Retouching People

People have skin! And because people have skin, retouching them presents special challenges. Retouching skin is such an important part of so many people’s digital chores that a whole toolset has been developed and refined with skin retouching in mind. This Healing Brushes toolset contains four brushes: the Healing Brush tool, the Spot Healing Brush tool, the Red Eye Removal tool, and the Patch tool. These four tools form the core of any toolset that you will use to retouch or enhance human skin, and most often human faces. Other tools, such as the familiar Clone Stamp, blur and sharpen tools, and the standard Levels, Curves, and Hue/Saturation tools, can be used, but the healing tools are the mainstay. And rightly so! The healing tools have been developed and refined specifically for working on human skin and especially human faces. You should also know that the Healing Brush tools work reasonable well on Klingons and Cardassians as well, but best on humans!

The Healing Brush tools work so well, in fact, that we often must exercise restraint in how we apply them. In many cases you can make people look so good that they … well … don’t look human. For instance, you can indeed take all the wrinkles out of an 80-year-old man’s face—and then he will look like a baby-faced 80-year-old. So when you are evaluating a face and deciding what to do and which tools you will use, think about the quantity of enhancement as well as the quality of retouching; ask yourself what is appropriate given the face, the lighting, and the environment. Let’s work through some examples to see how these various tools work and how you might apply them.