I have received many mails from other photographers / illustrators asking how I can reach the natural effect on my photos and my retouching artworks.
Usually when it comes to skin, everyone says "its easy just use the Blur tool in PS", but thats not how it works actually. I, myself now can confess when I got into retouching and photography thought its the right thing to use also but by time I realised its just destroying the skin texture, so I stopped using it.
However, I still know many retouchers who use Blur tool at first and then with the help of different textures they build the skin but that one still looks so fake for me.
So at first I open the photo (must be a high resolution photo to be able to work on the skin) in PS, then I just zoom in and out checking out the photo and the skin and other problems and trying to figure out which ones I should remove or clone etc. After that I use the spot healing brush, healing brush, clone tool to remove blemishes, zits, skin problems like bags and dark circles under the eyes. I know sometimes it might take ages to remove them but be careful we still want a natural effect on the skin so Do NOT remove all the pores.
The new Photoshop has an amazing tool it can be used with the spot healing brush and its called "Content-aware". I usually use this for bigger blemishes and hair on the skin or for retouching the hair.Then also I use Curves. I create two curves adjustment layers, one is a lot brighter than my image and the other is darker. These usually come with a mask so I press on the mask Ctrl + I (Command + I on Mac) and it just inverts them so now the mask is black on each one. You can view how it looks like in PS in the photo attached to this note.(Optional: If you want to see blemishes a lot more or easier to make a better work you can create two layers and fill it both with black. After that change the layer mode one from normal to color, and the other one to overlay/soft light. )
 |
| Click for bigger size |
Now go back to your adjustment layers, click on the mask, then on the brush tool. Make sure the colour you are going to use is white. Change the opacity to around 10-20% and the Flow also around 25%. The size of the brush is depending how big blemishes you would like to lighten/darken. And on the highlight mask start painting over the dark areas with the brush. Don't worry if you overlighten them, you can still change the white colour on the colour palette to black and it will fade the areas you believe look bad. I also use this technique to shade /highlight some areas on the face or give it a nice effect. But about this in another retouching tip!
See how the skin looks like with Blur and with my technique:
Original:
 |
| Click for bigger size |
Skin retouching by me:
 |
| Click for bigger size |
 |
| Click for bigger size |
