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Retouching

Touching up pictures is a very important part of a graphic designer's portfolio. Typical salaries of fresh re-touchers working in salaried positions can expect to pull down ~$36,000 a year. Their salaries only go up from there as they gain skill and most importantly productivity.

Before we start - PS users can use their power for good, or for evil. Please be cognizant of how/what/why you are doing edits and how it may impact your audience. The web is rife with examples of bad retouching (or here) I bet you can find them without difficulty.

Touching up requires attention to detail and while most people think the pictures being retouched are heavily manipulated, in reality, designers try to minimize the noticeable effects. If somebody looks at a picture and thinks that it has been retouched, then the designer has failed at his/her manipulation. There should be no conscious thought that the picture has been touched.

You are going to use the raw file for this picture and do some simple manipulation. We will retouch eyes, get rid of a few wrinkles, crop the picture, and save it out as a jpg with a particular target size. Note, we are NOT going to keep the picture as a black-and-white, we'll keep ours as a colour shot.

Assignment #1: Retouching a family photo

Step 1 >>> GRAB THIS FULL RESOLUTION PICTURE <<<

Step 2 - make a backup & what are these layers things?

Layers are the meat-and-potatoes of what digital imaging editing is all about. Think of a layer as a transparency put on top of a physical picture. You can add anything you want to that transparency. Unlike a physical picture however, you can also perform complex mathematics to that transparency and combine it with layers above, or layers below it. The further to the top of the panel a layer is, the further to the forefront of your screen the layer is represented. A couple features, at a glance, include:

the blend-mode drop-down menu (seen saying 'Normal' in this picture), which combines the current layer's information and mathematically combines it with layers 'under it'.
The opacity slider, which determines how much of your current layer will be included in the mix resulting on the screen (100% being completely opaque, 0% being completely transparent).
Other features include the visibility (the eye) of the layer (when turned off, you can't see the layer),
the locks (should you want to protect the content of the layer) and the fill - which won't be discussed in this course.
At the bottom of the layers panel are various other tools, they include:
1. effects (such as drop shadows, glows, bevels),
2. layer masking (allowing you to manipulate portions of your image while protecting others),
3. grouping (making folders to easily identify layers of similar use/content) and the add layers (ctrl+shift+N) and
4. delete layers icons.

First things first. Before manipulating any image we always duplicate the original picture, titled background, in the layers panel and hide it. That way, no matter what we do to the picture, we always have a "good copy" of the original in case of a "shop gone amuck".

There are a variety of ways of doing this. Look at the layers panel in the bottom right. The little icon that looks like a piece of paper next to the trash can is a new layers icon. By clicking and dragging our background layer over top of the new layers icon, we duplicate the layer. Alternatively, the shortcut is click on the background layer, and click Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D (and just hit enter). OR you can go up to the layers menu at top and choose duplicate layer there. After duplicating click the eyeball icon to the left of the layer to hide it. Work exclusively on the background copy layer and other layers, but DO NOT TOUCH THE BACKGROUND LAYER.

Newly opened

After duplicating background

Step 3 - Selections and masks

So we're ready to start manipulating.

We're going to zoom in (Z) or ALT+mousewheel and work on the wrinkles on our mom's eyes (notice zoomed in that the picture is blurry - not good!). Shortcuts are EXTREMELY valuable to learn since they are tied to productivity. Productivity, in turn, is tied to revenue. Faster work = more money.

Anyhow, the blurriness is because people move during even short exposures. Additionally - unless the camera is on a tripod the camera itself moves minutely during a shot. A way to fix that is to blast the person with light to the point where an extremely short exposure (think of it as a ridiculously short slice of time) eliminates virtually all movement effects of the camera and subject. We'll get into this when we get into lighting and shooting

Ideally we'd just reshoot our model until we had a razor-sharp image even at high resolution. But as a retoucher you don't often get what you want. So how to we go about fixing this? Well, we are going to try to deconstruct the shake. To do so we'll sharpen the picture using a Sharpen Filter. Filters are mathematical operations applied to whatever we select. Without selecting a set of pixels the filter just applies itself to the entire layer you have selected.

You say - so what?! We only see that zoomed in! Actually, while PS'ers work at 400-500% zoom most of the time, even when you zoom out, you'll notice a difference once we're finished.

