Retouching Tools For Boudoir

Excerpt from my book, 10 Ways to Improve Your Boudoir Photography Now.  Note that the images shown here are of a client in her 60′s where tasteful retouching was used to bring out the best, yet stay well within the boundaries of reality:

A question that usually comes up early in consultations prior to a boudoir session is about retouching.  It only makes sense that your client would want to look her absolute best in her pictures.  I reassure my clients right away that retouching is part of the package when doing this kind of photography.  We’re trying to produce an idealized image of a woman, after all.  So, things like skin blemishes, pimples, wrinkles, dark circles under the eyes, and more are handled as a matter of course.  How much of this type of work you wish to take on is up to you, your client, and her budget, but there should be a minimum you are prepared to do.

There are, of course,  ways to get around most retouching.  You can use actions and filters that will simply obliterate skin detail.  Since I  prefer to show more dimension and texture in my images, I can’t rely on blowing detail out all the time.  That means I have to use more professional retouching tools to achieve my look.

I have found a few very simple tools and techniques work the best to keep my time in front of the computer at a minimum and still get great results.  It’s up to you to learn to use these tools, experiment, and build your own style of working, but these are good starting points:

The Most Important Tools in Adobe® Photoshop® for Skin:

The Patch Tool: Allows you to draw a selection around an area and replace it with a better patch of skin in a very seamless way.  This works great for pimples, smaller blemishes, and wrinkles.  Zoom into the area that you want to fix, and work in small patches.  This will give you more realistic looking areas of skin than trying to fix large areas in one swoop.

The Spot Healing Brush Tool: I use this to a lesser extent.  It’s better when you’re faced with lots of small bumps or spots that you need to get rid of, one at a time, very quickly.

The Clone Stamp Tool: Unlike the Patch and Spot Healing tools, the Clone Stamp won’t actually hold as much original texture, at least the way I use it.  This can be helpful.  For bags and circles under the eyes, set it to somewhere between 15% and 25% opacity and target a smooth area of skin as the sample area.  Clone out the rough spots under the eyes using a good sized brush and repetitive stamping.  Doing this in a separate layer (using the setting, Sample All Layers), will allow you to adjust the entire layer’s opacity and blending to achieve a believable  smoothness.  I also use the Clone Stamp tool to clone out distracting hairs, loose threads, unsightly veins in the eyeballs, and other small areas.

The Liquify Filter: Only use if absolutely necessary and near the final steps in your post work on the image.  This is the go-to tool for bringing in a less-than-flattering tummy, or taking a few inches off an arm or thigh.   You can create a composite image from all visible layers onto a new layer and apply the Liquify Filter to that.  I find the Forward Warp Tool to be the most used, with the Pucker Tool coming in a distant second.  Using the Freeze Mask Tool is useful to keep areas near the changes from warping.

The Surface Blur Filter: This is the main tool I use for overall skin smoothing.  Setup a composite layer so you can adjust the opacity (to what degree your changes affect the underlying skin texture) when done.  I like to start off with a radius of about 20 pixels, and a threshold of about 30 levels.  Since the filter will affect the entire image on that layer, you’ll need to add a layer mask with a black fill, then paint out the mask where you want the effect to show through (on large skin surfaces).  Again, adjust that layer’s opacity to bring down the effect as much as possible to attain a balance of real skin texture and the filter’s softening effect.

Simple suggestions, for sure.  But that’s the idea.  They work and will accomplish everything needed, most of the time.  There are a number of books and tutorials available if you would like to learn more about using image editing software to improve the look of your boudoir photos.