of bits here where it looks like it's still a bit dark. So I'm gonna go back to my lightened layer, pick up the brush, and then just apply some more very carefully trying to make sure it looks really natural. And all I'm doing is evening any little wrinkles and recalls in the shape of the skin. So it should be it should have exactly the same effect as applying makeup. Okay, so that should do. So to see what I've done, Let's just turn off these two layers that we're using basically to help us see what we're up to. Zoom in a little bit. And if I closest group up, if I hide degree, show the high group. And you can see just how effective it is. It does take a little bit of practice. It does take some patients. But if you want to have a really realistic retouch of skin, there's no avoiding that. There's that I've got all of the different automated tools. And in the end, they're great, but they never looked entirely convincing. So for me, this is how to do it properly. They do it slowly, you do it carefully. And actually where about 90 percent of the way here name.
7. 6. Enhancing The Eyes: Okay, What we're now going to do is just enhance the eyes a little bit. Now there are a lot of techniques you can use for this. And I go through a few more on mastering portray photography.com. There's a whole video on three different ways to do it. So I'm just gonna pick one of them, one particular method which I think is really easy and it's really quick. So we're gonna do is we're going to get a last Sue tool first. And I'm gonna circle round as if a parent is if a particle pair of sunglasses or something. And I'm going to hold down Shift, Command or Shift and Control and see. And what that does is it copies everything inside the selection that you can see. So everything combined is now copied. I then hit control V or command V rather. That's created me the slaves. So if I hold down the Option or the Alt key and click on the eyeball, you can see this is what I'm looking at. Now. I'm going to turn this into a smart object. We've already talked about that a little bit and really useful thing to do. So just here on a layer on the Layers panel, just click and I'm going to go to Convert to Smart Object. That's now a smart object which allows me to apply effects to it but adjust them. So if I pick up a filter and for this we're going to use an unsharp mask. Now, basically, sharpening is nothing more than changing the contrast of something. It doesn't really sharpen anything. And you can use that knowledge to smart to good effect. So we're gonna go here to Unsharp Mask. And we're going to change the amount and the radius to give the effect we want. But the bit we're looking at is inside the eye, don't ignore the skin. I'm looking inside the eye. So depending on the amount and the radius. So if I have the radius too big, what will happen is that the eyes will start to go dark. If it's too little, you won't see any effect. So you want, I don't know, it depends on the resolution of your camera, of course. And what I'm looking for is I'm just adjusting it until the difference between the light and dark areas is at it's most pronounced. And then I'm going to change the amount until I get the effect that I went around about there. I think 93% radius 11 pixels, ten pixels somewhere around there, and hit OK. But I don't want it to affect the skin. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to hold down the Option or Alt key and click on Add New Layer Mask or Add Layer Mask. What that does is it's added a mask, but it's automatically filled it with black. I'm then going to Alt or Option, sorry, Option or Alt, click on the eyeball to un-solo that layer. So now that everything is showing again, and I can paint just as I did with the lighten and darken modes. Light and dark and curves. I'm going to paint on this layer mask in white. I'm going to bring my flow backup to a 100 percent. And then I'm just going to very carefully, each year's painting with white. And all white is doing is allowing this effect to show through. And all it's doing is revealing this layer with the Unsharp Mask and zoom out a little bit just to check that I haven't overdone it because there's nothing worse than when someone over does eyes. So we have to get that right and I think we've overdone it just a little. So I'm going to double-click on the Unsharp Mask and now allows me, if I want to, to just very carefully re-adjust and change my decisions a little bit. Yeah, star wasn't merely miles off. I think I just overcooked it a little here. Okay. So if I turn it off, turn it back on. You can see that it's really subtle, but it's just brought out the texture in her eyes. Really, really lovely. Okay, and so now onto the final steps really.
