Skin First. Notes for RetouchPRO LIVE The Spread Carrie Beene (carrienyc.com) The Beauty

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1 Notes for RetouchPRO LIVE The Spread Carrie Beene (carrienyc.com) The Beauty Always begin a Beauty spread with the Beauty shot, It s the most important image in the spread and should not be resized or transformed if at all possible. To begin open the Sarah.tif file and the FPO (For Placement only) Immediately we see that we will need to flop Sarah to match the For Placement Only file. Image>Image Rotation>Flip Canvas Horizontally. Double click on the background layer and in the dialog click OK to accept Layer o as the new name. Duplicate this layer and name the new layer RET designating it as the work (retouch) layer. Drag the FPO onto the Sarah file. Put your screen mode on Full Screen by using the F key. Lower the opacity of the FPO and then use the Transform tool (Cmd/Ctrl + T )to fit the FPO to Sarah as exactly as you can. When done put the opacity back to 100%. Hit Cmd/Ctrl + T again to put the Transform tool s bounding box on the FPO so you can see where it s edges are. Drag Guides to the edges of the bounding box and the click ESC to leave Transform. Now us the Crop tool to crop to the guides thereby extending your canvas. Turn off the FPO and begin the Beauty retouch. Skin First One of the most important things a good retoucher must be able to do is clean natural skin that does not look burred or smoothed out. The ability to retouch skin is the first thing I look at when hiring a retoucher. There are a variety of tools in Photoshop that can be utilized to this end. I m going to show you how I do it and tell you why.

2 Set up your retouching brushes I always us FLOW and never use Opacity: set your Brush Tool and Clone Tool to Airbrush. Open the Brushes Panel to set up the Brush Tool Uncheck Shape Dynamics and check Other Dynamics. Clicking on the words Shape Dynamics set both Controls to Pen Pressure.

3 Duplicate the background layer and name it RET (retouch), this will be the layer on which we will use the Clone tool. Theretouching technique we will utilize has 4 basic elements. To set up the retouching Group add two

4 Curve Adjustment layers above the RET layer. One Curve will be used for lightening and the second for darkening. Fill both of the Curve Layers masks with black so the effect of the curve is masked out and therefore unseen. Name the lighten curve LITE and the darken curve DARK.

5 Start retouching on the RET layer using the Clone Tool with the Blending Mode set to either Lighten or Darken.

6 I have the Flow set to 70% and the Clone tool settings are Shape Dynamics OFF, Other Dynamics ON and both Controls set to OFF. I have also set the hardness of the brush to medium/soft and have a very small diameter brush, around 3 pixels to start. You can access this brush menu on the tool bar or by holding the Control key while you have the brush selected and clicking on the image. I like to change my brush hardness and size by using the bracket keys, left bracket for a smaller diameter or right bracket for a larger brush. If you hold down the shift key you can change the hardness and softness of the brush, shift left bracket becomes softer and shift right bracket becomes a harder edged brush. When cloning with Lighten sample from the darker side of the blemish or mole and tap down the mole with one tap if possible so the area doesn t go lighter now leaving a white spot where the dark spot used to be. Retouch at 100 to 200, pore by pore. Move out frequently to look at your progress. Rely on your eyes and toggle your retouching Layer on and off often to see what you are doing to your image. As you clone with Darken and Lighten only hit the most difficult dark spots and the whitest almost zeroed out (100% white) white spots. Retouching with the Curve Adjustment Layers Begin with the lite Curve. You will want a Soft Brush as we set it up at the beginning of this Chapter. Make sure you are painting with white as we begin to brush away the mask to allow the affects of our lite Curve to hit the image. You can see what the mask in my lite Curve

7 looks like as I move forward with the retouch (the mask pictured is from a different file than the one we are using today). The Lifestyle

8 - Double click on the Background layer to unlock it. Duplicate that layer (layer 0) and name it RET. DO your warping and retouching on this RET layer. -Silhouette the lifestyle in preparation for moving it into the Beauty spread. I did the Silo in 2 separate steps, first using the Pen tool and then using a channel grab to get the hair. Use the silo to mask out the background. -Once the silo is complete create masks in the Channels panel for the skin, dress (the white and green parts separately), and the hair. -We want these masks to move with the lifestyle when we drag it into out main file. I created four groups and attached each of the masks to one of the groups. Shift click to select all the layers and drag them to the Create New Group icon. Name the group Lifestyle and change the blending mode of the group from Pass Through to Normal. Drag the group into the main Beauty spread file.