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Adobe Photoshop CC - Essentials Training

How to retouch skin in Adobe Photoshop CC

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, we're back. It is time to do some retouching skin. You can see this gentleman here, we can remove some of the spots and marks. We're going to jump to this other example where we use the exact same tool for kind of tidying up maybe older photographs. We're going to use the Spot Healing Brush. Basically it's really useful for removing any small parts of a large image. Much the same way we did with Content Aware Fill earlier on, but this time it's a paint brush, great for small details. Let's jump in now. 
Let's open up our file, let's go to 'File', 'Open'. In your '09 Retouching File' we're going to open up 'Spot Healing 01' and '02'. Click 'Open'. We're going to start with doing kind of more traditional retouching with skin. Then look at how we can use it for really kind of anything you want to remove. As long as they're small parts of a larger object this tool works really good. The tool in question is this one here, it's called the Spot Healing Brush. Looks like a little band-aid. If you've been following along, yours is probably still set to Red Eye from the last tutorial. Click, holding down, and grab this top one here, 'Spot Healing Brush'. Make sure it's set to 'Content Aware', it probably is. If yours doesn't say Content Aware, there's no option up there, it's probably just a really early version of Photoshop you're using. Unfortunately it's not going to work, it's going to work, but not as well. 
We need a brush size and hardness. Let's go for the hardness down to '0', so it's nice and fluffy. And in this particular video, probably about 50, yes, about 50. I'm going to zoom in a little bit and all we do is, let's find this little mark here. Click, hold, and paint over it with black. Let go of your mouse, and then magic happens. It's such an easy tool to use. Click and hold, drag. This one here just needs to click once over the top of it, let go. It's pretty magic. It's a little mark, blemish up here. Gone, and that my friends is the Spot Healing Brush. 
Now let's take it a little bit more advanced, just a little weensy bit. Let's jump to 'Spot Healing Brush 02'. Yours is not going to have Resample Layers checked on. I left mine on from when I was playing, because this image right here, we've kind of changed forever, right? We didn't use any sort of Smart Object, or anything fancy. And it's kind of gone forever. Those little marks. So what we're going to do, before we get started with the Spot Healing Brush, is we're going to do a little trick. So over here in your Layers Panel we're going to click on this new layer here. We're going to double click the word 'Layer 01' we're going to call it 'Retouch'. But this layer is selected, and this thing here, it says, 'Sample all Layers', it does a clever thing, where it reaches through to the layer underneath but paints on to the layer that we have selected. 
What I mean by this is, let's say we're going to remove some of these dust and scratches. We could be at this forever for this one. It's quite wrecked this image. Watch this, if I click and drag across this image, see it cleaned it up. And I click across there. Lots of clicking I'm going to be doing for this video, in this image. I can drag them across these little guys, I might use a bigger brush. So we're going to work our way around this image forever. Tidy it up. But the cool thing about it though is that say we get to a point where we're like, maybe you've gone a bit too far, you do end up in kind of retouching land, and just keep going into this thing, looks absolutely fake. 
What you can do though is, you can-- because it's on its own layer let's turn off the eyeball on the background layer to see what can you see, it's just stuck that stuff over the top on this retouch layer. So it means that with the 'Retouch Layer' selected I can lower the opacity. Bring back some of that realness that was originally there. It works really good when we've got this particular image. I'm going to redo things in super fast editing mode. See you in a sec. 
All right, we're back. Basically I just kind of kept retouching, and it's kind of funny when you're retouching, you're like, “Just get rid of this kind of main stuff,” and then you're like "Oh, there's another level of main stuff," and then you get rid of that, and you're like "Just getting rid of this last chunk." And before you realize that you've kind of removed any personality off the image and also you end up kind of looking like a-- looks kind of plastic. 
You can start to see, especially some of the stuff I did over the nose to remove some of the dark pores, it's gone looking a little weird. So, in this case exactly like we did in the last one, it's on its own layer which is quite cool, but it means that, let's say that it's-- I want to kind of lower my work a little bit. So with this Layer selected, the Opacity, just trigger back a little bit. Can you see, doesn't have to be all the way back, just enough to kind of maybe bring back some of that realism. That is going to be it for the Spot Healing Brush. This is the workhorse for retouching. Especially for kind of skin and blemishes, spot, Acne. Kind of removed a few of these straight hairs as well. All right, let's jump into the next video.