Now - we ONLY want to increase the sharpness of our models and not the background. What we want to do is select our models and sharpen only them. We do this by creating a mask. This means we'll sharpen our girls, but not the background.

Duplicate your background copy layer AGAIN and call it sharpening (double click the existing layer name in the layers panel or right-click and choose rename). On this new sharpening layer we're going to select the girls and then make a quick-mask.

After duplicating the layer and renaming it

Masks are by default white and that means everything in the layer is affected. The way that masks work is that anything 'selected with black' will blocked out from the selected layer (think of it as being cut out w/ scissors). In the picture at left you can see roughly how a layer mask works. On a layer mask, whatever is painted black is made invisible w.r.t. changes imposed on that layer. Whatever is white is visible. In our case, what we are going to do is to choose the default

How layers work - white is "hit", black is "passthrough

colours of black for a foreground colour and white as a background colour. We want to sharpen everything EXCEPT the background. That means we have to select the pixels our models occupy.

In so many ways photoshop is exactly this. Picking what pixels to apply effects and/or changes to. We want to select our models and there are a dozen different ways of doing this. But photoshop is all about efficiency. How are we best to select our models? They're a complex set of pixels representing different colour shades and geometries.

Choose the following: QUICK SELECT TOOL (W) (in photoshop 2020+ they've hidden it behind object selection - just click and hold the tool until the menu opens up)

Now paint the girls - don't worry if it's perfect, you'll find most of our model's heads will be wonky.

The quick-select tool chooses pixels based on colour ranges and proximity to where you are painting. Very quickly, we can get the bulk of our models. THIS IS MEANT TO BE A FAST WAY OF SELECTING.

However, it doesn't do a perfect job. Notice the areas highlighted in red. These are complex areas where hair is thinly placed with background visible between strands or clumps of hair.

You should have something that looks like this (below). After clicking OK it looks like the picture below. Notice how most of the edge seems to have "marching ants" (the term used for the edge of the selection process), but it gets wonky in some places. We need to fix those up.

Now quickly we can fix up some areas where the selection doesn't work. Namely the head of the girl on the right, the valley between the mother and the girl on the left and bits of grey between the girl on the left's hair strands. To fix this use the lasso tool (L). Up at the top right we want to choose the modifier that allows us to ADD TO THE SELECTION. We get that by pressing (and holding) SHIFT.

That means anything we circle target will be Added to the selection - you'll see a + next to the lasso letting us know we'll be adding to the selection. Lasso works by dragging your cursor (with mousebutton held down) around an area. Anything in that area is now added to your selection. Drag little lassos around each selection error in the background. If you make a mistake, simply click and hold SHIFT and the + sign turns into a - sign and anything you circle will be removed from the selection. We can toggle between quick select brushes (W) and lasso tools (L) to quickly add/subtract pixels until we have something that looks roughly like this (below).

Right now the whole layer is 100% visible. We ONLY want the girls visible so we apply the sharpening only to this.To do this we need to create a mask form our selection. This way ONLY the girls will be chosen and the grey background will be blanked out for this layer. We get this by CLICKING ON THE ADD LAYER MASK BUTTON at the bottom of the layers panel.

If you did it right, the girls in the middle are in white and the background is black.

Step 4 - On to Sharpening

Now, on to sharpening. In the sharpness layer you are going to select your image layer which you should still have by default (not the mask....click on the picture thumbnail on the left) then choose Filters>Sharpen>SmartSharpen. Once you do this the dialogue box appears. This is an older version of the software above, but you'll get a dialogue that has the same options. Zoom way in on an eye. Under remove options notice you have gaussian blur (kind of a generalized blur), lens blur (if the photographer was moving the camera) or motion blur (if the models were moving). In this case we'll choose Gaussian blur which combines lens and motion (the camera was moving AND the models were moving in this case).

We want to move the sliders for amount and radius around until we are able to see definition (e.g. eyelashes in this case), but not so much that the model gets blotchy.

In this preview window, if you press the mouse down and hold/release it, you'll be able to preview the degree of sharpening compared to the original picture.

Once you're happy press OK.

