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Now that we have cleaned up the skin, we have cleaned up some of the small
blemishes, let's work on a couple of different areas in the photograph.
In particular, notice there is some darkness around the eyes a little bit,
I want to brighten that up. Now, there are a number of different ways that we can do
this. I want to show you one technique here that
I think will be pretty helpful. Now because retouching takes a lot of time we
need to learn certain shortcuts. So let's create a new layer by way of shortcut,
Shift+Command+N on a Mac, Shift+Ctrl+N on a PC. We'll name this clean
up 2. Next we are going to reach for the Clone Stamp tool. Now the Clone Stamp
tool gets a bad rep. But you can use it in some pretty interesting
ways. Let's press S to select the Clone Stamp tool.
Again that shortcut key is S for Stamp. Next what we are going to do is change the
blend mode for this tool. You can see I have my blending modes up here.
I could of course select it from this pulldown menu and I want to select Lighten
or if I want to speed up my overall retouching, what I'm going to do is on a Mac
press Shift+Option+G. On a PC that's Shift+Alt+G. And it's that G. It's
the third letter in Lighten. And that's kind of a tricky shortcut to remember.
Yet it's worthwhile to start to take note of those because again it can speed
up your overall workflow. Next, we need to lower the Opacity of this
tool, right we never want to do this at 100%. So I'm going to press 2 to take it
to 20% or 25 to go to 25%. So now I have selected that tool. I have modified
how I'm going to use it. I have done that really quickly. I'm also making sure
that Sample All Layers is turned on. Now I don't need to be zoomed into 100% as
I do this work. But I might want to zoom in a little bit on the photograph. So
I'm zooming in a little bit here so I can start to do some work on the image.
Next, I'm going to go ahead and hold down the Option key on a Mac, Alt key on a PC,
sample an area that I think is nice. I'll go ahead and paint across an area
that I want to brighten up. So here's my before and after. Okay, well that's
pretty subtle, let's keep going. And one of the things that we are doing here
is really we are dodging with this tool. And again here is our before and after.
It's subtle yet significant. And we can start to make our way around this
image and again just sampling different areas. That one was a little bit
too strong, so I'll press Command+Z on a Mac, Ctrl+Z on a PC, and I'm going to
go ahead and hold down the Option key on a Mac, Alt key on a PC, sample a nice,
bright area around and then make my way underneath the eye here. Just slowly
going back and forth, working out these shadows a bit. Here's my before and
here's my after. It's subtle, yet it's significant.
Now is this the best tool? Is this the only tool? No, not at all.
There are a ton of tools that we can use for burning and dodging, in this case dodging.
But here it works pretty well. Let's go ahead and do some work on the other eye.
So again I'll hold down the Option key on a Mac, Alt key on a PC. The nice thing
about using this particular technique is it's bringing pixels into the image.
So it's not just brightening or darkening, but it's using some kind of a texture.
It's a nice way to be able to maintain texture. And as we are starting out, that will be kind
of nice for us to have a little bit texture, so we don't lose it completely.
Again here's our before and then after. Okay great. Well, again that's not
the only way to do this. But now that we have started to work on the overall tone
a bit, we could then apply some different adjustments on top of that. So I'm
going to just go ahead and finish this off actually, before I get to my different
adjustments here. I'm just brightening this area up a bit, just work
on that. The trick of course with this is that we have to sample an area. We
have to be using something in the image and that doesn't always work but sometimes
it works pretty well. Again, here's our before and after.
The next thing that I'm going to do is do a little bit of cloning or healing on
top of this. Before I do that though, I want to look at my before and after and
say have I gone too far, have I brighten this up too much? Well, perhaps. So
the nice thing about using layers is I can lower the Opacity there. So I have a
little bit of the shape left. I don't want to flatten out the face completely
and lose all shape. So in this way, it's kind of blending that back. That will
create a new layer, Shift+Command+ N on a PC, Shift+Ctrl+N on a Mac,
and I'll call this clean up 3. Now do you always need to clean up layers?
Could you flatten these down? Well, yeah of course, you could flatten down. Yet
for demonstration purposes, I'm going to keep all these layers so that
I can show you the progress as we move along. All right, well let's go ahead and select
another tool like the Healing Brush. And now that the tone is a little bit more
even here, I can use a Healing Brush. Sampling All Layers. Make sure that's turned
on and you know it's almost always that we'll be using the Sample All
Layers. I'll just make my way through underneath the eyes here. And I'm just going
to try to clean those up a bit and a lot of times what this will do, just even
out some of the tones that we have there. The nice thing about doing it this way is
because we worked on the different tones. We now are able to add this on top.
It brings a little bit of texture back. So here's our overall before and then
after, working on those areas. Now let's move up and down. Let's kind of
see if there's any other areas it could benefit from this type of a technique.
One area that I'm noticing is down here underneath the chin. It could use a little
bit of brightening. I'm also noticing that the lipstick could use a little
bit of shaping. So let's go ahead and continue to work on
this photograph in the next movie.