Hey gang, it’s your pal Zeke McConnell here from photoshoptutorialz.com, and today we’re going to be doing an advanced-level retouching exercise designed to teach you how to remove the despair from a human face in a group photo or portrait.
Okay, let’s open up our image here — ZekeClassReunion.jpg — included in your exercise files for those of you following along at home. Just in case you’re curious, this is a shot of me and some friends from my ten-year college reunion. Now, on first glance you’ll see it’s actually a pretty good photo. We had a professional photographer, so the lighting is good. Composition is good, colour’s fine — all the fundamentals of the photo are solid. However, if you zoom in on the guy at the far right standing sort of awkwardly a little bit away from the rest of the group, you can see that even though his mouth is smiling, his face is quietly overwhelmed with despair.
I will now show you how to use the powerful tools of CS6 to remedy this problem.
First let’s take care of these dead eyes. If you zoom in closely you’ll see that even though they are reflecting the incandescent lighting from the room, as well as the flash from the camera, the eyes here are devoid of any real inner glow. Right off the bat we’re going to patch that up with a quick adjustment layer. For best results, select the irises using your elliptical marquee and then create a new brightness/contrast adjustment layer — now all we’re going to do is just pop up the brightness a few levels. This should mitigate at least some of the spiritual barrenness we see emanating from the eyes.
Now that we’ve taken care of the eyes I think we’re just about ready to get into the real meat and potatoes of this photo, which is removing the existential anguish on our subject’s face. We’re also going to have to work at making his smile seem less forced and more like that of his friend on the far left, who got a great job at an ad agency right out of college despite being a talentless fuck. We’re going to do this through carefully manipulating the face itself using the liquefy feature. I’m then going to make these changes seem more natural by drawing in some simple shadows on the face using our burn tool.
Even though we’re almost done, you’ll notice his face is still a little bit ashen, and this latent resignation towards his horribly ordinary fate can be seen not only in his eyes but around them as well. One of the places this focalizes the most is these deep, puffy bags under his eyes. The good news for us is that while it will likely take him decades to work through the emotional pain responsible for this mild facial deformity, it will take you only seconds. I recommend sketching around the bags using your free-form lasso tool, and then feathering your selections by a couple pixels. Now use your patch tool to select an area just below the eye. In order for our subject’s new-found mental health to not look too unnatural, consider fading this effect under the edit menu.
Now we’re just going to make a few final adjustments here. First things first, we’re going to do a dark flesh-tone colour overlay on the face with a soft edged brush to give the appearance that our subject has actually been out of the house in the last two weeks, and definitely hasn’t been holed up in his basement apartment since his girlfriend left him for an Australian law professor who’s also a semi-professional surfer because apparently that’s a thing. We’re also just going to do a quick-and-dirty whitening of the teeth by desaturating the yellow stains a little bit. While you’ll notice this doesn’t necessarily make him look happier per se, it does distract attention away from the corners of the mouth, which as you’ll remember from the second part of this tutorial, we heavily manipulated to give the appearance of a genuine smile, so we don’t want anyone examining that area too closely.
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