When we talk about retouching photos, we immediately think of Photoshop. But the act of tampering with photographs goes back a lot further than digital imaging. Before computers, retouching was done using ink, paint, double-exposure, piecing photos or negatives together in the darkroom, or scratching Polaroids.

The first recorded case of photo manipulation comes from the early 1860s, when a photo of Abraham Lincoln was altered using the body from a portrait of John C Calhoun and the head of Lincoln from a seated portrait by Matthew Brady.

The term ‘image editing’ is generally reserved for subtle alterations of contrast and colour balance, whereas in retouching we change the objective truth value of a photograph. This can be the removal of a lamp post sticking out of our model’s head, people to make a scene look more dramatic, or even swapping people’s heads. We get bombarded with distorted or artificial images in advertising and marketing, but it can lead to ethical issues, especially in photojournalism.

Retouching images can also mean restoring the original photograph after the many years of storage in a shoebox have taken their toll. We previously ran a series on photo restoration (see D-Photo, October and December 2007) and in this article we just look at altering the content of a digital shot.

Portrait Retouching

The aim of portrait retouching is to bring out the best in our model. Your role as a portrait retoucher is to accentuate the person’s natural features, while minimising the distractions and blemishes that can detract from an otherwise pleasing portrait. Most importantly, you want to maintain the individuality of a person.

The first thing to do is to look out for skin blemishes, and the classic way to fix them is by using the Clone Stamp tool. But in Photoshop 7 we got something much better: the Healing Brush and its bigger cousin the Patch tool. Whereas the Clone Stamp tool copies pixels faithfully from one part of the image into another, the Healing Brush attempts to patch a defect using a texture from another area while blending all the edges with the surrounding colours.

If the defect has a round shape, like a pimple or a mole, you might want to use the Spot Healing Brush, which is hidden underneath the Healing Brush. It’s literally a one-c––lick fixing tool: simply adjust the brush size (with the square brackets on the keyboard) and click on the offending spot. Photoshop then looks at the pixels just outside the edges of your brush and blends them with the pixels inside the brush. However, for better control and larger blemishes the Healing Brush is more reliable.

Once you have selected the correct tool, either the Cloning Stamp or the Healing Brush, the rest is simple. You Alt-click on the area you want to use as the source and then you click on the part of the image that needs to be eliminated or cleaned. On the toolbar you find a box called ‘Aligned’. If ticked, the source area will move in sync with the area you want to change. Simply untick that box if you want to clone from only one particular area. The latest Photoshop (CS4) gives you the advantage of a preview of what the repaired area is going to look like before committing with 
a click.

Instead of just clicking away and permanently changing the pixels of your image, it is a good idea to leave the original untouched and work on a new layer. If you make a mistake or change your mind, you won’t need to revert to a previously saved version (if you still have the original untouched image!).

A better way is to clone to a new layer. With this method you simply cover the pixels you want to get rid of but don’t replace them permanently.

The first step is to make a new empty layer by clicking on the New Layer button at the bottom of the Layer palette. Make sure that the new layer is on top of the image layer. Second, you need to enable the ‘Use All Layers’ option on the toolbar, after selecting the Healing Brush. The new layer will only have the repaired parts of your image. It will be almost empty and won’t contribute much to the final file size.

Now let’s have a look at the rest of the skin. Image 2 shows you how cruel a sharp lens is in bringing out all those pores in what should be smooth skin. After running it through the Unsharp Mask filter the skin will look like sandpaper. A soft-focus lens would be a solution, but it’s cheaper — and offers much more control — to use the digital darkroom to simulate the effect.

There are many techniques for adding a romantic atmosphere or a glamorous look to a portrait, enough to fill an entire article, so we just look at a simple Gaussian Blur treatment here.

Start by duplicating the image layer and apply the Gaussian Blur filter with a Radius setting of around 2 to 3. Of course, we can’t run the filter over the entire image; we need to apply the effect selectively and this is best done with a Layer Mask.

Click on the New Layer Mask button at the bottom of the Layer palette. This will show up as a white rectangle in the new layer, next to the image thumbnail. The white colour means that all the pixels of the new layer are fully revealed and all the pixels of the layer underneath (the sharp image) are fully covered and hidden. Now we are going to change this Layer Mask to black: click on the Layer Mask to select it, then go to Image > Adjustments > Invert. The Layer Mask will turn into solid black and we only see the sharp original image from the layer underneath.

