A Pro's Top Retouching Tricks - Part 2

Raise your Photoshop game with these tips from a professional retoucher

I love working on Cool Images with Cool Creatives! And over the course of my 30 years as a High End Retoucher I’ve built up quite a bag of ‘tricks’ that help me get my work done quickly and efficiently. 

In my previous article I shared 5 of my favorite tricks. And, of course, you gotta know I have more than 5 I wanted to share. So here are 5 more. 

And again, let’s start off with a Bonus Tip! We love those Bonus Tips, eh?

Bonus Tip: https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel

A few versions of Photoshop ago there was a super cool extension called “Color Themes” that among other things let you sample colors from your image and map them onto a Color Wheel so you could see how they related to each other. Unfortunately that extension no longer works, but while we pray for its return we have a tool that works in a similar way, www.color.adobe.com. 

This site features a lot of cool tools for working with color harmonies and themes. But my favorite tab is the “Extract Theme” tab. Here you can upload a JPEG of your image and it will analyze the colors and pick 5 colors from your image then map those onto a color wheel.

You can override what the AI side does and pick your own colors, or move the samplers around to see how different colors relate.

Once you see how they relate on the color wheel you can more easily see how the color harmony might be improved if you shifted one or two this way or that.

To be sure this site is a lot clunkier and more of a challenge to work with, but until our beloved Color Themes extension makes its glorious return this tool can come in mighty handy. 

Now back to our list of Tricks!

1) Finessing a Layer Mask using the Dodge/Burn & Blur tools!

Masking is one of the most fundamental skills one needs to be good at Photoshop. So many things we do rely on good masks, especially when it comes to compositing images together.
A good deal of the time when I’m compositing images together I’ll start off by using the Pen Tool to draw a Path around the person or object I’m going to composite. But no matter how you start off your mask it’s very common that you’ll need to adjust the edge of the mask in different places.
Maybe you need to bring the edge of the mask in closer to hide a touch of the background. Or maybe the person’s feet are not as sharp as their head in the shot. Whatever the situation it’s very common to need to zoom in close and scroll around your image cleaning up the mask in different places.
Doing this with something like the Brush tool requires very careful work as you’re having to repaint the mask by hand. And using the lasso tool with the Blur or some filter takes guess work.
But this is where the Dodge/Burn and Blur tools shine. If I want to bring the edge of the mask in a little I can easily do so using the Burn tool, (burning will make the gray tones in the mask darker). Or if I need to make the hair just a little more visible the Dodge tool can quickly handle the job. And, of course if I need to soften up the mask a little the Blur tool is the one to use.
By bouncing from one or the other and back and forth (with a few taps on the keyboard to switch tools) I can quickly and easily scroll around the mask adjusting it as needed without having to worry about making perfect brush  strokes. 

Using the Dodge/Burn & Blur tools on a Layer Mask can be a quick, easy way to finesse the edge. Here’s quick video I made explaining how this works.

2) Keyboard Shortcuts!

Of all the ways there are to speed up Photoshop the best one I’ve found by far is the Keyboard Shortcuts.
These allow you to switch tools, invoke menu items, apply filters etc all by tapping a key or two on your keyboard. This speeds up my workflow tremendously saving me tons of steps. Instead of having to look up at the menu or tool bar and reaching over to click on the right thing I can just tap a key to switch tools, or tap a couple of them to invoke the Menu command I need.
And learning, or modifying these shortcuts can be easy! (I like to joke that the only downside I’ve seen is that the more my fingers ‘memorize’ the shortcuts the less my brain remembers where that item is in the menu etc.)
You can see and change these Keyboard Shortcuts by going to Edit>Keyboard Shortcuts. One of the best parts is you can customize these shortcuts as well. For instance when it comes to the Healing Brushes in the tool bar I almost always only use either the Healing Brush or the Spot Healing tool. It’s quite rare for me to use the other options in that section of the tool bar. So I modified the shortcut for those tools, (J by default), so the shortcut only works for those two options. That way if I’m using say the Brush to add paint and need to switch to the Spot Healing tool all I need to do is tap “J” on the keyboard. If I want to switch between Spot Healing and Healing all I need to do is tap Shift-J. (I also edited the shortcut for the Dodge & Burn tools so “O” allows me to switch back and forth easily. 

And here is a link that should take you to a web page where adobe has published the list of default shortcuts: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/default-keyboard-shortcuts.html

3) Blending Modes!

