Hi, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today we're going to do a little color
correction and also smoothing to a photograph.
And the reason you might want to do this, a lot of times with, say, acne or something
like that, you can fix this with lighting.
I downloaded this photo from pixels.
And you can get the link in the description if you want to practice with this photo.
But sometimes, just based on the lighting, it's gonna catch certain parts of the face
in an unflattering way.
You can do a lot of fixing of this in Photoshop and I want to show you kind of some ways of
fixing some of the reddish color that's on this guy's face.
And also maybe just minimizing some of the acne that he has.
I don't think it makes sense to get rid of it completely.
You don't want to go too far and have someone be completely different.
You want to still maintain the look of their face and everything, but you want to edit
the face so that it turns out as if it would if, you know, the lighting were just a little
brighter.
And it would have blown out some of those areas.
Let's go ahead and copy this layer, we can just pull this down to the New Layer icon.
I've got two copies of the photo now and now, hit CMD I to invert that layer.
You can also go up to Image > Adjustments > Invert right here.
Now I realize it looks a little crazy, but we're going to keep going.
Let's go ahead and change this normal setting here to Vivid Light.
This is still looking pretty weird.
So let's go ahead and go to Filter > Other > High Pass.
And now we can see a little bit more of what's going on.
I want this part to be smooth enough so that it will look better, but not too smooth.
So I'm going to leave it right at about 9.1 and say OK,
and then we'll go to Filter > Gaussian Blur,
and usually do about half of what that last setting was.
So it was 9.1, so we'll put it 4.5 here and say OK.
Now let's do OPT and click the Layer Mask button.
And now we can paint on this layer.
So let's zoom in pretty close with the Z tool.
And now I'm going to get a brush.
I'm gonna hit B for the brush tool.
We want the size to be right about this big and the hardness to be zero.
So not hard at all, a very soft brush.
Make sure white is your fill color, but we can paint on with the brush that smoothness,
and we can also minimize some parts that we don't want to stand out as much.
So I'm going to paint over here and kind of just smooth out some of the cheek things,
right here beside the nose, and anywhere you don't want shine to be also, this will help
to fix it.
Maybe some of these down here.
I know it might be a little hard to see where my mouse is.
We'll get that.
You can also hold down CTRL and ALT to resize your mouse and resize the hardness.
I'm just going to kind of get a lot of these little spots out and then we'll switch over
to removing the redness.
Okay, so I think this is pretty good.
If we turn this layer off, we can see the change.
It's really subtle, but I think it does improve the look a little bit.
Okay, now to remove the redness, create a new layer.
And then we'll change the Blending Mode to Color that's right down here at the bottom.
And then we can grab a brush with 100% opacity, but a 10% flow.
So I'm going to hit B to get the brush tool.
And we'll do normal brush here.
We'll do 100% opacity and a 10% flow
and now click OPT to get a skin color that you like that's nearby the red.
So I'm going to hit OPT and sample this right here.
And now I can paint over the redness and we'll see how that looks.
It looks like it's turning it a little bit gray.
Maybe we won't do that color - I'm going to Undo.
Let's do this yellowish over here.
And we'll paint over now.
Okay, and this is a little more what I'm looking for.
Over here, we'll choose this yellowish here and that gives us a little more of an orange
look instead of the red.
And I'll choose this color up here.
It does sometimes want to go gray on you, so you have to be careful about that.
But I think it does a pretty good job of reducing the red without losing a skin tone color.
Another thing is is really good for is if he is wearing, say, like a green shirt, and
you're wanting to change the color of the green shirt to yellow, you'll still have a
green cast on his skin and you can do the same trick to help change that to more of
a skin tone.
Okay, so let's take a look at what we've got.
Now, I'm going to turn off these two layers and you can see what we started with and what
we finished with.
Now, you do have to be careful getting it a little too smooth, I probably went a little
overboard on the numbers that I did with my background copy here.
So be careful about that.
You don't want it to look obviously photoshopped.
So go ahead and play around with this until you get it right, but you can always knock
down the opacity of this layer too, to bring back some of the stuff from the background
layer...if it is too overwhelming.
Let me know in the comment section if you have any tricks yourself about removing color
cast or smoothing skin – I would love to hear them.
Thank you and I'll see you next week for another video!!!