8. 7. Reshaping Hair and Figure: And what we're now going to do is a little bit of reshaping. As I said at the beginning, I think I got the posing a little bit often. I've just created that lump in her shoulder which we could do with reducing if I can, and we might just shape the outside of the hair a little bit. To do this, I'm going to create yet again, a new layer and is going to be a smart objects. To do this, I am going to stamp visible. There's a command in Photoshop that rarely people use or know about. It's called stamp visible. And to do that you hold down shift option, command or Shift Alt and Control E. And what that does is it makes a copy of everything you see as one new layer. And if you look in your history, you'll see it's called stamp visible. Okay, So that shift option and command or Shift Alt and control and E. And that takes everything that you can see on the screen and creates a new layer of it. We're then going to turn that into a smart object. You know, I like smart objects and I was if I can't, we'll use them. We're now going to go to Filter. And this is where we're going to do some liquefying. Now you have to be ever so careful with this stuff. I don't want to overdo it. I don't want to fundamentally change someone's shape. I'm not into body dysmorphia. And there's a whole load of stuff you can do in here. So for instance, if I choose the face tool, I can change the eye shape. I can change the eye height. I can do all sorts of things that we counsel up. And I'm not necessarily going to do that is useful occasionally where I just want to very carefully, gingerly, very gently bring out the very magic of someone. But what I want to do here is a little bit more subtle than that. So we're gonna go into liquify tool. We're gonna go to warp, which is this one appear very big brush. People tend to use a brush that's too small and you start to see the edges. And what I'm gonna do just very, very slowly, very, very carefully. Just clean up this outline. I don't think I got quite right in the posing, so I don't want her to look hunched or like there's a bump there. I want everything to look smooth and much more natural. I'm actually correcting a defect in my own posing because I don't think from recollection, the early had any sort of sign of a bump there. Always see me and the photography. I don't know if I've done that particularly well. But you get the gist. I also noticed going to wear their hair is just came to little a where I've been retouching. I was going to very carefully, very gingerly and gently reshaped some of it. I mean, you can go the whole hog. So what I could do is just bring out the best or the most of this lovely outline here, the cut and this hair is absolutely beautiful. So as a final mile kind of step, I'm just using the Warp Tool just to finesse that a little. Again, remember that most people use a radius that's way too small for this user agents that's a little bit bigger than you think. And you will get more believable results. If you want to. You can't just face, shape the face and maybe bring the neck in a little here. And I tend not to get too involved with that. I liked my research to be done using make-up rather than fundamentally reshaping someone. There we go, That should do it. I think I've got it by Rossum still concerned about this back here. It's a bit. There we go. And so you can see if I do, if I turn that layer off and turn it back on. You can see what we've done. You can see it's in keeping with the image. You can see that it's subtle and it's simple and it looks natural. I haven't fundamentally gone for a body shape or a face reshape and reshape the eyes or anything. All we've done, SNCC is make-up to enhance what we already had.