An oldie, but a goodie, Blending Modes bring a lot of power to Photoshop. These Blending Modes are basically shortcuts to tweak the way the math is calculated. Scott Valentine wrote a book detailing the math behind Blending Modes, so if you really want to know you can pick up a copy here: https://amzn.to/3Qeg9yM.

But for we mortals all you really need to know is that they give you a lot of power over how one layer interacts with the layers below. In short Blending Modes can lighten, darken, or enhance the contrast of the layers below. They’re loosely grouped in 5 groups.

The first group leads off with Darken as the first Blending Mode. This lets you know that everything in this group will darken the image based on the contents of the layer, or layers using that mode.

The next group’s first mode is Lighten, and all the Blending Modes in this one lighten the image. 

Next we have a group that starts off with an oddly named mode, Overlay. The modes in this group are very powerful and enhance the contrast of the image using 50% as a neutral color. So anything lighter than 50% gray will lighten, and anything darker than 50% gray will darken. 

Each of the modes in this group basically have different degrees of how strong this effect might be. Overlay is the most common one, but Soft Light and Linear Light are used a good deal as well. (Linear Light is an important Blending Mode in a Frequency Separation workflow.)

Some of the most common uses for Overlay are to add Noise, for Dodging & Burning, or to add Textures to an image.

Lest we leave you with only a link to Scott’s book here is a link to an article I  wrote on Blending Modes a few years ago: https://bit.ly/3RoSPj4

4) The Select and Mask Panel!

This tool just keeps getting better and better. Before Adobe added this panel it could take many steps to adjust masks, to grow them, to shrink them, to sharpen them, or to soften them. And finessing a mask for hair took a great deal of hand work, Channel Pulls, or painting by hand etc.

Several years ago when Adobe first added the predecessor for Select and Mask I had a project involving masking the hair on several shots to be used in a poster for a new streaming show. After spending the entire day the Creative Director was only partly satisfied with the results. That weekend I took the files home, where i had the latest version, and in a matter of a couple of hours using the Refine Edge tool in the panel I was able to get a significantly better mask. 

Now that tool, only a small part of the Select and Mask Panel, has gotten better and better! Whenever I have to mask hair, which is a lot these days, I will always pay a visit to the Select and Mask Panel. (Note: while this tool is very helpful it usually gets me about 80-90% of the way there, I always have to do a little finessing afterwards to get the result I need. But this tool often saves me a great deal of time.)

In addition to the Refine Edge tool the panel also features sliders that let you Smooth, Feather, Adjust the Contrast, and Shift the edge of the mask. When used with a tool like Select Subject, discussed in the previous article, these sliders allow you to adjust the edge of the mask easily and quickly.

Lastly, one of the really cool features in the Select and Mask Panel is the Decontaminate Colors adjustment. This slider comes in very helpful when you might see issues where the color of the previous background has influenced the edges of the subject you’re masking out. 

Do take care when using this last feature, there is an option to output the result to a new Layer with a Layer mask. Whenever I use the Decontaminate Colors slider I use this output option so I can check closely to see if the result has affected areas where I did not want it to. Typically this will show up where say Light colored hair meets a colorful fabric on the shoulder etc. By having a separate layer I can copy the Layer Mask to the original copy of that Layer and then use the adjusted layer as a Clipping Group with a new Layer Mask making sure the decontaminated layer only shows up where it helps. 

5) Selective Color Adjustment Layer

This one takes us back to Color Grading. Selective Color is found under Layer>New Adjustment Layer and it provides some really quick and easy to use ways to target colors for subtle adjustments. 

For instance when working on a lifestyle image recently the subject was wearing a blue shirt the client wanted to be a closer match to the teal color of the table cloth. Adding a Selective Color Adjustment Layer I was able to toggle down to the Blues Adjustment and easily add more Cyan to the Blues in the image bringing the shirt into closer harmony with the table cloth. 

When compositing images from different sources Selective Color can come in really handy as the Blacks, Neutrals, and Whites sliders give you a great tool for adjusting those tones in the layer for the element you’re adding so they match better with the environment it’s being added to. 

Getting into the adjustments a little Selective Color lets you adjust the Color of Reds, Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues, Magentas, Whites, Neutrals, and Blacks by giving you sliders to adjust the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black of each color. 

So when I needed to adjust the color of that blue shirt I chose the Blues under “Colors” then pulled the Cyan slider over to the right until it looked about right. 

Adjusting the Black slider makes the color darker or lighter. 

The best part is it’s all visually based, that is you can quickly see the effects you’re getting as you change the sliders one way or the other so it’s easy to experiment with.