Look at the bottom right - 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:

1. 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'.

2. 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).

3. Other features include the visibility (the eye) of the layer (when turned off, you can't see the layer),

4. the locks (should you want to protect the content of the layer) and the fill - which won't be discussed in this course.

5. 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.

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.

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 

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.