Original subtitles

In this skin retouching lesson,

I'll show you how to quickly remove blemishes and freckles.

Last, how to digitally airbrushed textured skin into a smoother, softer texture.

There are a lot of photo filter applications out there

to meet this massive demand for smooth skin and photos,

but nothing will get to you as natural and effect,

as careful and meticulous photoshopping.

After all, we all know how easy it is to spot a photo filter.

Most of them can be pretty obvious and a little obnoxious.

The focus of this lesson is going to be retouching in a very natural and convincing way.

No blur outs of every single pore.

Instead, we'll be learning how to tastefully retouch

skin to look natural and soft. Let's get started.

All right, for step one,

look for the file called skin.jpg,

and let's go ahead and drag that into photoshop.

Cool. I'll press F to enter full screen mode,

and let's go ahead and zoom in and take a look at our image.

The model we have here, she's absolutely beautiful,

but the point of this lesson is to teach you how to smooth out skin,

remove freckles, blemishes, whatever else,

and come up with a really perfect skin tone.

I chose this photo because she has

these beautiful freckles that we are going to be removing entirely.

First things first, let's go to our layer,

make sure background is selected and let's make a copy,

command J. I always like to make sure that I'm never editing on that original layer.

I like to keep that there in place just in case I need it

later and it's always nice to go back and see where we started.

Make sure that layer one is selected and I'm going to zoom in even further.

The first thing that I'm going to show you how to do,

is how to remove these freckles and for that,

I like to use the clone stamp.

You can get there by pressing S on your keyboard or going over here

to the toolbar and make sure that clone stamp is selected.

How a clone stamp works,

is you sample an area of your image like this,

and then you can stamp it somewhere else on your image. There's an example.

We're not going to be putting near eyeball in the middle of her forehead.

Let me just command Z to backup a little bit.

Instead, what we'll be using the clone stamp for,

is for sampling areas of her skin that are

clear and replacing the freckles with a clear skin tones.

With my clone stamp selected,

I'm going to go to the top and make it a much smaller tool,

because again, we're only going to be working with these very small areas.

I'm going to zoom in even tighter.

Like I mentioned, the clone stamp works by sampling areas of

skin and then replacing the areas that we want to replace a with that sampled area.

In order to sample the area of skin,

I press S to get clone stamp,

I'm going to hold down ALT or OPTION on

my keyboard and click to sample an area of clear skin.

So holding down ALT,

I'm just tapping once with my mouse,

and now I'll go back up here to this first freckle.

Click, drag it around.

You can see this plus mark and that shows

you exactly the area of skin that it's sampling from.

We can go around here and I like doing small samples at once.

Instead of just sampling that one area and clearing away all of these freckles.

I'm just going to make small incremental samples so that it feels more natural.

For this freckle right here,

I'm going to hold down Alt and sample an area of skin right above

it and then go ahead and erase this area out.

Basically what we're doing is a lot of sampling and stamping.

Sample and stamp.

The reason I like to sample the clear areas of skin that are very close to the freckle,

is because that's what's going to feel most natural.

If ever you're going to sample an area of skin,

say way over here and her cheekbone and try to paint in a freckle over here,

it would just look way too light and doesn't really

match the skin tone of the surrounding area.

That's technique number one for removing freckles or blemishes,

it's the clone stamp.

Another technique I use is called the healing brush.

You'll find that over here on the menu next to the red eye tool,

just click, drag it down and select healing brush.

You can also get there by pressing J.

The healing brush works in a really similar way.

You can hold down Alt,

sample a piece of your image and go ahead and brush it in and again,

you see that crosshatch that shows you where the area is being sampled from.

Both of these techniques work pretty well.

A way to remember this is,

if you're going to be retouching skin,

the healing brush is usually better because

it's better suited for the textures of that skin.

The clone stamp is great when it comes to duplicating or

removing objects like I showed you with that eyeball when we first opened it.

I'm going to go ahead and stick with the healing brush and sample

areas of skin and erase out those freckles.

If I want to make my brush a little bit bigger,

I'll just hold down the right bracket on my keyboard and continue.

All right, now that I have gone ahead and removed her freckles I'll zoom

out to show you what it looks like before, after.

That was all done using the Healing Brush.

If you're interested in moving just a few blemishes or imperfections,

the Healing Brush is a great option.

All right, now that we have removed the freckles,

I'll go ahead and j the second stage of retouching skin.

She's already beautiful, but if you want to have a completely airbrushed complexion,

that's what the second stage is for.

The first thing I'm going to do,

is go ahead and make a duplicate of this layer.

Command J and again,

I like working with a lot of different layers for the sake of contingency.

If I mess up on the airbrushing,

but I don't want to lose all that other work,

I've still got this layer underneath,

so I've saved every single stage of the way.

