Retouching Portraits in Photoshop

This post is a part of my Weekly Make series, where every seven days I force myself to create something and put it out in the wild for you to gawk at.

Retouching photos is never something I formally practiced. My Photoshop skills started all the way back in middle school. In hindsight, that talent did not quite bring me the fame and popularity I’d hoped for.

I was a pretty cool kid. (December 2, 2002)

But even fifteen years later, I’m not sure I’d improved all that much. I could cut things out a bit better, and knew a few more tools, but I’d never truly practiced the fundamentals. So, after a wonderful Saturday hiking in the Hudson Valley with friends and my Canon DSLR, I sat down with a few tutorials to see what I could do.

Retouching Process

1. Color correct.

This was probably the most difficult step of the process, and, I have to admit… I eyeballed it. And used sliders.

But, I noticed, taking down the red midtones significantly improved the accuracy of the skin tone and adjusted the white balance much better. Preserving luminosity gave me slightly lighter, more vibrant results, so I kept it.

2. Add vignette.

In a portrait, you generally want to draw attention to the face. One way to do that is a vignette. The way I did this was to create a filled black layer and applied a multiply blending mode. I then used a feathered elliptical marquee to create a mask to only apply the darkened area in a circle. (Here’s a much better explanation.)

3. Adjust levels, vibrance, and saturation.

Next, and I may have overdone this, I created adjustment layers to increase saturation, vibrance, and darkened the darks and lightened the lights. I worry I overexposed it here, but it adds a lot of liveliness to the image.

Using the Hue/Saturation layer to isolate the reds, you can highlight and reduce reddishness in the skin.

4. Remove blotches and blemishes.

Understandably, after hiking several miles on a hot day, my subject was a little flush. Using a very interesting technique with the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, I identified a color band and adjusted the hue to reduce the reddishness around her cheeks, while preserving the red of her lips.

I also used the Patch tool to remove a few very minor blemishes and lighten her eyes and teeth, but those changes were largely unnecessary and mostly for practice.

And voila! The final portrait.

I’m proud of the outcome. It isn’t quite explosions and lightsabers, but these new Photoshop techniques will come in handy for some darn good Facebook profile pics.

Thanks so much for reading! If you enjoyed, feel free to follow me and hold down the Applause button. Stay tuned for the next Weekly Make!