In my two decades in this business, I can honestly say that retouching skin has by far been the one topic of frustration for many a retoucher. With the new paradigm shift in the imaging world, a great many more young photographers have to do their own retouching and with that comes a new breed of frustrated artists. In this Case Study and in Skin Case Studies to follow, we'll be diving head first into the realm of skin.
In this in depth series of videos I take an industry standard beauty image and retouch it from start to finish. From initial color and density settings we move on to taking inventory of what's needed to be done. We then start by adjusting all the problem areas of the image before moving on to the beauty retouching. Then comes the meat and potatoes of this series- beauty/skin retouching. In this series we use a subject with skin texture that I'll call an "average" skin type for the sake of argument. This means nothing terribly harsh, but the kind of skin you'll find in most professional beauty photography. We'll call this type of skin: Skin Level One.
I start with the basics of spotting the image and move deep into trouble areas and finish her with my own version of dodging and burning. No tricks here! Just down and dirty, old school retouching. This style of retouching is near transparent and most sought after.
Step 1 - 3: Assessing The Situation
In steps 1-3 we talk about photo as a whole and touch on the "White Check Curve"- a little trick I learned back in my NY studio days in the mid 90's. This simple, yet magical curve helps with SO MANY things that it I made into it's own tutorial: The Canine Curves. These next 3 videos deal with cleaning up the stray hairs, neutralizing the color cast in the image and using Layer Styles rather than complicated masks. We also touch on using curves for setting the dynamic range, warping parts of the image to make our job much easier and basic quick mask selections as we start the first stage of this beauty retouch
Step 4
In this video we begin with Stage 1 spotting of the skin and background. General starting cleanup. We start by removing with large problems first so that later on we can deal with the secondary and tertiary stage of cleaning the skin. Layer groups are also touched on here.
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Step 5
Here we begin Stage 2 spotting: finer detail using the clone and the healing brush. We also use a soft brush cloning technique to smooth out the bumps and grit. We treat her oily skin and clean up the whites of her eyes. Pay close attention to the techniques I use here. There's a very important "click and slide" cloning technique that when used properly can REALLY help your retouching.
[ VIDEO ] GENESIS PRO MEMBERS ONLY
Step 6
Here we toy with using blending modes in Photoshop to do our heavy lifting. Sometimes it's the little things that make life so much easier. Some facial hair is no problem either. We deal with that here as well.
[ VIDEO ] GENESIS PRO MEMBERS ONLY
Step 7
We begin the task of dodging and burning. Probably one of the most important steps in beauty retouching, this technique remains a mystery. I break down how I go about using curves to achieve flawless transitions from highlights to shadows. A MUST view!
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Step 8
Almost there, so hang tough! More dodging and burning as well as dealing with a clean, uniform skin color.
[ VIDEO ] GENESIS PRO MEMBERS ONLY
Step 9: Final Step
You made it! Final image touch ups and some finishing touches with dodging and burning.
Want to see the entire series?