We're going to get the airbrushed look and a few simple steps.

First with that top layer selected,

go to filter, noise,

dust and scratches, and if you're not seeing a

very reduced blurred out example behind you,

just to make sure that, that preview box is checked.

I'm going to bring that radius up to about 11.

You can see that her skin and everything else in this photo has

really been blurred out and you're not seeing a lot of texture come through,

which is exactly what we want.

If you go too far along the scrubber,

like 207, it just gets a little crazy.

There is such a thing as going overboard with airbrushing.

Let's bring it back to 11 and go ahead and hit OK,

and for the second step,

I'm going to add one more filter and that is going to be a Gaussian Blur.

Go up to your menu bar and click Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur.

Again, make sure that your preview box is checked so that you can see

a live preview and if you bring the scrubber all the way to the left,

there's no blur applied whatsoever,

and if you bring that scrubber all the way to the right,

you will see the most blurred out photo imaginable.

I'm going to bring that scrubber back down right at the very beginning,

around 2.4 is nice.

Go ahead and press OK.

Now, you can see that she has very nice airbrushed skin,

but the rest of her is also incredibly blurry.

What we're going to do is add a layer mask on top of that layer and

literally just paint her skin back into place through the layer mask.

Make sure that that top layer is selected,

and go ahead and throw a mask on there by clicking

the Add Layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers palettes.

I'm going to make sure that my foreground color is

black and I'll press G to get to my paint bucket.

You can also get here on the menu by

selecting it and getting that middle option Paint Bucket Tool.

Let's see opacity is at a 100, perfect.

Go ahead and click anywhere in that photo,

make sure that your Layer Mask is selected.

Awesome. What we've done is through a mask over all of those Gaussian blurs and

Dustin scratches filters that we applied just now and now we get to paint it back in.

What you're seeing is that layer that we just edited is

entirely covered up and you're seeing the layer underneath it.

Make sure that your Layer Mask is selected.

Let's go ahead and change white to the foreground color.

Get your brush by pressing B on your keyboard.

I like to bring that opacity down to about,

let's do 65 percent.

I want to check the hardness,

it says 0 percent.

I'm going to bump it up to about 14.

I'll make my brush bigger by pressing the right bracket on my keyboard.

Now, simply start brushing in where her skin is.

You can see that, that softness is being applied.

I'm making my brush smaller by pressing the left bracket, by the way.

The important thing here is to avoid

any highly detailed areas like within her lips or her nostrils or her eyeball.

If you blur that too much,

it's just going to look like a fake photo.

What we want to blur out is just the skin and resizing

my brush as needed with the right and left brackets.

I want to make sure that I'm not hitting that shadow where her pinky touches

her cheek because I want to make sure that that line stays nice and sharp.

I also want to make her lips a little bit softer,

but I don't want it to be too evident.

I'm going to drop that opacity down to the 20's,

so 20 percent and making sure that I'm not brushing over the crease because again,

I want those sharp lines.

I'm just going to smooth over her chapped lips here.

This is like a digital chopstick.

Cool. I'm going to bring that opacity back up to about 50's,

59 percent, and one pro tip,

if you're going to be softening skin like this,

don't forget to do the same thing with hands otherwise,

it's just going to look weird.

I'm not going to overdo it on the hands because you still want to see those joints,

so that it's recognizable as a hand and not a sausage.

let's go ahead and bring my Brush Tool down a little bit

and just be really careful to only get strategic areas of her finger.

Now I'm going to do a few more touch ups and

we are good to go and if I ever Over painted an area, I'll show you an example.

Let me blur out that eyeball.

The nice thing about the mask is it's entirely reversible.

All you need to do is switch that foreground color back to

black and you can paint in those areas that you accidentally masked out.

That's the really nice thing about layer masks.

There's a lot of flexibility there.

Let me go ahead and zoom out by Command 0 and I'll show you the before and the after.

Let me zoom in so you get a closer look at that, before and after.

I wanted to look a little bit more natural.

Right now, it's looking a little bit to airbrushed for my taste.

I want to make sure that layer is selected and in the Layers palette go to opacity.

I'm going to toggle that down to about 50 percent.

Perfect. Now you see some of that original skin texture coming through,

but it's still nice and smoothed out and you get that same airbrush effect.

Before and after, again,

it's really nice and subtle.

This is where we started, rough skin,

you've got a lot of texture coming through plus

the freckles and this is where we've netted out,

smoother skin, freckles removed,

but it doesn't feel overly airbrushed if still feels really natural.

Let's go ahead and save and I'm going to save this as Skin-Retouched in my edited folder.

Make sure it's saved as a Photoshop file so we can retain all of those layers and now

I'll save it as a flattened JPEG with that same file name, Skin-Retouched.

Press OK. We're good to go.

Let's move on to the last video of the retouching segments.