How to Retouch Photos

Posted on September 9th, 2009 by Carmelia

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Anyone who’s uploaded their photo on a social networking site such as Facebook of Myspace is guilty of retouching their photo at least once. Look your best by using a little cheat method and retouch your photos.

Remove Blemishes

Blemishes and oily spots on the face are usually the number one problems when it comes to photos. You can remove spots, wrinkles and oily patches of skin using the Healing tool on Adobe Photoshop. Here’s how.

Open your photo file in Photoshop.
Right-click on the base layer of your picture and choose Duplicate Layer.
Double-click on the new duplicate layer and rename it healing.
Select the Healing Tool on the toolbar. Essentially, what the Healing Tool does is to clone (like what the Cloning tool does) and sample the color of another area. It can then blend the chosen select area to another.
Select the target area that you want to copy over the blemished area. Basically, if you have a zit, you copy a zit-less patch of skin. Choose the target area by pressing the Alt key and dragging your mouse. There will be a crosshair cursor. Click that on the unblemished area.
Press the Alt key again and aim the crosshair on the pimple. Voila, the blemish has disappeared. If you are dealing with a larger patch of problem area, keep clicking until the whole area is fixed.
If you made a mistake, undo it by pressing Ctrl + Z.
Keep in mind that if you’re healing a patch of skin on your cheek, you must use another part of unblemished skin on the same side of the cheek. If you’re healing a part of your forehead, use another part of your forehead.
If you think the healing is a little too much and you’re starting to look a little too plastic, click on the Healing layer and lower the opacity to around 80%. This will help the layer blend better with your skin.

Removing Red Eye

You don’t have to get rid of a perfectly good picture because of the red eye effect pictures sometimes have. Here’s how to remove the red eye from your pictures.

Open your picture in Photoshop and zoom in your eyes.
Click on the Color Replacement tool in your Toolbar.
Choose a small brush size.
When it comes to Limits, select discontinuous to replace the target color, aka the red.
Drag the tolerance slider to around 70%. This is not a fixed number, as you may need to adjust it more or less to fit in the alteration organically with the rest of the picture.
Choose the color that you will use to replace the red, ideally the original eye color of the subject.
Click on the color you want to replace in the picture. Drag the brush over to remove the red. Increase the tolerance level if this doesn’t work initially.
Zoom out to see if there are any improvements.

Whiten Teeth

Forgot to brush your teeth on the day of the party? Here’s how you can make your teeth look whiter.

Open the image and zoom in to your teeth.
Select the Dodge tool from the toolbar.
Click Options and go to Palette. Select the midtones, setting the exposure to around 20%. Again, you may need to adjust it to make it look more organic to the rest of the picture.
Choose a small brush with soft edges, resizing it to be smaller than the area to be retouched.
Start retouching your teeth using the Dodge tool.
Zoom out and see the result.