Transform your portraits

Transform any portrait with a glamorous magazine-style finish
Once you’ve mastered the use of adjustment layers and their masks, producing polished portraits is as simple as a brush stroke here and a brush stroke there. A lightening Curves adjustment layer can be used not only to dodge dark blemish areas on skin, but also to whiten teeth and eyes and emphasise highlight areas in the hair. A Hue/Saturation adjustment layer can remove every last drop of yellowing in the teeth, while another, in combination with a Curves layer, can change lipstick to any imaginable colour in the spectrum. And we all know by now the benefits of doing things the adjustment layer way – we can go back at any point and make changes to our work without throwing away any of the detail. After adjustment layers, we’ve got the Healing and Clone Stamp tools to play with, which can do a superb job of removing spots, wrinkles, creases, eye bags and unwanted eyebrow hair. And doing the work on a separate layer ensures we continue our non-destructive workflow. The final appliance in the retouch toolshed is the filter. Gaussian Blur, Noise and Sharpening can all be used to produce that smooth but high contrast look popular in the commercial world of fashion and glamour for a truly professional finish.

Clone Stamp for edge detail
The Spot Healing Brush tool (J) is generally used as the default for removing spots and blemishes from the skin of a portrait subject. However, there are times when this tool fails to do the job. It creates new detail based on surrounding pixels, so if you’re close to edge detail like an eyelash or a lip edge, you can end up with a blurry mess as that info is dragged inwards. The solution is to switch to the Clone Stamp tool (S). The Clone Stamp duplicates sourced detail rather than creating new detail, so you need to choose a clean area of skin very close to the blemish itself. Move too far away and there might be a subtle change in tone that will stand out once moved to the blemish area. Source proximate detail using the Alt/Option key, making sure the correct source sample is chosen in the Tool Options bar.

Spot Healing Brush tool
Great for even tone areas
Where the Spot Healing Brush tool really excels is in areas of relatively even tone, such as sky, or areas of skin on the face away from detailed features such as the nose, eyes or mouth. A cheek area is a good example. Here you can simply click away without having to source any nearby information to remove blemishes such as spots, freckles or moles. Work on a new layer and make sure the Sample All Layers option is checked in the Tool Options bar, and turn off visibility for any layers you don’t want included.

Patch tool
Patch up larger areas
The Patch tool is part of the Healing family and is useful for larger areas of blemish – good examples are forehead wrinkles, neck lines and cheek creases. Like all the Healing tools, it’s no good if used near proximate edge detail, but some photographers get around this by selecting a large area without including nearby edge detail and floating it as a new layer before using the tool. The greatest limitation of the Patch tool is that it doesn’t have sample source options like Spot Healing and Clone Stamp, so you have to work on a background layer copy (increasing file size) or a merged copy of all layers you want to include. Rope off the area you want to replace, then drag from inside the selection to the clean area you want to replace with.

Healing Brush tool
Useful in cluttered areas
The Healing Brush tool works in a very similar manner to the Spot Healing Brush tool, creating new detail to replace a blemish area and blending this detail in with surrounding information. Where it differs is that you have to choose where to source your texture from, with the Alt/Option key as per the Clone Stamp tool. It’s an extra step, but useful in some circumstances where the surrounding texture isn’t great either – for example, when removing a spot among a cluster of spots. Again, create a new layer first and set the layer source sample in the Tool Options bar.

Lip Gloss
Make those lips shine
Here’s a little optional extra for lips. Bear in mind that it works best with lips which have had some lipstick applied already, or for portraits that are studio lit to produce quite punchy highlights. Start by firing up a Curves adjustment layer using the button at the bottom of the Layers palette, and plot one point on the shadows quarter point and one point at the midtone. This ensures the shadows and midtones aren’t affected by the Curves adjustment layer – we only want the highlights to pop. We can achieve this by plotting a third point in the highlights and pushing upwards hard. OK the dialog, then invert the layer mask with Ctrl/Cmd+I. Now change the layer blending mode from Normal to Luminosity so the saturation isn’t increased. Take a soft-edged white brush and paint in the lips, focusing on any highlight areas.

Iris contrast
Add a glint to the eyes
Begin by lightening the midtones and highlights of the eye as a whole. This means whites and iris were subtly lifted. The whites in particular are quite sensitive to change – go even a shade too light and the retouching looks obvious. The iris, however, can take a bit more stick, so you can add a further Curves adjustment layer to focus purely on this. Use an S curve this time, bringing the shadows down and the highlights up with just two points.

Hair edge tidy
Clone out stray hairs
In the original shot there was quite a lot of stray hair moving down into the forehead. It’s relatively simple to remove. We create a new layer at the top of the stack and select the Clone Stamp tool with ‘S’, making sure that in the Tool Options bar the Sample drop-down menu is set to Current and Below. Use the ‘[' and ']‘ keys to produce a large brush, hold down Alt/Option and sample a clean area of the forehead close to the hair, then click upwards.

Contrast wash
The commercial glamour look
Removing blemishes and dodging and burning can get us very close to the professional fashion and glamour look, but we need to work on our tonal range to produce a real magazine contrast punch. There’s a great trick incorporating Unsharp Mask that can achieve the bulk of the effect we want. It increases contrast in a far more intelligent way than an ‘S’ curve on a Curves adjustment layer. Create a new layer at the top of the stack then Merge Visible with Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+E. Run Filter> Sharpen>Unsharp Mask with an 80px Radius at 20%. Finally, expand the tonal range into the brightest half of the histogram by fixing shadows and pushing upwards with a point further up on a Curves adjustment layer.