Photoshop Tutorial #8: Photo Retouching for Beginners

There are five simple techniques that are critical to Photoshop use for personal pictures. Ladies, this is an anti-aging, beautifying tutorial for all of your favorite photos. With these techniques you are sure to end up with a movie-star quality to each photo.

1. Freckle-free recipe

This technique will erase any flaw in the skin. Even if you’ve never used Photoshop before, this technique is hard to mess up. Everywhere you see a freckle or mole that you wish to remove from the picture, take the Spot Healing brush, enlarge it larger than the spot, and click on the spot you are removing. This will remove the spots altogether leaving smooth and perfect skin.

2. Focus on the eyes

As the eyes are most peoples’ best asset, these are the main features of the face that are focused on. This technique will bring those gorgeous blues or browns or even greens right out of the picture. To create an affect that beautifies them further, start with a new layer. Duplicate the background layer and use the “Soft Light” blending mode. Follow these steps exactly: click layer, then layer mask, and hide all. On the layer mask, use the White brush to paint the inside of the eyes. This will create an effect that the eyes are brighter and more amazing.

3. Get that baby soft skin look

To get the look of flawless skin, this technique is very handy. Using the surface blur tool will be the best method for this technique. Duplicating the original background, use the following specs for the surface blur tool:

  • Radius: 5 pixels
  • Threshold: 10 pixels
  • Opacity: about 70%

The end result should be a more delicate and smoother look to the skin. /p>

4. No collagen needed

To get the look of plumber more delicious lips, you will first need to select the Lasso tool. Using the Lasso tool, roughly outline the lips to create a selection. Use Ctrl+J to make 2 different duplicates of the selected area. On the first copy, you will blend using “Multiply” and 100% opacity. On the second copy, blend the first copy with “Linear light” and 55% opacity. The end result should be lips that look more plump and gorgeous. Using the soft round eraser, go around the lips softly erasing the edges to give it a more natural look. With a new layer use the soft round brush and the color White to add a little light to the bottom lip, sort of like an application of lip gloss.

5. No-dye highlights

To give your hair a luminous look, you can use a quick little highlighting technique. First create a Curves Adjustment layer. On this layer, you want to use the following specs:

  • Curves: Strong Contrast
  • Output: 50
  • Input: 77

Next, click layer, then layer mask and make a mask of the hair. The end result should be a black layer with a glowing wig in it (this is how it will look). Adding the layer will add the glow to the hair only leaving you with a beautiful picture.