Toggle the eyeball (visibility) ON and OFF on your sharpening layer and see if you like the result.

The result:

before

after

Step 5 - Opacity

If we find that the effect is too strong, we can simply reduce how much it is being applied to the final composite picture. That is easily done at the top right by adjusting the opacity of the layer (bring it down to about 75%). This is true for ANY contribution from ANY layer. Layer opacity is a powerful tool in our arsenal. That is especially true for more detailed adjustments we will do in future projects. There is also a Fill opacity which is also useful, but won't be addressed in this course.

Step 6 - Remove Blemishes

One of the backbones of retouching is what used to be called "airbrush work". While we no longer try to match skin colour tones and spray paint over top of pictures and then reshoot them to fix them, the fundamentals remain the same. We're going to remove a few blemishes from our model and decrease her visible age by about 10 years. We're going to do this with either the spot heal brush or the heal brush. Each work a little similarly, and a little differently. Spot Heal works by grabbing pixels from areas surrounding it and blending it in whereas Heal Brush works by having to have an area defined as a source (which you get by alt-clicking), then painting. Each has their own unique time/place in which they're used.

We're going to make a blemishes layer. Either press CTRL+SHIFT+N or click on the new layers icon at the bottom right of the layers panel. Rename this layer blemishes.

We will choose the spot-heal brush (J). We're going to then make sure our brush (which is shown at the top left of your screen as a hard circle) is about size 10 (slightly larger than the mole) and we're going to give it a soft edge (click on the brush circle at the top left and a dialogue will open. Like in the picture below. Under hardness slide that to about 70%. Most importantly, at the top of the screen ensure SAMPLE ALL LAYERS IS CLICKED ON. We're going to get rid of that mole to start with.

With that, go over to our model and click on the mole. Presto-magic, gone!

STEP 7 - Tint Eyes

m going to show you TWO ways of doing this.

First)

We want to select our mom's left eye for this next step. Simply using the circular marquee tool:

We need to click on the Layer we named SHARPNESS. Now just draw a circle around the pupil. Obviously, if I'm going to adjust anything I need to remove the eyelids from the selection. We do this by choosing our trusty Lasso friend (L). This allows us to drag a circle shape around objects. Now, with alt-held-down, (the " - " should be next to the lasso symbol), drag a path to include the top of the eyelid.

We want to make this adjustment on a new layer so we'll either go up to LAYER>NEW>LAYER VIA COPY or, because shortcut=profit, CTRL+J. Call it LEFT EYE.

Do the same steps again - click on the sharpness layer, select it, then CTRL+J and make a new layer via copy. Call this new layer RIGHT EYE.

We're now going to change the foreground colour. Click on the top box of the two (black/white) in the bottom left corner. The tooltip says FOREGROUND COLOUR. Click on it. You're going to enter the following HEX colour code #33800d. That colour code is actually broken into colour components red = 33 (out of a possible 256 or FF in hexadecimal counting), green = 80 and blue = 0d.

Hit ok.

We want to fill ONLY the eye in the layer - to make this work we need to hold down CNTRL and click JUST the thumbnail for the left eye. This will give us a "marching ants" selection of only the eye.

We can now fill this by pressing ALT+BACKSPACE (or edit>Fill or Shift +F5) to fill the ellipses with this colour.

Yes, this looks freaky and weird bright green. Don't worry, we're only going to use this colour to ENHANCE the natural colour of the mom's eyes, not to make her look like an alien. Do the same thing on the other Eye layer.

We now want to combine the two eye layers. To do so hold SHIFT down and click both left and right eye layers. Right click on either of the layers and from the dropdown menu choose MERGE LAYERS. Rename this simply to Mom's Eyes.

Now, mom's an alien at the moment. We need to fix it. To that extent - we're now going to examine BLEND MODES.

Blend modes can be found at the top left of the layers panel. By default each layer blend mode is set to 'NORMAL'. This simply means that each pixel in the Mom's Eyes layers are seen as the colour it is and has no direct interaction with other layers. Click through the various blend modes and play with their relative opacities. I chose a blend mode of MULTIPLY for her eye-colour and an opacity of the mom's eyes layer of 20%.

Problem is - notice the white reflection in the center of her eye - or the blackness of her pupil are tinted? This is not idea. This is why professionals generally use the second method.

