Editing Skin
Editing skin is important if you don't want all of your subjects to look old, weird, or dead. Also, fixing up the skin is important before you put the image into a graphic for obvious reasons.
There are many ways to edit the skin beyond what I have here, because some pictures will have different skin problems than the one that I am editing. I chose a picture of Uma Thurman where the quality isn't all that great and she looks like she has age spots. We'll have those all fixed, don't worry.
Click any image to enlarge it.
- I started out with the usual - put the picture into a 1000x1000 px file, with the Contents set to Transparent and at whatever resolution the picture is (if you copy the picture from Microsoft Paint and immediately open a new document in Photoshop, it will provide you with the resolution and the size of the image.) After that, just paste the image in, duplicate the layer, and you're ready to work.
- With her, I started by increasing the brightness and contrast of the picture since it was extremely dull. Make a practice of doing this with all your photos because they always look a lot better when you brighten them up.
- Next, I duplicated the layer (make a practice of this) and grabbed the Smudge tool. Make sure you have the opacity set to 20% or lower. Otherwise, you are just going to be smudging her face around. The brush I use has the Hardness set to 0. Make sure that you don't make the brush size too big or small - just enough to smooth away shadows.
- Start by smoothing the face in areas where it is pixilated or the shadows are odd. This picture of Uma has some weird shadows on her cheek, so I took care of those. Make sure you are careful about the forehead. Remember - people do not have flat foreheads, so don't smooth everything together too much. Mostly, you just want to weed out rough edges and pixilation.
- Try not to mess around too much with creases around the mouth - those are natural. Also, don't forget about the ears and neck, and be careful around the nose.
- Use a smaller brush size when dealing with the eyelid and around the eyebrows.
- After I did that, I zoomed in even more so I could see both eyes and started to remove the bags under her eyes. Start from the outer edge of the eye and smudge toward the inner corner, and make sure that you aren't messing up too many shadows. Do this for both eyes.
- At this point, you might want to zoom out and check to make sure that you didn't make the person look stupid or airbrushed. Trust me, it happens.
- Now is the time to make sure the skin is even all the same color. Use the eyedropper tool to select a nice color skin tone in a patch of skin somewhere (make sure it is generally a medium color - not too yellow and not too red, or any other color, depending on the picture.)
- PIck up the airbrush tool, set the Hardness to 0 and the brush to a reasonable size. The Opacity of the brush needs to be at or below 10% because you don't want to make the even skin tone overpowering, and it helps if you make a mistake. Zoom all the way in on the skin, select Hue from the Brush "Mode" drop-down box, and start glossing over areas of the skin that are not the same color.
- You might have noticed that Uma's face had a few red/pink patches that showed up even after I smoothed out her skin. Making it the same color does not leave her with the appearance of sunburn.
- After you are satisfied that the skin is the same color, zoom back out and pinpoint any changes you would like to make. It was at this time that I straightened out her eyebrow and cleaned up her hairline a bit.
- Then, your picture is ready for a graphic!
Look at the difference by clicking on the image below:
