In this lesson we’ll be re-touching images with Photoshop!

Right click on each to download the images from the example to try it for yourself.

Skin retouching

To start with, open up Photoshop and go to Window > Workspace > Photography to access everything you need easily. Now, there are two ways you can work with your images in Photoshop:

1. Dragging an image indirectly into Photoshop
2. Right-clicking the image in Lightroom, and then choosing “Edit In” and then Edit In Adobe Photoshop 2022. This takes the photo from Lightroom into Photoshop and then straight back in again when you press Save. We’re going to use this method so that we can keep our workflow super clean.

Here we’ve got our first image, and if we zoom in just a little bit, we can see that she has a few sort of pimples and discoloration up on her chest. That said, we’re not going to tackle her face as it’s a completely different ball game and quite hard to get 100% correct. So it’s just a matter of looking at the image and asking yourself if it’s really that important to remove something or if it’s fine to just leave it as it is.

Spot Healing Brush

Now, we could try and use the Spot Removal tool that’s built into Lightroom, but it doesn’t quite get it right all the time. Whereas in Photoshop, we have a lot of control and flexibility on how we tackle the image.

1. Assuming that we’re now in Photoshop, press Command + J to duplicate the background layer. That way, we always have something to fall back on if everything goes wrong. 
2. Let’s concentrate on her chest. Zoom back in and out to check the areas you really want to target. 
3. Click on the Spot Healing Brush tool. If you hover over the icon, it’ll actually give you an example of how it works. This is an auto feature which removes blemishes and imperfections intelligently in one click. However, once you start working with it, you’ll soon realize that it hasn’t really removed everything perfectly and that’s because it’s a quick tool that doesn’t give us much control over the end result. It’s ideal just for little spots and specks among clean areas.

Healing Brush tool

This gives you just a little bit more control over how you’re going to be using your brush by painting with pixels from another part of the image.

1. Hold Option/Alt on your keyboard to turn your cursor into a crosshair. Then click on an area to take a sample.
2. Release the Option/Alt key and click on where you want it to go to remove those blemishes. It’s important to know that it’s going to still use artificial intelligence to work out how to fill in that space.
3. Continue to keep taking samples from different spots as you move around and it will give you a much nicer result.

Clone Stamp tool

The idea of the Clone Stamp tool is it paints pixels from another part of the image. However, unlike the Healing Brush that uses artificial intelligence to work the replacement out, with the Clone Stamp tool we’re actually cloning one place to another.

1. Hold Option/Alt on your keyboard to turn your cursor into a crosshair. Then click on an area to take a sample.
2. On the top menu you have the brush settings that allow you to control the opacity, the flow, the type of brush to help you manipulate the output.
3. To make it smoother, let’s set the flow to 50% while keeping the opacity to 100%. Then if you keep tapping on the area you want to replace, it’s going to work like a spray can as though it builds up on top of the previous brush.

Lasso tool

We use the Lasso tool when we want to just remove things really quickly with the help of a feature called Content-Aware Fill.

1. Create a selection over an area with lots of blemishes with the Lasso tool.
2. Then press Shift + Delete on your keyboard to bring up the Content-Aware Fill. Leave the settings as it is and press OK. You’ll see that the blemishes are removed straight away, but often the result might not be that great considering that it’s an automatic process. So it’s important to know that Content-Aware Fill isn’t always working great with skin textures, lines, or blurry subjects.

Patch tool

The idea here is to work backwards - we first make a selection of the area we want to fix and then replace it with another area we want to sample.

1. Make a careful selection of the area you want to fix.
2. Then drag the selection to another clean area you want to sample, and keep moving around until you’re satisfied with how it’s replacing the area that needed the fix.

Paint brush tool

This is actually more like a hacky way of doing skin retouching, but if done correctly, it can sometimes surprise you with such a nice result.

1. Press Command + J to create a new layer, just in case something goes wrong.
2. Pick the Brush tool, and on the top menu choose Soft Brush, and then set the opacity to 10% and the flow to 40%.
3. Then hold the Option/Alt key to bring up the color picker and take a sample of a nice skin tone on our subject’s chest.
4. Release the Option/Alt key to go back to the brush tool and start brushing on the area with discoloration.
5. Keep moving around with sampling different skin tones to brush on different areas. Importantly, you don’t want to go to the extremes with your opacity and flow, but rather focus on doing it in granularly as the compounding effect can give you a really nice skin overall.

Object removal

We’re going to remove the pike in this shot:

Now, there are lots of ways we can tackle this and the result will vary depending on how much we can control the process and the result.

The Spot Removal tool is probably the fastest and the easiest way to tackle this, and while it’s mostly effective, you can still see a few areas where it feels unnatural and isn’t quite right. The Healing Brush tool isn’t going to do the best job in this case either, as taking a sample from the sky to replace the pike gives you a smudging effect with an even more complicated process.

With the Clone Stamp tool, you can achieve much better results as long as you keep moving around with sampling a clean area to replace the pike, however, once you get closer to the pole and the straw hat, it becomes really difficult to clean up the edges.

The easiest way to do this I think is by using the combination of the Polygonal Lasso tool and the Clone Stamp tool. Here’s how:

1. With your Lasso tool, make a selection of the whole pike.
2. Then press Shift + Delete to bring up the Content-Aware Fill and press OK.
3. Hold down the Lasso icon and select the Polygonal Lasso tool. Now, draw your points carefully along the edges of the pole, and then contain the leftovers from the Content-Aware Fill before going back to the first point to make a selection.
4. At this point there are a few ways we can clean this up nicely. And the best way is to work with a tool that makes a literal replacement and not with artificial intelligence, which is the Clone Stamp tool. And let’s set the brush to Soft Brush and give it a hardness around 25%.
5. Then keep moving around taking samples until the whole selection area is completely nice and clean. When you’re finished, just deselect the selection.
6. Now, let’s clean up any subtle leftovers and extend the straw hat that’s being cut out with the Clone Stamp tool. And you’re done!