9. 8. Adding A Background Texture: Now what I want to do is I want to add a little bit of texture over that paper background. It's really simple to do. And all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to some backgrounds that I've prepared these backgrounds available for download on mastering, portray photography, and I will include this background as part of the downloadable assets for this particular class. We're going to do. Select it, drag it across. It will come up in this instance as a frame I can adjust, I'm gonna hold down the Option key or Alt key as I scale it. So it's scaling it uniformly around the middle and double-click to commit it. And you'll see that this time it's automatically created a smart object for me. But what do I do about the fact that the whole frame? Well, if you remember, we've already saved a selection of Ellie. So if I go to Select Load Selection, hit the channel here, and I'm going to go for the LE, outline here. Okay, and you can see that selections come in. Now when I click on Create New Layer Mask down here in the layer panel, you can see that it's created a mass, but it's the wrong way round. So I click on the layer and this time I'm going to invert the pixels. And to do that instead of it being Shift Command I or shift control and I, which is for the selection mode. I'm now we're just in pixels, so it's now just command I or control and I, and that inverts the mask. So there's my mask now you can see it doesn't quite match up because I made some adjustments to using the warp tool. So what we need to do here is we're going to just correct that. So I'm going to go into my mask, pick up a brush. I can see the brush there it is. I'm going to paint in white so the background shows through. I'm not too worried about that edge just for a moment. Because what we're gonna do is we're not going to have it this dark, sorry, this opaque, and we're not going to have it this bright, but it's looking. All right. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to change the mode to overlay. Last better already, it's starting to look better. I'm going to change its opacity to something a little bit more subtle somewhere around there. And then the next last bit of the background is you have to remember that if they really was a background that I was photographing Ailey against, it would be more blurred. It would not be as sharp as her eyes and the moment is too sharp. So to do that, oops, let me just put it right in the middle. I'm gonna go to Filter and go let me just yeah, yeah, yeah. Filter. I'm going to go to Blur and I'm going to apply a boxplot. A boxplot is seems to give the best result that looks most like the blurring you get for out-of-focus camera regions. It's taking a minute to do something. I don't know what. There we go. So if I go all the way across, you can see it'll blow out completely. If I go to four, you can see it's almost no blowing and I think we want somewhere. I maybe 11 or 12. I've got the preview checked so I can see what I'm doing now. It looks, I don't know, maybe a little less than that. It's got to look natural. Let's try that. There we go. And then the next thing I'm gonna do is, although I had that beautiful outline of, of Ellie, I want it to be just a little bit softer. So I'm going to feather it. I'm going to feather the mask by clicking on that mask. And then it brings up the properties here. If that's not showing, go to Window. And then you can see that you can bring up the properties panel from here. That properties panel has a feather setting for this mask and I can drag it all the way across and it will blur the mask itself, massively softening those edges. And I just want to bring it. If I overdo it, you'll start to see some funny effects around the edges. I just want to bring it around those edges so that it just softens the transitions and makes it feel really, really, really natural. And then the final thing I'm going to do before we apply any plugins or filters or anything like that, is I'm going to create a vignette and I'm going to show you the fastest way I know of creating a vignette. We'll do that in the next part of the class.
10. 9. Adding A Vignette: So in this bit of the class, I'm going to show you the fastest way I've managed to figure out for creating a vignette. A vignette is simply a way of drawing the viewer's eye into the bit of the image that you want them to be interested in. In this case, probably Ellie's face. You can do it by darkening the edges. You can do by lightening the edges if you wish and used a dark center area, you can even blurred the edges. These are all different ways of making the bit that you're, that you want the viewer to be interested in, make it more prominent. For me. I'm going to darken the edges. So I'm going to grab the last sue tool very quickly. And then just going to create a shape I think is more relax the shape. I wanted the vignette. I'm then going to invert that. So I'm going to hold down Shift Command and I or shift control and I. And then I'm gonna go down here to the Adjustment Layer icon and I'm going to hit exposure. And what it's done is it's de-selected everything, but it's created a new mask for me. So if I adjust this gamma correction here, you can see really quickly that I'm adjusting the outer edges of the frame and making it darker. But of course, it looks awful. So if I click on that mask, I'm now going to feather that age. I'm going to adjust in the Properties window again, I'll remind you if the Properties window isn't showing it, go to Window Properties. And I'm just adjusting the feathering of that area so that it becomes nice and soft. What can now do is on that mask any extra bits. I really want to just soften out. Maybe I don't want it to be quite so dark along her skin with a black soft brush. I'm just going to paint those back. And very just going to make it a little less, even a little less predictable. Now if you're worried you've got too much, of course, you can change the settings of the actual exposure. So I can just soften out back and maybe I've just overdone it a little bit. It's a bit too dark because he wanted it again, you want things to be subtle, right? You don't want people to go nice vignette. You want people to go great photo. So the vignette is just a vehicle for drawing the viewer into the middle. It is not a piece of art in its own right. So, and just very gently peeling bits back. For I feel I've just made me feel too much back. I'm just going to switch to a white brush and paint some more of that mask back in. And that'll do that's there. They're about some of them. It's not perfect. And I'm doing all of this pretty quickly.
