Step 1: Draw A Rough Selection Around The Outside Of The Nose
Before we can start our digital nose job, we first need to isolate the person's nose from the rest of the image, which means we need to add a selection around it. Photoshop's Lasso Tool works perfectly in this case so select it from the Tools palette:
Photoshop Tutorials: Select the Lasso Tool.
You can also quickly select it by pressing L on your keyboard. The reason the Lasso Tool works so well here is because if you've used it before, you already know that it's not exactly the most precise selection tool in all of Photoshop (that honor would go to the Pen Tool), yet for this technique, we purposely want to avoid making a precise selection of the nose. Instead, simply drag out a rough selection around the outside of the nose as I've done here:
Photoshop Tutorials: Use Photoshop's Lasso Tool to draw a rough selection around the nose.
It's definitely better to select too much of an area than not enough, since we'll be cleaning things up at the end.
Step 2: Feather The Selection
Next we need to make the edges of our selection softer, or "feather" them as Photoshop calls it. To do that, go up to the Select menu at the top of the screen and choose Feather. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Ctrl+D (Win) / Option+Command+D (Mac
). Either way brings up Photoshop's Feather dialog box. Enter a Feather Radius value of somewhere between 20-30 pixels depending on the size and resolution of your image. You may need to experiment a little with the value. I'm going to enter 20 pixels for my Feather Radius:
Photoshop Tutorials: Feather the selection to make the edges softer.
Click OK to feather the selection and exit out of the dialog box.
Step 3: Copy The Selection To A New Layer
With our selection in place and the edges feathered, press Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac) to copy the selection to a new layer. If we look in Photoshop's Layers palette now, we can see our original image on the Background layer and the nose now on a new layer above it, which Photoshop has automatically named "Layer 1":
Photoshop Tutorials: Press "Ctrl+J" (Win) / "Command+J" (Mac) to copy the selection to a new layer.
Step 1: Draw A Rough Selection Around The Outside Of The Nose
Before we can start our digital nose job, we first need to isolate the person's nose from the rest of the image, which means we need to add a selection around it. Photoshop's Lasso Tool works perfectly in this case so select it from the Tools palette:
Photoshop Tutorials: Select the Lasso Tool.
You can also quickly select it by pressing L on your keyboard. The reason the Lasso Tool works so well here is because if you've used it before, you already know that it's not exactly the most precise selection tool in all of Photoshop (that honor would go to the Pen Tool), yet for this technique, we purposely want to avoid making a precise selection of the nose. Instead, simply drag out a rough selection around the outside of the nose as I've done here:
Photoshop Tutorials: Use Photoshop's Lasso Tool to draw a rough selection around the nose.
It's definitely better to select too much of an area than not enough, since we'll be cleaning things up at the end.
Step 2: Feather The Selection
Next we need to make the edges of our selection softer, or "feather" them as Photoshop calls it. To do that, go up to the Select menu at the top of the screen and choose Feather. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Ctrl+D (Win) / Option+Command+D (Mac
). Either way brings up Photoshop's Feather dialog box. Enter a Feather Radius value of somewhere between 20-30 pixels depending on the size and resolution of your image. You may need to experiment a little with the value. I'm going to enter 20 pixels for my Feather Radius:
Photoshop Tutorials: Feather the selection to make the edges softer.
Click OK to feather the selection and exit out of the dialog box.
Step 3: Copy The Selection To A New Layer
With our selection in place and the edges feathered, press Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac) to copy the selection to a new layer. If we look in Photoshop's Layers palette now, we can see our original image on the Background layer and the nose now on a new layer above it, which Photoshop has automatically named "Layer 1":
Photoshop Tutorials: Press "Ctrl+J" (Win) / "Command+J" (Mac) to copy the selection to a new layer.
Step 5: Add A New Layer
The only problem remaining with the image is the area under her nose where I made it smaller, which now looks a little messed up, as we can see below:
Photoshop Tutorials: The area under her nose needs to be cleaned up.
