Shelby Stidham

Photoshop Tutorial for Dummies 1: “Airbrush” Your Face

February 4, 2008 – 11:02 pm

This is my first photoshop tutorial. I’m not a photoshop pro by any means, but I’m learning and I thought I’d make a photoshop tutorial for people like me who like to do simple photo tricks. So in this photoshop tutorial I will be giving myself the “airbrushed” effect. It’s easy to follow with lots of step-by-step pictures. So enjoy!

First, open your photograph of choice. Pictures that are high resolution are easiest and best to work with because it allows a lot of room to edit small details. I’ve selected this close-up picture, taken specially for photoshop purposes. Once you’ve opened it, get ready for step 2!

In this step, we will remove any blemishes and dark spots from our face that we don’t like. For this, I use the healing brush tool, which has a bandaid icon on the tools menu. Alt + Click on an area free of blemishes to establish a base for the corrections, and begin removing blemishes with just one click per area. You can even remove lines and stray hairs. It is good to use a small size brush when doing this so you can get detailed!

So this is my finished product of step 2. I used the healing brush to eliminate visible pores, lines under my eyes, and other blemishes. (NOTE: If you want to get rid of unruly eyebrows or facial hair, this tool can only be used for VERY SMALL portions or else it will turn dark. To get rid of big portions of hair on your hair, or other big blemishes, I recommend using the clone stamp tool!)

Now that we’ve eliminated marks, we can whiten our teeth or the whites of your eyes, if you wish. If you already have perfectly white teeth, skip this step! If you’re like me and you drink coffee every single day.. then this step is for you, too! Using the polygonal lasso tool (or magnetic lasso if you’re not into fine tuning the details), make a selection around the areas you wish to whiten. For me, it will be my chompers.  You can see what your final selection should look like by viewing my selection here. (TIP: If you hate looking at the dotted selection lines, you can hit Ctrl + H and it will hide the selection lines. And remember, once you are done working on a certain selected area, hit Ctrl + D for deselect.)

Now, using your short cuts on your keyboards (because they save so much time, seriously) hit Ctrl + U to bring up your Hue/Saturation menu. Adjust the saturation and lightness of your selection to get your ideal whiteness. For me, I desaturated my teeth to -16 and lightened them by +5. I didn’t mess with the hue; I don’t want funky colored teeth! Once you have done this, click OK and don’t forget to deselect or else your other tools won’t work on the rest of your face! (EDIT: If you didn’t make a perfect selection and the lines are visible, use a small brush and the blur tool and smooth the edges of your teeth. You can see that here.)

Now this next step is also optional but a must for me! Select Filter from the drop-down menu’s and select liquify. In this part of photoshop, we can give ourselves bigger boobs, smaller stomachs and thighs, plumper lips, longer hair.. just about anything! I will be using this part of photoshop to thin out my face and give myself a smaller nose. Check it out below.

On the left hand side, select the pucker tool and adjust the size of the brush according to the size of the object you are applying the tool too. In this case, I am changing the size of my nose so I will be making the brush exactly the same size as the tip of my nose, as shown in this screen shot. After I have resized my nose, I will make the brush considerably smaller and thin my face, as show in this screen shot. After you’re done with all of your “puckering” or “bloating”, you can click OK and see your results. Now, let’s move on to the next step.

Now, using the Clone Stamp tool (I mentioned it earlier), fix any surface blemishes that you couldn’t fix with your healing brush tool. For me, I will fix the stray hairs in my eyebrows and a few wisps of hair that are in my face. Other than that, I will only use that tool once. Remember, this tool is used the same way as the healing brush tool; Alt + Click to retain a base area to use for fixing the other areas. Our next step is giving our faces that “airbrushed” look that you see in magazines.

Using the Quick Selection tool (this tool is good when selecting large areas that don’t need a lot of attention paid to detail, like when selecting skin), select your face (or whatever you’re looking to airbrush) and make sure you deselect your eyes and mouth, so that the details in them make the photo look realistic. Additionally, you can hide your selection by using the keyboard shortcut I told you about earlier in this tutorial. Now we’re going to actually give our selected area that “airbrush” effect without actually airbrushing anything!

Now, from the Filter menu, go to Blur then select Smart Blur. From here you can play around to see how blurred you want your face to look.  (Although you can’t see, I have deselected both my eyes and my mouth, so keep the details of my face as clear and sharp as the original photograph). Here are the numbers I went with on my final blur, but don’t hesitate to increase or decrease these as you please! Now, while your skin is still selected…

Using Ctrl + U, you can make your skin lighter or darker (I like to make my skin look like it has a naturally tan glow, but you can make your face any color you want!). After you have found a good shade of tan (or whatever), click okay. One more thing… if you have a shadow on your face, you can remove it by playing around with the levels of shadow on your face by hitting Ctrl + L for the levels. I didn’t do it for my photograph, but feel free to use it. Here’s what my picture looked like after all that. Don’t be scared! Next step… 

Select your eyes and use the hue/saturation tool (Ctrl + U) to brighten them. If you want to make them a different color, you can click the colorize box in the bottom right hand corner. If not, Just play around with the hue and saturation to make your eyes as bright or as dark as you’d like. I chose to enhance my blue eyes. What do you think… do they look good?

Now,  using the menu’s shown in the screen shot above, make a new layer (it doesn’t have to be from the background). After you’ve made a new layer, select the paint brush tool and then click the color palette and choose a bright pink color. We are going to make our cheeks rosey! After you’ve selected the perfect bright color (don’t worry if it’s extreme.. we’ll tone it down), paint the pink on your cheeks and nose.. or wherever you want it! It should look a little silly..

Here’s what it should look like. I look like a clown! But, for now, that’s okay. Because we are going to change the elements in the layer to make it look normal.  From the layer drop down menu, select soft light. Then, once soft light is selection, change the opacity to anywhere from 9%-15%, depending on how bright you want your cheeks. Then flatten/merge your layers and you are finished! You have just completed your very first photoshop tutorial. How do you look? Was it that hard? Tell me what you think and check out my final product below!