In this video, I'm going to show you the best way
to remove wrinkles, blemishes, and other distractions in Photoshop.
Hi, welcome back to the Photoshop Training Channel!
I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this video I'm gonna show you several different techniques
that you must know to remove wrinkles,
blemishes, and other distractions in Photoshop.
We're going to use the Spot Healing Brush tool and I'm going to teach you how you can
use the different modes
so that you get the results that you want.
You probably have not even noticed them before.
I'm also going to show you
a very useful technique that you can use
so that the hard to seen blemishes in the skin
become more noticeable. So, that you can remove them.
Just like every other PTC tutorial, this video will be filled with tips and tricks.
Okay, let's get started.
We're going to work with this document, it contains this portrait and we're going to
use the Spot Healing Brush tool to remove wrinkles and other distractions from his face.
I'm going to zoom in to the side of his face
and as you can see he has wrinkles on the side of his eye.
We can use the spot healing brush tool to minimize the wrinkles on the side of his face.
And by the way, in this tutorial I'm going to push things to the extreme but when you're
re-touching try to keep adjustments to a minimum.
Subtle effects work best.
In my opinion, it's not good to completely remove wrinkles or other characteristics of the face.
It's always best to just minimize them instead of removing them but that's just my opinion,
but anyway we have the spot healing brush tool selected.
Also, make sure that in the options bar you select "Sample All Layers" so that we can create
a new layer, a blank layer, and generate new pixels
when we paint with the Spot Healing Brush Tool.
See that how we generated new pixels?
And the reason that we're doing that is so that we can work non-destructively
and always come back to the original photo if we need to.
But anyway, I'm going to create a new blank layer
and when you have the spot healing brush tool selected
you can use the bracket keys on the keyboard
to increase or decrease the size of your brush.
I'm tapping on the left bracket key now to reduce the size of my brush, then I can paint
away the distracting element.
Now I want to increase the size of the brush and show you why this is not the way I prefer working.
So, I'm going to paint and you'll notice that it does remove the wrinkles but Photoshop
also adds extra detail onto those areas.
That is because I'm using content aware, and content aware looks at surrounding pixels
from the areas that I painted on and it uses those pixels to generate the new pixels, so
it generated skin texture on those areas where it really doesn't work.
So, I know that some of you may be thinking, "Well, you used one giant brush stroke and
that's why it generated those pixels."
A good way to work is to reduce the size of your brush and do small brush strokes, and
that's right, that would certainly work and do a much better job.
But in some cases you're still going to run into that same problem when you generate pixels
that don't necessarily work or you'll get a very smooth skin texture like we have here
and it really doesn't work.
So in my opinion the best thing to do is to create a new layer.
Select the spot healing brush tool, make sure that you have content aware selected and sample
all layers, then think of your blemish.
Is it darker or brighter than the skin tone?
In this case, my distracting element, the wrinkle, is darker than the skin tone
so I want to lighten that.
So I'll go down into the mode dropdown and select lighten.
If the blemish was lighter than the skin tone, then I would darken it.
In this case, I'm just going to select lighten so with lighten selected I'm just gonna paint
away those wrinkles.
And notice one thing, that I can't really paint away the bright area.
So, for example, if I come under the eye here and paint I'm removing the darker pixels but
I don't really remove the bright pixels which give definition to the skin texture.
So, I think it'll be more clear if I hold the space bar, click and drag to pan and paint
away this wrinkle here.
Notice how I still have the highlight of the wrinkle but not the dark areas of the wrinkle,
and that's because I'm targeting the darker pixels and, just like everything else, when
you have more control you get better results.
So, I can now, then we'll click on the hand tool to fit the image to the screen and I
can see the before and the after.
As I said before, I like subtle effects so usually what I like to do is just bring down
the opacity to zero so that brings the wrinkles all the way back to their original state and
increase the opacity until you find a happy medium.
So something like that, before and after.
And to show you why I like this technique much better, I'm going to go into this document here.
We have this older gentleman and if I zoom into his forehead you can see that he has
these fine white hairs on his forehead and there's also blemishes.
So if I create a new layer, select the spot healing brush tool, make sure that sample
all layers is checked.
In content the word is selected.
I can look at my blemish, is it brighter or darker than the skin tone?
In this case it's darker so I want to lighten it so when I start painting away those blemishes,
watch what happens to the fine hairs on his forehead.
I'm not really affecting those fine hairs because I'm targeting the darker pixels on his forehead.
So, it might not be that noticeable now but when I double click on the hand tool in disable
this layer you can see how I was able to remove those blemishes
without affecting the important detail on his forehead.
I can even remove this blemish there and not really affect the detail of the hair, and
that's because I'm only targeting the darker pixels.
You can also see that here when I remove this blemish, that I remove the actual blemish
but the dead skin around it stays there because those pixels are brighter and that's what
these adjustments do.
They target dark pixels or bright pixels, you just have to decide if you want to target
the dark pixels or bright pixels depending on your portrait.
What I'm gonna do now is show you a technique that brings out the difficult to see blemishes in the face.
So, we're work again with this portrait and it has already been re-touched
so, the portrait is actually pretty good.
But even then
there are some difficult to see blemishes that I'm gonna show you how to bring out.
So I'm going to create a black and white adjustment layer,
then I'm going to reduce the reds and
increase the yellows so that we can better see the skin tone.
And you may have to fine tune this a little bit in your photos until you can actually see the skin.
And the reason I adjusted the reds and yellows is because that's where skin tones are found
in all skin tones, no matter the ethnicity.
So I'm going to zoom in into this area here and you can actually see some of these blemishes
that are coming out in the skin.
You can see that they're barely noticeable or not noticeable at all without the adjustment layer.
But if I enable this adjustment layer you can see it there.
So I can fix it by clicking on the portrait layer, creating a new layer, selecting the
spot healing brush tool, and just like before look at the blemish or distraction.
It's darker than the skin tone so that means we want to lighten it so select lighten, then
I can reduce the size of my brush by tapping on the left bracket on the key on the keyboard
and I can start painting away those blemishes like so.
And there's some here on the nose, and I'm not gonna do all of them but I'll do just
enough so that there's a difference when I do the before and after.
And I think that should be enough so I'm going to disable the black and white adjustment layer.
So that's before and after.
So notice that originally these blemishes were really, really hard to see, and we were
able to remove them fairly easily by having a black and white adjustment layer and reducing
the reds and increasing the yellows so they can really see the skin tone.
Again, in your image you may have to fine tune these a little bit differently so that
you can actually see the skin but the blemishes who stick out, at some point.
Before and after.
And let me know in the comments if you knew this black and white adjustment layer technique
to bring out difficult to see blemishes.
And by the way, when you're working with Photoshop and you're working with any tool,
I recommend looking at the options bar and the fly out menu
because usually that's where Adobe hides the good stuff.
For example, you might remember a tutorial I just did a few weeks ago where I showed
you how to auto white balance a photo by using a hidden algorithm.
That is another very useful technique that is hidden just like the modes
in the spot healing brush tool.
And I'll post a link to that video down below in case you're interested.
Also, talking about videos that I recently have made, I just did a tutorial on how to
whiten eyes that I think is really good and that I recommend.
I'll also post a link to that video right below in the description.
And I have one question for you.
Please let me know in the comments which one was the first PTC video that you ever watched.
You can put the title if you remember it or describe it I'm really curious to know what
video lead you to start following the Photoshop Training Channel.
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Thank you so much for watching and I will talk to you again very soon.