Turn off visibility of the mom's eyes layer (click on the eyeball next to the layer). For all purposes it looks like you're back before you did the eye adjustment.

SECOND METHOD

We're going to choose a new way of adjusting eyes - ADJUSTMENT LAYERS. We're going to colour mom's eyes a different way (the way a professional would do it). Go to LAYER>NEW ADJUSTMENT LAYER>HUE/SATURATION.

Rename this new layer Mom's eyes 2.

We're going to click on the white thumbnail area (HEY LOOK IT'S A MASK AGAIN!) and paint everything black (the bracket should be around the white thumbnail as in the picture at right).

We will now choose the foreground colour as black, then press alt+backspace with the white thumbnail selected). The mask on Mom's Eyes 2 should now be black (see the picture below) Now we want to select just mom's eyes in this mask. We could paint them in with white, but the fastest way to do this is to steal the selection we already made in the original mom's eyes layer.

To do this hold down control and click on the thumbnail next to original mom's eyes layer. Notice that you get the shape of the two eyes selected for your? OK, now we want to use this selection, but on a different layer. Click on mom's eyes 2 layer again, and we're going to fill the selection with white. Ensure the foreground colour is white by pressing D, then hitting X to switch the white to the foreground. Now ALT+BACKSPACE on the mom's eyes 2 layer. You probably won't notice anything, but you've made 2 very tiny white patches in the mask thumbnail for mom's eyes 2.

As seen above, click on the HUE icon to open back up your hue/saturation panel. Choose the Hue (colour replacement) saturation (how "thick" the colour is applied) and lightness (how much white/black is in it) values you see in the panel. Choose a HUE of about +50 and a Saturation of about +2.

Drop the layer's overall opacity to 60%. Toggle the visibility of mom's eyes 2 and mom's eyes and see which one is preferred. Industry tends to use the HSL adjust for eye colour.

Repeat this HSL layer adjust step for each of the 2 kids. Choose different eye colours for each of them. You should have 3 HSL adjustment layers - one for mom, and one for each kid.

There are many other ways of tinting eyes, each with their own merit (for e.g. you can create a layer and simply paint a colour of choice over it then change the blend-mode to COLOR and the opacity to ~30% or 40%). The point is - minor changes are believable, major changes must be justified for the goal of the project (i.e. if you are doing an ad for a company and they want their model to stand out and it's for something futuristic, you could go with, say, purple eyes).

Step 8 - Curves and/or layer adjustment

Just before we're done, we're going to look at the dynamic colour range of our picture as a whole. On your toolbar at right, There's a rough mountain icon. Click on it - if it's not there go to the top menu under WINDOWS and choose HISTOGRAM Notice that there is a bunch of "mountain tops" spread out in the middle, but it drops off sharply and then there's nothing at the right?

This article describes the histogram and how to read it in depth. For our purposes, we're going to select LAYERS>ADJUSTMENT LAYER>LEVELS. We're going to click AUTO and rename the layer to LEVELS.

Step 9 - Cropping

Finally we'll crop down to our final shot The crop tool (seen in the picture at right), can be found in the middle of the pack on the standard toolbar. Alternately you can use the shortcut 'C'.

In the selection bar at the top choose 6 inches by 4 inches. Then you can drag the corners to frame the shot more nicely.

We will obey the rule of thirds and put our 2 kids heads' at focal points and and you have a pleasing composition.

Save the file as a PSD but also as a 150KB jpg. To do so:

LAST STEP

In Photoshop choose File>EXPORT>SAVE for WEB(legacy). Change the preset to JPG. Click on IMAGE SIZE Set the image quality to 60%. On the bottom left of the screen you'll see the image size. For example, if you choose JPEG compressing MAXIMUM, you'll find the file size is going to come out as about 1.5 MB in size. You can also change the SIZE of the picture (Width/Height) in pixels in order to target a smaller JPG. To do so you'll need to change the image size as a percentage down to around 70%. Keep adjusting until the filesize is 150KB.

the student will submit into their handin folder the result from doing the family tutorial above as a 300KB jpg AND the photoshop editing file (PSD)

WHAT IS A JPG? OR A PNG?

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