11. 10. Finishing Touch: Nik Color Efex Pro 2: I'm going to apply an effect. I'm going to use Nick color effects. I always, I didn't even know if it's still called knit color effects. It certainly was, but color effects by an owned by dx. So optics now, again, I'm going to do it on a smart object layer. So I take Shift Option Command or shift Alton control E of stamp visible, that brand new, shiny layer and that layer. So if I solo that layer by hitting Alt or Option and clicking on the eyeball, you can see really clearly that layer contains everything that is in the image that you could see a second ago that's now been encapsulated and don't into that top layer. I'm just going to call this finished. I haven't been very good at naming. I'm so sorry. As I went along, what I'm now going to do is turn that into a smart object. So convert to smart object just using the little burger menu on the Layers panel. And then I'm gonna go to Filter Nick collection, color FX pro forma is the one I'm using and just wait for it to bring up the dialog. Okay, I'm just going to make that full screen. And I've got a whole series of presets here that I can choose from. I have no idea at this stage which one I'm going to like. And I, I allow myself a little bit of time to play and maybe sometimes I won't apply any finishes at all. That's a little bit too punchy. I think. I wonder what that one's going to look like. A quiet like that desaturated look, but maybe I want something with a bit more color in it given the beautiful color for her. What about that one? I'll go with that one. I think I think I've named it the ox wedding shoot, and I've got all of these settings here. Um, I'm not gonna go into each of those. That's a whole lesson in itself, but we are going to just push up the glow a little bit. And I am going to take out some of the saturation. So I still quite like that slightly more painterly look. Push it the diesel extraction and little I should do that. Maybe just a little bit of extra contrast in there, maybe. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so that's applied, that effect. And what I can now do if I think, if I look at old, You know what, I'm not sure I got that right. Remember, we did this on a smart object layer so I can double-click on the effect, bring it back up, and I can make changes to it. It's retained. All of those settings are still here. On the right-hand side. I can change anything that I want. I can take off the grant and the glamour, glamour, Glaucon even say it's been a long day. The glamour glow, I can change the cross processing if I wish to. Anything I like. I can change the effect completely. If I don't like it, I simply cancel it and that'll take me straight back to where I was. So you've seen really clearly step by step by step by step, how we can change the original image. If I go back to the background, solo that background, that's the imagery started with. This is the image we ended with. The imagery started with the image we ended with. And we've done all of it by using little steps, little subtle changes, bits and pieces that aren't fundamentally, I'm not warping her body. I'm not changing anything. I'm just essentially applying digital makeup and correcting mistakes. I made an opposing removing little stray hairs and adding a little bit of texture to the background. And then a final layer over the top to give it a little bit of color. Incidentally, I will make this nick color effects preset available as part of the downloads for this image.
12. Outro: I hope you've enjoyed this particular video. It's taken us a minute to put it together and to try and get myself organized because you can see the way I work, it's very quick, it's very instinctive, but it actually has some methodology as I worked my way through it. If you have any questions at all, please do. Email me. I am Paul paul Wilkinson photography dot code at UK. That's Paul. Paul Wilkinson photography dot code at UK. I'd love to see the work that you produce. So if you go through the process of doing a beauty portrait retouching, please do share it with me and the rest of the team, the links for sharing your project. Down below. If you've enjoyed this and you'd like to see more of mastering portrayed photography, the resource that I've put together to help portrait photographers, just like you were putting photographers just like me really. It's just things I've learned along the way because hey, every day is a school day if you have enjoyed it and you'd like to learn more. Head over to mastering portrait photography.com where there is a ton of stuff like this. There are articles, there are resources, there are things you can download including more backgrounds, for instance. And there are videos a little like this one, but whatever else, remember, until next time, be kind to yourself. Take care. Man alive, I need a drink. Cheers.
Paul Wilkinson, Portrait Photographer
