Portrait 'Before & After' Beauty Photo Retouching

Please wait for the page to completely load and then move your mouse over the images to see the "Before and After" photos.

Everybody is beautiful in their own special way. Please remember that :-)

If you have a photo that you would like to have some post processing work done on it then please drop me a line at the following email address with some details of your requirements and I will be able to provide you with a competitive quote.

Alternatively, please use my Contact Form to get in touch.

I can offer the following:

Beauty retouching, in terms of photography, usually takes the form of manipulating a photo to enhance a portrait. To what extreme the enhancement is taken is a personal preference. Some people may want artefacts removed from the photo and others may want to take it all the way to magazine style touch ups.

I offer the service as an option so that the choice is left up to you and your personal preference.

Beauty and photo retouching work can take a long time because it involves a lot of close up delicate work to make sure the original feel of the image is retained. There are quick win methods but I prefer not to employ any of those techniques because they look fake. What I mean by that is with the skin smoothing techniques.

Soft skin techniques, usually called "skin smoothing" is the area that women want the most work and there are two techniques that retouchers employ; The Blur Method or the Dodge and Burn (D&B) Method. The former is the quick win. The D&B method in itself has two methods, the best of which is the pixel level technique. It is time consuming because it requires time to work over the photo at such a low level but it gives the best result because the detail in the skin pores is not lost.

Remember to ask your chosen photographer which method they employ and ask to see their examples.

To make sure I capture exactly what you are looking for, I will use my laptop to take digital notes directly on a copy of the photo you want edited so we both know what is expected. I will also be able to show you some quick edits and talk through what is possible and what is not possible.

Take a look at my dodge and burn retouching samples by moving your mouse over and out of the pictures to see the before and after results.

Sample 1 : Blemish removal and cloning (1 hour later)

The obvious blemishes are removed to make way for the pixel level dodge and burning.

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Sample 2 : Smooth tone over the skin with texture (4 hours later)

The pixel level dodge and burn technique smoothes out the overall tone of the skin as well as reducing the potted effect from the skin pores and thus resulting in a realistic smooth texture. The skin pores are all still maintained.

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Sample 3 : Subtle smooth skin (5 hours later)

The final step is to apply very subtle skin smoothing so that it does smooth out the skin but does not create the plastic look. See how the skin pores are still visible, resulting in a realistic photo.

The following information is for post processing artists and photographers.

Bored? Nothing to do? Have 6+ hours of free time, then why not try your hand at pixel level dodging and burning!

It doesn't have to take ages, it does depend on the resolution of the photo and how much of the face you are going to cover and for the first few times as you try and find your groove, it will be time consuming.

First of all you will need a tablet to do this easily, it is not necessary but your wrist will love you for it if you want to do this regularly. Plus the tablet is great for all the other retouching.

There are two popular methods in doing this technique. The first is with curves adjustment layers and the second is with a gray layer. The difference isn't that apparent. With curves adjustment layers you can get a colour cast in different areas of the photo. At the basic level, they are doing the same thing and I prefer the gray layer method. You can choose what you would like to use.

Dodging is where you lighten an area of the photo and burning is where you darken an area of the photo. With pixel level, you are doing it at a much higher magnification, at the skin pore level. You will also find that you do a lot more dodging than burning. 

Skin Clean Up

Before you start, you should try and clean up any small marks and blemishes so you have a relatively smooth canvas for the dodge and burn. Any obvious spots, fly out hair and indentations can be fixed using the clone stamp or healing brushes. I prefer to use the healing brushes as they control the tonality at the destination. Something that the clone stamp tool does not do and so you can end up doing a lot of fine adjustments. I would use the clone stamp when near to a high contrast edge. Make sure you do this in a seperate layer sampling the current layer and the one below and use a small soft edged brush, to feather the edges.

Ok, so let's get to it with the pixel level dodge and burn technique:

1) Create a new layer, set the blend mode to LIGHTEN and fill with 50% gray. This is your dodge and burn layer. I name this "D&B" layer.

2) Create two new brushes, one as a light brush and the other as a dark brush sampling the light and dark areas of the skin you are about to retouch. Load these colours as the foreground and background colour. Set the opacity of the brushes to 15% and the flow rate to 7%.

You can use black and white if you prefer, your choice :-)

3) Add a GRADIENT MAP adjustment layer and choose the black and white style. This layer is optional. It basically removes all the colour to reveal the luminosity of the image. With dodge and burn, you are basically adjusting the tones and this layer helps with the overall visualisation. I also have a negative gradient map layer if I need help with further visualisation.

4) Add a CURVES adjustment layer and this time put in an aggresive "S" curve to dramatically increase the contrast. This will help to make the contrasty pores and skin areas more apparent and therefore easier to clean.

At this point all we have done is setup the layers ready for the dodging and burning, We haven't actually done any work yet ;-) I have my own action which sets up all these layers for me. When it has run I then go and adjust the curve to suit the tonality of the picture I am going to work on.

This is what my layers palette looks like:



Now it's tablet time!

5) Select the light brush and check the opacity is around 15% and the flow to 7%. You won't be using these settings all the way through. As you get experienced, you will know when to increase/decrease the flow rate. Leave the opactiy.

6) On the "D&B" dodge and burn layer, with the light brush as your selected colour zoom into your image and start painting over the dark areas. I start with the lightening first because pores and most of the contrast comes from dark pixels.

7) After "some time" your "D&B" layer should now look like this. NOTE: This mask has been converted into a negative image to make it easier to see. You can see the very small strokes as well as some sweeping large strokes across the image. 



8) Now work with the dark brush. Look for highlight areas and tone them down. You may want to switch between your two brushes as you work to even out the tone of the area you are working on. That's the X key to switch brushes.

9) Once you have done your smoothing, you may need to degrunge the skin. This is where you try and smooth out any contrasty light and dark tones over the skin which then smoothes out the features. The degrunge method can be done a number of ways, two popular methods is to use the dust and scratches filter or the dodge and burn tools. Yep, I prefer using the dodge and burn method.

Create another new layer and set its blend mode to overlay and fill with 50% gray. Call this the "degrunge" layer. Using a soft edged brush, which is relatively large, say the same size as the persons iris, set the opacity and flow rate relatively low and use your high contrast curves adjustment layer to show up the overly dark and light tones. Now paint on the degrunge layer using smooth strokes and first one down the dark areas using a white brush. Once completed, bring up any overly dark areas using the light brush.

The mask in step 6 shows where I have done this on the same layer as the dodge and burn layer. I now prefer a seperate layer to do this.

If you want to try the dust and scratches method then create a new layer at the top of your layer stack and merge the visible layers onto this new layer. Make sure your contrast layer and black and white layer is switched off. Then blur that layer slightly using the gaussian blur filter. Use settings that smooth out the tones, which will depend on the resolution of your file. Now add a mask on the layer and fill it with black. Use a white soft edged brush at approximately 30% opacity to go over the skin. This will also smooth out the skin too so be careful how you go about doing this.

You should then end up with an image as shown earlier on in this page in the "Stage 5" processing step. If you then want to smooth out the pores and add some of that pastic look then you can add a blur layer, mask it out and then paint it back onto the face.

Best of luck and have fun!
Ram.