How to: Beautifying tips in Photoshop

Everywhere you go, you see the beautiful people filling the covers of magazines.  If you dont know by now, a lot of the work is done in Photoshop.  But what are some of the techniques used to make your model look perfect?

Here is a typical head-shot session.  Im going to skip the color correction and save that for another time.  But for now, lets focus on the retouching of the model.

Ok, before I do ANYTHING else, I always duplicate the beginning layer.  I use a Mac so its J

Really simple but very necessary incase things go bad, you always have it to revert to.  Its also good practice to continue doing this throughout the edit.

It isnt until you zoom into your subject do you start to see the flaws, dont worry, every single person has them.  Everybody has some form of acne or wrinkles so lets figure out how to get rid of them.

Above you can see that I have pointed to the Spot Healing Brush.  This is a tool I use constantly.  all you do is make the brush size to fit your need (not too big of course) and just start clicking away at acne or sunspots.  

Sometimes though, you cant fix it with the spot-healing brush.  This is where you have to use the actual Clone Stamp tool.  You can get it by just typing "s".  How it works is that you pick a spot to clone from by holding "alt/option" (on a mac that is) and then clicking your target area.  Make sure you click on an area that you want to clone and then start brushing over the "bad area"  I recommend using an opacity of about 30%, its just much easier that way to get finer details.  The clone stamp takes a lot of practice, but it always gets the job done.

Ok, after a lot of clicking to get rid of sunspots and other unwanted features, we can see that we actually did a lot to improve our picture.  Yet there is still more to do here.  We want to really smooth out the subject's face. 

This is where I show a really cool trick called the History Brush.  I never started using it until a couple of months ago, I never knew what it was and thought it was a worthless tool.  I was very wrong, its a very convenient tool and it comes in handy in situations like this.

Ok, how do we smooth out the face?

Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.  When the window pops up, set it to about 10px.

Now your picture is blurry beyond recognition.  This is where the brush comes to life.

In your History box you will see the Gaussian Blur at the bottom.  Go ahead and click on the little box to the left of it and you will see a little icon take its place.

After this, make sure you backup a step, click on the last action to take place right before you did the Gaussian Blur.  Now you will notice that the picture is no longer blurry.

Now all you have to do is click on the History Brush icon or just press "Y".

Using a lower opacity and soft edge brush, about 30% or lower is best for opacity, you want to start brusing over places like the forehead and other areas that have a lot of detail.  What this is doing is smoothing out the face by applying the Gaussian Blur in small amounts.  Make sure to leave some of the areas alone, like the eyes of course.

So after you are happy with this, you might want to lighten up a few areas by using the Dodge or Burn brushes.  But if not, you ought to be done.  Go head and compare the finished result with the very beginning picture.  You will notice a huge difference.