#digitalpassion

A lot of retouching knowledge is available for free on the internet. The core question is often what to use when during your retouching process. That’s why today we want to not only give you the links to some of our favourite tutorials, but most of all an insight into our process when retouching portraits. 

The first thing we do is set the colours in Lightroom. The fine tuning will be done in Photoshop (PS), but we already chose a mood and the crop of the image. Great tools to do so are to create digital copies (right click on image thumbnail in library and select “create digital copy”). Here you can set various styles and compare them. There is no right or wrong here. Also, don’t worry to much about the skin colour, you can mask this out in PS later. Even when most of the retouching takes place in PS, Lightroom is an incredible tool to fast up your selection process. If you are interested in more information about Lightroom, just let us know!

Once this is done we open the file with PS. The first step is always to create a copy of your background layer. This way you always can go back to zero in case you get completely unsatisfied with your retouching and you can easily compare the before and after to make sure you actually enhanced your image. Using the patch tool we always clean up some major issues straight away. These include dirt or irregularities in the background and skin issues, such as big pimples or similar issues. Keep your eyes open for “visual noise”, meaning details that distract the viewer from what you actually want him to focus on.

Now comes the beauty retouching part. After you tackled the obvious distractions, now is the time to go into fine tuning.  We first start with the eyes. Zoom in and clean the eyes by getting rid of big blood vessels and smudged makeup. To attract more attention to the eyes, select curves adjustment layer and push the curve up a little in the mid tone part. Turn the layer mask black and now slightly paint in with white on the lower part of the eye. The lashes naturally cast a shadow on the upper part of the eye. Painting white there will make the eye look unnatural, so pay attention to where light already is brighter and enhance those parts of the eye. Now we create an levels adjustment layer and push the right ruler to the left. Only focus on the iris - you want to enhance the structure of the iris and make the bright parts shine even more. Again, invert your layer mask to black and carefully paint in with white. If you have an highlight in eye, enhance the highlight and the opposite to it laying part of the iris. Again, you will want to stay away from the part directly underneath the lashes. The great part about adjustment layers is that you can adjust them later and set the opacity at any time. For more ideas on how to retouch eyes we highly recommend this tutorial from Phlearn. Every person has dark circles around the eyes and tackling those with the healing or stamp tool can be quite frustrating, since the skin structure underneath those areas is really different. You can fix this by using a curves adjustment layer. This technique is easy to use and looks great. Check this tutorial for a detailed instruction. Create a curves adjustment layer, select the adjustment icon (by default the selection is on the layer mask). Now double click on the top pipette and select the colour you want to paint in. This should be a colour from the cheeks. Press okay and “No” when asked if you want to make this your default. Now click on the area in the photo that you want to substitute. It will affect the entire image for now, but don’t worry about this. You might need to try around a little until it looks good. Invert your layer mask and paint the area you need back in. We usually select a flow of one percent. To make sure everything looks smooth we also run a Gaussian blur on the layer mask to even everything out.