Portrait modification • Lightening freckles and facial acne

This technique is popular with older people like photographers because they need to reduce or eliminate large chunks of acne, acne or freckles. This approach is useful when you want to decorate a large number of photos without having time to use the methods shown earlier to handle flaws one by one.

First step:

Please open the photo you want to decorate.

Step Two:

Go to the Filter menu and select Gaussian blur from the Blur submenu. When the Gaussian Blur dialog box pops up, drag the slider to the left, then drag slowly to the right until you see the freckles (or acne) blur out. The picture now looks blurry, but we'll deal with it right away, so don't worry, just make sure the freckles are blurred and then click OK.

Step Three:

Select History from the Window menu to open the History palette, which records the first 20 steps you have recently performed in Photoshop. If you look at the list of steps, called historical state, you should see two states: The first one is "open" (this is when the document is opened), and the other is "Gaussian blur" (This is the blur we added).

Fourth Step:

Click on the open state to return the photo to its original state when it was opened. The history palette can also be used with the history Brush tool in the toolbox, so press Y to select the brush. When you draw with the tool, it draws the picture to its open appearance by default, so it is like a "restore brush." It's easy to use, but the real power of the history brush is that it can draw pictures to different historical states. You will see this in the next step.

Fifth Step:

In the History palette, click on the first column on the edge of the Gaussian Blur state. If you are drawing with a history brush now, the picture will be drawn to the Gaussian blur, but we do not intend to do so.

Sixth step:

To avoid simply drawing a picture to a blurry version, go to the options bar and modify the mode Drop-down list for the history brush to brighten. When you draw again now, it will only affect pixels darker than the blur state. So click the thumbnail on the right side of the brush text in the options bar and select a moderately sized soft corner brush in the brush selector. You can now draw with the history brush on the acne area, and when you draw, you'll see that they're much less. If they are reduced too much to make people look "too clean," you can restore the drawing of the history brush by pressing Ctrl-z (MAC:COMMAND-Z), then go to the options bar, reduce the opacity of the brush to 50% and try again.

Before processing: (Click to view larger image)

After processing: (click to view larger image)

Category:

• PS Image Processing