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Adobe Photoshop CC - Advanced Training

How to retouch in Photoshop using face aware in Liquify

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, this video is all about using Liquify to retouch. Specifically using Photoshop's kind of facial recognition. Just when you thought this man couldn't get any more handsome, 5-head, forehead. More manly chin? Just drag it out. Everyone looks cuter with bigger eyes. Ah, look at me. We're going to go from smirk to, ah, approachable smiley man, lips as well, definitely bigger lips. It is that easy, let's look how to do it in Photoshop. 


To get started let's go to '10 Retouching', open up 'Liquify - Face Aware 1' and '2'. We're going to start with this handsome devil. We're going to use 'Filter', and we're going to use 'Liquify', but we're going to be professionals. So we are going to right click background, and say, you are a Smart Object first, so we can turn it on and off. Good to compare our adjustments, and later on we just tear it off if we go too far. We are going to go so far in this one. Because it's me, I'm allowed to distort my face as much as I like. You are too, I give you full permission. 


Now if you open it up, it sometimes jumps to Face Detect. Anyway, if it doesn't, go from our Forward Warp, down to this little guy here, 'Face Tool'. And somehow magically, every time I open an image with the face in it, it seems to just know where the eyes are, the nose are. Like face recognition is pretty amazing, where it's just built into Photoshop. So cool. 


So you've got two ways of distorting faces, or adjusting. You can do it generically over here. There's this little drop down here, it says Face Aware Liquify, or you can do it actually on the actual artwork. Let's do the generic stuff, and you can-- let's do eyes first. Let's make sure that-- we don't have to, but let's link them together, so that when we adjust one side they both come along. It could be really handy when there's just this like weird perspective. You know that the person's eyes are the same size, but just the angle of the face. The bend and the lens just makes it look a bit weird, so you could come in here, break the link, and just move one, bigger than the other, make the other one smaller. Looking good, Dan. 


Now you can just work your way through these, right? So I'm just going to link all of these because it's just-- it's experimenting. You can stretch the height of the eyes, and the width, separately from just the overall size. You can tilt them. Let's say I want to tilt this guy down a little bit, just need to kind of rotate him around. Can you see? Wiggle, wiggle. Zoom in a bit more. Distance between the eyes, if you wish your eyes are just that little bit further apart or a little bit closer, there's a slider for that. So nose, mouth, they're all adjustable, but what you can do is, with this tool selected you can actually do it on the artwork. You can decide all of these little dots have a different kind of adjustment. So you're looking for the little white dots, so nose height, nose width. One of my favorites, the lips, I can just-- here you go, Dan. Look at that. Didn't quite grab my bottom lip. Looks like I've been punched. Really depends on how much of the lip you can see. 


So if you can't do it here you might go in and actually go to the Bloat Tool. I'm going to pick a Brush size. And I'm going to just kind of express my lips manually. There we go. Now if we go back to face recognition, it's probably going to pick up that lip a lot better. These ones are cool, you can give yourself a smile. It's weird doing it to yourself. I'm smiling, he's smiling. This photo, I was going for like cool, serious Photoshop trainer. Now, fun approachable Photoshop trainer. It's pretty amazing how it locks in all the different muscles. For me, what I really want is I want a nice big chin. Here you go. Look at it, manly. Now I can just keep going and adjusting, you get the idea, right? 


So face recognition, pretty amazing, you can adjust them globally over here, or just on the art, just work a way around and decide what you want to do. The other one to mention is, and probably for me the most, it's my forehead. I've been told I have a 5-head, mainly by my little brother. So I can reduce that a little bit. I need to Photoshop, and maybe a fringe. My fringe, about halfway down the back of my head now. Anyway if you go too far you can click 'Reset'. Let's click 'OK'. But because we did it on its own Smart Folder we can turn it off. 


The only other thing really to share with you, is that you can do it for groups of photos, which is pretty amazing. When I say groups of photos I mean groups of people in photos. Somehow facial recognition works for lots of people. Same tool; I should have made it a Smart Object first, but what you can do, up over here, you can select the different faces, you can see, face-- it's just left to right, one, two, three, four. So I can pick the fifth person and say, "You my friend, need big eyes." "You my friend, need to smile more." There we go, everybody. He's smiling, he's kind of smiling, she's not smiling enough, come on. Let's go. 


One thing I'll do before we go is that, say when I'm retouching, often, kind of main trick is to make the eyes a little bigger. You don't want to go too far, so we went quite far in this tutorial, we just yank them up because it's funny, but when you're doing serious retouching it's all about the subtleties. People look happier, healthier, prettier when their eyes are just bigger. So I'm going to lock these two together, we're just going to make this guy's eyes. So you end up doing like these tiny subtle adjustments. What you're looking for is this. Remember Puss and Boots? People look cuter when their eyes are bigger, especially when their pupils are bigger. What we used to do is just grab the 'Bloat Tool'. Couple of clicks, gone a bit far, but you get the idea. Did a lot of work for us. 


When we were a company they did a lot of men's bathing suits. And what the Art Director wanted was, he wanted guys, but he want them quite feminine, so we ended up messing in with the cheekbones, kind of messing with the face to kind of give them a bit more feminine features. Rather than the one we did with me, where we give ourselves a nice big thick jawline. If you ever use Liquify to do this before it was really hard. To do it naturally, now we've just got sliders. I can't believe how good it is. And the trick for us as Photoshop users is how subtle we need to be, especially if you're doing work for say models, kind of portrait pictures, you don't want your kind of finished product not to look like the person. Especially messing with the eyes, distance of eyes, those types of things. You can end up changing a person that just doesn't look like that person anymore, it's only subtle little adjustments. You don't want them walking into an interview, and people not recognizing them. "Hey, this is not in your head shots." But lowering your 5-head down to a forehead, I'm okay with that. Let's go here, he's got a head on, so it still kind of works, it's pretty amazing. We're going to click 'OK', undo, undo. Much more handsome this man is. 
All right my friends, that is Liquify using facial recognition. Let's get into the next video where I set a pretty exciting class project.