Face Retouching in Photoshop
When it comes to face retouching, the first step to success is to remove all imperfections that appear on the skin. The second step is to resize a part of the face (i.e. nose or chin) to give our subject thinner/thicker appearance. In this tutorial we will cover blemishes removal and chin & jaw reduction. Please note, we cannot just make the image too much retouched that it will look so obvious, and so we need to remember to maintain the original skin texture as much as possible.
We will use a photo of a woman in this tutorial (the picture has been obtained from www.dreamstime.com website as royalty free).
1) Open the picture and zoom in on the area we see some skin imperfections. Get the Healing Brush tool from the Toolbox as shown below.
Tip: Select the Zoom tool and draw a rectangle to zoom in to the area you want
2) Move your cursor over the area of skin that is similar to the area surrounding our blemish, press and hold the Alt (Mac: Option) key and single click to get a sample of that area.
Tip: You can sample from different areas of the face, but make sure to choose similar texture of the skin
3) Now, move the Healing Brush over the blemish we want to correct and single click.
Tip: To achieve best results use a brush settings correctly (shown below). Make the size of a brush just a little bit bigger than the size of the blemish and set the hardness of a brush to fairly soft
4) Final result without blemishes:
5) Staying with the same picture select the Lasso tool and draw a selection around the chin and jaw, up to the nose (as shown below).
Tip: Do not apply any feather to the pixel selection as this is not needed
6) From the toolbar menu choose Filter, then Distort from the drop-down menu and then Pinch. Set the Amount to 15% and click OK.
Tip: To accurately set the amount of the Pinch filter look at the preview window to see effects.
7) Final result before and after: