Photoshop tips & Tricks

These are a selection of tips and tricks on Photoshop that I picked up along the way.

Slimming a person
1. Select a portion of the area to slim. Copy-Paste. A new layer will be added.
2. Edit-Transform-Warp.
3. Drag the points on the warp to change the shape of the area under the warp.
Sometimes if there's a sharp border between the adjusted layer and the base layer, add a layer mask on the adjust layer and paint with White (50% opacity) on the boundary of the adjust layer, so the blending is smooth.

Narrowing the whole picture (and also slimming a person).
In Camera raw, select Lens Correction, Manual and adjust Vertical values.

Removing Blemishes and spots on face
Make a copy of the image (Ctrl-J)
Use Lasso tool to draw around spots, stray hairs and marks (anything that casts a shadow)
Edit-Fill-Content Aware. Photoshop does the work in one go.
Done!

Smoothing a skin
First make a new layer out of previously edited layer, using Merged Up in layer panel.
Filter-Surface blur. With settings of Radius: 14 and Threshold:24 (for women) and less so for men. Note: Thereshold value determins how many pixels should be affected.
Alt-LayerMask on the blurred layer - Creates a black Mask.
Brush with White, Opacity:40% and paint over the face to smooth out the skin.
For dry lips, use 70% and smooth out the lips.
Adjust the layer's Opacity to heighten or weaken the effect of smoothing.

How to smooth skin in Photoshop -2
Copy the Background
Filter-Other-High Pass and select 9
Filter-Blur-Surface blur with value of 3 (or 1/3 of High pass value)
Cmd-I to Invert the image then change Layer mode to Linear Light and Opacity to around 50%. Whole image will be blurred.
Hold down Alt and click Layer Mask. - Whole image will be sharp.
Press B to select Brush mode, with White selected.
Brush over the skin to remove the sharpness to soften.

How to whiten teeth
Add Selective Colour layer
Choose Yellow and reduce to -100 so the teeth becomes white. Whole images goes pinky colour.
Press G (paint box) and with Black selected, paint the whole picture. Image return to normal colour.
Press B (brush) and with White selected, paint out the teeth.

Enchacing eyes
Added Saturation adjustment layer
increased saturation to 70-80%

How to blur the background
Click on the copy of the image and select 'Create Smart Object'
Filter-Gaussian Blur
Click on White box of the Smart Object in Layer pane
Then press B for brush and with Black paint, paint on areas to remove the blur.

Remove shine from face
Blank layer - blending mode (Darker) - call it remove flash spots
Take eye-drop (3x3 sample size) an take sample of correct skin colour
with Paint brush and paint over the highlighted skin areas
Then reduce the opacity until the skin looks natural.
Additionally,take a copy of the background (and Overlay mode) and place above Remove flash spot layer
Then add High-pass filter (adjust radius appropriately to show the skin texture) and add back in any skin texture that was lost due to painting in the skin colour over the flash spots.