Now you need to paint those parts into the Layer Mask that you want to soften. Make sure that the Foreground Colour is set to white, choose a soft Paint Brush with an opacity setting of around 10 per cent, and paint over the skin to give it a glamorous look. The best way of changing the softness of the brush is by right-clicking with the Brush tool selected. Make sure that you select the Layer Mask before you start painting, and use repeated brush strokes to build up the effect.

If the model’s teeth are showing, they could benefit from some digital dentistry. Lightening teeth, removing stains or braces, or even closing gaps between teeth is much more pleasant with Photoshop than in a dentist’s chair. Keep in mind that a 20-year-old’s teeth will be brighter that a senior citizen’s. We don’t want them to shout: “Look at us — we’re fake!”

For a simple lightening job it is tempting to reach for the Dodge tool. But again, you don’t want to change those pixels permanently. If you go too far with your whitening or if you change your mind, you will need to use the Burn tool to make those pixels darker again. Pixels don’t like that, and sooner or later it will show up in your image as ugly tone transitions and discolourations. So this is best done by lightening the teeth through a Levels or Curves Adjustment Layer and then you simply restrict the lighting to the teeth only with a mask, similar to what we did with the skin.

The Botox Treatment

Retouching a person’s face can be a sensitive undertaking. Your aim should be to make the person look positive and refreshed, as if he or she had just returned from a relaxing two-week vacation. When you start to work on a wrinkle, make sure to maintain the individuality of the person. We only want to take off a few years, not make them look like they just had plastic surgery.

The Healing Brush is the tool of choice for this job. Larger areas are better tackled with the Patch tool. Unfortunately, these tools don’t allow us to reduce the opacity — it is either a wrinkle or smooth skin.
One solution is to go to Edit > Fade Healing Brush, straight after using the Brush. This allows you to bring the wrinkle back to some degree. Or, better, you might do all your corrections on a separate layer and then reduce the opacity to fade in the original, unretouched version. A layer Mask will give you even more control.

Removing Unwanted Objects

Image 5 shows a couple, Charlie and Sarah, a week before their wedding, and illustrates a mistake every photographer will make at some time.

The idea was to place the couple with the Savage Memorial in the background. Unfortunately, in the original version of this photo it looks like the memorial was growing out of Sarah’s head.
All we need to do is replace the column with sky. The Healing Brush doesn’t work in this case because it would try and blend the sky into Sarah’s head. Wherever there is a sharp border, the Healing Brush won’t do the job and we need to go back to the good old Clone Stamp tool. Again, we start with a blank layer where we clone the sky pixels. To make the job easier, and to protect some of Charlie’s individual hair strands, I first prepared a protective mask for both heads (see Image 5 above).

Cloning Between Two Images

Cloning is not restricted to the pixels of an individual image. Sometimes it is convenient to copy objects from one image into another. Image 6 shows an example. Here we again have Charlie and Sarah, this time with Sarah sitting on a park bench.

Let’s say we want to remove the flower bouquet from the bottom right corner but place it on the bride’s lap.

We first need to carefully restore the hidden part of the bench and the wedding gown underneath the flowers. The job needs to be done with a combination of our two tools. The cloning tool will be necessary for the parts with sharp edges, the bench and the edge of the wedding dress. The Healing Brush is ideal to restore the pattern of the dress. Needless to say, we do this on a new layer so we can get back to the original in case we make a mess.

What about moving the bouquet to its new destination? First of all the flowers have been cropped and secondly the angle wouldn’t be right if we place the flowers as they are on her lap. Fortunately, we have another shot where the bouquet looks just right.

First we need to resize the second image to get the flowers to the correct size for their destination. Then you need to have both images open and positioned conveniently. One easy way is to go to the Window menu and select Arrange > Tile. The next step is to make the source image active by clicking on it. Then, with the Clone tool selected, Alt-click on the part of the image you want to copy, in our case the flowers. Once that is done, you click on the second image and simply paint the whole flower bouquet in.

There will be bits of background coming with the bouquet; at the bottom we get the wedding dress, which blends in quite nicely, but the grass on top of the flowers is a worry. Hopefully you have remembered the advice from earlier on and started with an empty image layer to copy the flowers into… All we need to do is grab the Eraser tool and delete all those background bits from the previous image. For the top part we use a fairly hard brush to get rid of the grass. For the rest we switch to a softer brush to get a good blend with the dress. Having the bouquet on its own layer even allows us to resize it.

As always in Photoshop, there are many ways to accomplish a task. We could just as well have selected the bouquet from the source image and copy/pasted it into the second one. But we saved ourselves from having to make a challenging selection, and cloning between images is certainly an elegant way of combining parts of two photographs.

Words: Hans Weichselbaum

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