It's the perfect photo right? Weeeell, almost. There's just that nick, wrinkle, scar, or spot that needs a little touch up. So in order to erase that flaw, lack of sleep, or shadow we have some wonderful tools in Photoshop.
We will be using the:
1. Spot healing Brush
2. Patch Tool
Quick Tip: If you want to scroll through each tool set quickly and easily hold down Shift as you press the shortcut button, which in this cases is J. Try it. Shift+J. And again. It switches out the tools in that fly out menu quick and easy.
We will start with the Spot Healing Brush, but also notice where the Patch Tool is. You will find both in the options bar on the left. So open your photograph and let's get started!
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| I will be using my handsome Hubby (with his permission :) as my subject. We took some pictures a few weeks ago and my poor Honey was kinda tired, so we are gonna work on removing those circles and any other small spots we need to. |
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The first thing I want you to do before you edit is make a copy of your background layer. Try to make a habit out of this if you are directly editing your photo that way you always have that original to fall back on. So with your background layer selected hit Ctrl+J - this will create the duplicate layer. You can also drag it over the layer icon in your layers palette to create a copy. Now we're set. Grab your Spot Healing Brush by pressing the shortcut button J or click on it with your mouse. Now this is a SPOT brush, so don't drag it all over the place, we have other tools for that, this one is for specific spot fixes. Adjust your brush size to just larger than the size of your spot, and then find that mole, zit, or whatever and simply click on it. It will be gone. It's like magic zit-b-gone! What this tool does is grab information from the area around it and "camouflages" the spot. Awesome huh? |
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| Now onto even awesomer things - the Patch tool. You should be able to click Shift+J twice and that will now be your current tool (if you're following along with me). With this tool I will be removing the under eye circles. 1. This brush works similar to the lasso tool - so first you will need to kind of draw with it around the area that you want camouflaged. Be careful not to get too close to the eye. Here's what the first circled circle looks like: |
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| 2. Now loom over the circled area and you will see your tool looks slightly different. Click, hold down, and drag. Drag around the face and you will see that that whatever area you drag over replaces your selection. The Patch tool takes the information and skin from wherever you drag to and places it into the trouble area. So you can drag the "replacement" around until you find the area that works the best. This tool does an amazing job of making it look natural. |
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3. Release, and let the Patch tool do the rest.
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| This is what mine looked like after the first run. I wanted to perfect it more so used the Patch tool again, then used the Spot Healing Brush to finish things off, and below is the result: |
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Pretty perfect huh? Actually too perfect, but we'll take care of that. So I corrected the other eye, and then in order to make it look more natural - as nobody has NO under eye circles I slid the opacity of my correction layer (you know the background layer we copied at the beginning that we've been correcting on?) down to 72%. |
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| And the before and after: |
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Pretty dandy tricks huh? Of course, I think my Baby looks great either way, but the second version makes him look a little more bright eyed. So go and make everyone in your pictures look awake and flawless!
Love,
Em
I am bookmarking this as it might come in handy with my self-portraits. Thank you.
I like the circles around my eyes. It's an excuse for being dopey.
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