Access Digital Photography

Most people who’ve done any digital retouching at all have depended heavily on Photoshop’s Clone tool. It is very useful if you’re smoothing skin near the edges of a selection…such as one that might separate facial skin from hair. That’s because it won’t try to blend texture that’s outside the selection and cause a dark “blotch.”  Most of the time, however, the three most efficient retouching tools are the Patch Tool, the Healing Brush, and the Spot Healing Brush.

The Clone stamp is most useful when you want to cover part of the image with a particular pattern that exists in another part of the image, such as blades of grass to cover trash on a lawn or the clouds in the sky that were interrupted by an accidentally twisted lens hood.

When it comes to retouching faces, the three ìhealingî tools are much faster and do a much more credibleî job than the Clone stamp. To remove something like a scar or eye bags, you just choose the Patch Tool and drag a selection around that “unwanted” feature, then drag the selection to a nearby “clean” area that has the same texture. If, for instance, there were no freckles where the bags were, don’t drag the bags selection to a bunch of freckles.

A lot of folks use the Burn and Dodge tools to “re-shade” a large area of a face. The problem is that using the Burn and Dodge tools changes the pixels they affect on the layer that uses them, so it’s difficult to fix those strokes when you make the little messes that most of us make when we’re burning and dodging. Besides, unless you have CS4 (and youíre not telling me what youíre using), the Burn and Dodge tools can also change the color balance of the affected area.

So what you need to do is create a new layer, fill it with 50% gray, put it in Overlay mode, and then progressively Brush on a low percentage of White (to Dodge) and Black (to burn). The best part of this is that if the client or AD want to change the degree of the burning and dodging, itís easy to do by simply “painting over” what you did before. You can also change the tone of the burning and dodging by changing the Opacity, Fill, or Blend Mode  of the layer (Multiply and Darken, for instance).

One thing you really have to be careful of is the edges of hair: Though you might want to remove (neaten up) some of those, taking them all out is a dead giveaway that something “phony” has been done. Some people just “cop out” by using the Blur tool to smooth the edge of the trimmed hair. But this “fakeî depth-of-field” rarely looks authentic. Always lift the head and the area surrounding it to a new layer (select, feather, Cmd/Ctrl + J). Then, on that layer, Use the Extract Filter or Background Eraser (if you have CS4) to erase the background without erasing the little streaks of flying hair themselves. Another option is to use Photoshop’s Image > Image Calculations dialog when the original background contrasts strongly with the face. It’s a complicated process, but well worth learning. Truly, this is one of the hardest things to do when retouching, but virtually no pro client will accept anything less. So you’re going to have to put in a lot of time and practice in the meantime…not because I say so, but because it is so.

It’s also really important to understand exactly what your purpose is when youíre retouching. For instance, are you creating this version of a portrait for use on a magazine cover? For use in a business resume? Both will require a sharp, high-impact one-on-one connection of the subject to his/her audience. In both instances, you’ll probably want tight control over the lighting, background, clothing, make-up, and accessories. Then it comes to retouching. For a glamour portrait, the retouching should ‘idealize’ the subject. In a business portrait, you want the person to look like someone you’d like to know and trust.

If the portrait is for a magazine cover or ad, you may have very strict requirements for color accuracy and the placement of type in the image. Thatís why most of these shots use a white or solid color background. You’re also going to want to crop the image to fit the magazine cover.