To clean that area up, I'll use Photoshop's Healing Brush, but before I do, I'm going to add a new layer above "Layer 1", since it's always good practice to do your "healing" on a separate layer. To add a new layer, I'll simply click on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette:
Photoshop Tutorials: Click on the "New Layer" icon at the bottom of Photoshop's Layers palette.
Photoshop adds a new layer above the two existing layers and automatically names it "Layer 2":
Photoshop Tutorials: Photoshop adds a new layer at the top of the layer stack and names it "Layer 2".
Step 6: Clean Up The Area With The Healing Brush
With the new layer added, select the Healing Brush from the Tools palette. In Photoshop CS2 and CS3, you'll find the Healing Brush hiding behind the Spot Healing Brush, so you'll need to click on the Spot Healing Brush in the Tools palette and hold your mouse down for a second or two, then select the Healing Brush from the fly out menu that appears, as shown below:
Photoshop Tutorials: Select Photoshop's Healing Brush from the Tools palette.
With the Healing Brush selected, look up in the Options Bar at the top of the screen and make sure you have the Sample All Layers option selected:
Photoshop Tutorials: Select "Sample All Layers" in the Options Bar.
You'll need this option selected whenever you're using the Healing Brush on a separate layer as we're doing here. The Healing Brush works by sampling the color, tone and texture from part of the image but since we're working on a new blank layer, there's nothing on the layer for the Healing Brush to sample. By selecting the "Sample All Layers" option, Photoshop is able to sample from not only the layer we're on but also from any layer(s) below it, which is exactly what we want.
The Healing Brush works best when you set the brush size to just slightly larger than the area you're trying to heal, and you can quickly change the size of the brush using the left and right bracket keys. The left bracket key makes the brush smaller, and the right bracket key makes it larger. It also works best if you click on individial spots with it rather than trying to paint over the entire problem area at once. One final thing to keep in mind with the Healing Brush is that you want to try to sample an area of skin that's close to the area you're healing, since different areas of a person's face have different skin texture, so you don't really want to sample an area from someone's forehead when trying to retouch part of their nose. With that in mind, I'm going to resize my brush with the bracket keys and then sample a good area of skin from below her nose by holding down Alt (Win) / Option (Mac
) and clicking on an area just above the top left side of her mouth. You'll see your brush cursor turn into a target icon letting you know that you're sampling the image from directly under the icon:
Photoshop Tutorials: With the Healing Brush selected, hold down "Alt" (Win) / "Option" (Mac) and click on a good area of skin to sample it. Make sure you sample from an area close to the area you're trying to heal to keep the skin texture as similar as possible.
Then, with my first area sampled, I'll release my "Alt/Option" key and begin clicking on areas under her nose that need to be cleaned up. You'll see your cursor change back into the brush cursor when you release "Alt/Option", letting you know that you're healing areas of the image at this point rather than sampling from them. Again, I'll click with my mouse rather than paint with it, since painting large areas with the Healing Brush tends to give Photoshop too much information to work on at once and usually gives you poor results, so it's best to click instead of paint. I'll click on a few spots to clean them up, and as I do, Photoshop replaces the texture from the area I clicked on with the texture from the area I sampled. It also tries to blend the color and tone from the area I sampled with the color and tone of the area I clicked on. This replacing textures and blending colors and tones is what Photoshop calls "healing".
If I continue clicking on areas to heal them using that exact same area I sampled from though, the area under her nose is going to end up looking like a repeating pattern, which is a dead giveaway that the image was retouched. To avoid turning her skin into wallpaper, I'm only going to click on a few spots to heal them and then I'll hold down "Alt" (Win) / "Option" (Mac) and click on a different area of good skin to sample it. Then, with the new area sampled, I'll release my "Alt/Option" key and click on a few more spots to heal them before sampling from a different area again, repeating this process of sampling and healing, sampling and healing, over and over until the area under her nose looks good.
Photoshop Tutorials: Continue sampling from different areas of good skin by holding down and using them to heal problem areas until the area under the nose looks natural.
Once you've cleaned up the problem areas with the Healing Brush, you're digital nose job is done!
