Portrait Retouching Techniques

Portrait Retouching Techniques

by William Lulow

I have gotten better at retouching my portraits over the years, and with the improvements to Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Creative, it has actually become much easier than ever before. In the days of film, it took a lot more practice and different kinds of materials to effect a good retouching job. The digital process has made it a bit simpler but it still calls for some expert technique and a lot of practice. One of the things I learned from a retouching class I took in San Francisco many years ago, given by an expert in the field then, was to build up tone gradually in areas retouched on a print. That meant starting with small brushes and switching to larger ones as you got more done. When I do my retouching today, I always keep this basic rule in mind. Rarely can you complete a retouching job with one pass with the HEALING BRUSH, CLONE STAMP or REGULAR BRUSH. You often have to change sizes as you try to cover a larger are, making sure you have the right tones all the way through and the right brushes. Sometimes you have to start with the regular brush for tone and then add texture to it with the healing brush.

With all of this said, I will explain how I did the retouching on this portrait:

I knew I was going to have to do some major retouching when I saw my subject with a bandage on his head. The portrait was for his wife’s 80th birthday party and even though she is a beautiful woman, I also knew that I would have to smooth some of her facial lines a bit in order to make an image that they both liked.

The very first step is to make a DUPLICATE LAYER so that I can revert to the original any time I make a mistake or want to change something. I will then make a separate layer for the man and one for the woman. You can always undo your retouching, but you don’t always want to go back to the very beginning (but I do it sometimes to get a completely fresh look at the image). Layers help because you can always just delete one and pick up where you left off.

I started with getting rid of the bandage. I selected it using my QUICK SELECT tool and then deleted it using the CONTENT AWARE tool as well. This got rid of the bandage but left a line around where the tool selected it. As you can see, it also selected part of the man’s hair line. I proceeded to use a small HEALING BRUSH to blend the skin tone and texture in with the rest of the skin on his forehead. Once that looked good I then had to reconstruct the hair line. I switched to the CLONE STAMP and selected first a small section of the hair just above where the bandage ended. I gradually built up that tone. The CLONE STAMP selects and COPIES pixels from as large an area as you select with its brush size. So, again, beginning with a small size, I gradually built up enough pixels to reconstruct the hairline where the bandage covered it. When the tone was there with the lines of hair as well, I switched to the HEALING BRUSH to smooth out the overlaps from the CLONE STAMP. So, the CLONE STAMP selects an area of pixels and copies it exactly where you deposit them. The HEALING BRUSH selects an area of pixels depending on the size you choose and creates a kind of path for them when you place them on a selected area. It picks up the color and texture of what is chosen. You can select an area by holding down the ALT-key, letting it up and painting a kind of swath with the brush. When I was satisfied that I had reconstructed his hairline, I switched to the woman.

Now with older women, you don’t always want to take away every single line, but you do want to minimize their effect if you can. So I again started with a small HEALING BRUSH to pick up the COLOR & TEXTURE of a small number of pixels and began softening up her facial lines. I usually begin with the area under the eyes and then pick up other lines after that. I also smooth out any lines caused by blood vessels in the forehead. (She had a couple here).

When I think I have softened just the right number of lines, I then reduce the size of the image to that which I will print, usually 8×10 inches. If it all looks pretty natural, I feel that I have done as much as I should.

Here’s the final version:

You can see that everything looks fairly smooth. I haven’t retouched all her lines, but left a few. When doing a job like this you don’t want the person to look way younger than they are, just cleaned up and smoothed out a bit. I also smoothed out her neck a bit. You can also see how natural the man’s hairline looks after taking out the bandage.

So, the main takeaway for retouching portraits is to do a little at a time, in layers and then combine the layers in the final version saving it as a separate file. That way, if something needs to be changed afterwards, you can pick up where you left off.