Skin retouch

In this tutorial you’re going to learn the basic skin touch up process. This woman, for some reason, only has make up on half her face so I tried to make it even…but no judgment.

First thing you ALWAYS want to do is duplicate the background layer so you always have the original picture in the background.

I named it wrinkles.

You’re going to use the healing brush tool (just press j) and go over her wrinkles on the forehead and so on.

Already a pretty big difference.

Then you’re going to do a surface blur.

Depending on the picture this step will vary, but I used a radius of 2 and threshold of 9.

I applied a vector mask (at the bottom of the layers panel). You don’t want the eyes to be blurred so go ahead and mask that off.

This part was just me trying to make her face look more even. It’s not that great, but normally you’re not going to have to match the halves of people’s faces.

Teeth whitening. Just make a new layer and take a white brush and paint over the teeth. I think soft light looks best. Never go more than 20% opacity. Nothing looks worse than teeth that are obnoxiously white. Screams fake.

I also usually do the whites of the eyes. Personally, I feel it makes a pretty big yet subtle difference.

After (just pay attention to the skin, makeup is not good).