5 Quick Tips For Retouching Women's Faces in Photoshop

Befor I begin, I just want to point out that retouched photos often look unrealistic next to the original, because, well, they are. It's good to stand back and look at your final product by itself to decide if it looks realistic enough for you. Okay, now on with the tips:

1. Negative clarity in Camera Raw. Drag the clarity slider just a tad to the left to soften the skin and reduce wrinkles and lines.
2. Adjustment brush in Camera Raw to whiten teeth. This might be especially important if you're trying to make the picture more colorful everywhere else....the vibrance slider is infamous for making teeth look like they haven't been brushed in decades. Just use the adjustment brush to paint over the teeth, and slowly start to bump up sliders like brightness and exposure, and bump down the saturation until it starts to look unreal. It's easy to go overboard.
3. Remove under-eye bags with Patch tool. Select the patch tool (it's in with the healing brush and spot healing brush), draw a selection around the "bag," then drag the selection just below so it can be sampled in to replace it. You will probably want to fade the effect a little because it always looks unreal. Repeat on the other eye.
4. De-squint the eyes using liquify. Liquify can be your best friend or your worst enemy. In the picture I used here, I was squinting a lot, almost to the point of not being able to correct it, but I very lightly placed the bulge brush (it's the 5th tool from the top in CS4) over each eye and held it down for about 1/4 of a second. The size of the brush and how long you can hold it down without the eyes starting to look cartoonish really depends on the size of the photo and how much the person was squinting. Experiment.
5. Add a little blush! Everyone could use a little blush on their cheeks. You can even use the plain ol' brush tool for this one. To pick a color, I usually use the dropper tool to select the color of the subject's lips. Make the brush the size of the apples of her cheeks and run it at about 22 percent.