Airbrushing and Retouching Part Two

This will only be a fairly short post, as what I’ve done to the image is fairly simple and perhaps difficult to notice. Fortunately for myself, the brown facial marks on the girl in the portrait are quite easy to notice and even easier to remove.

I’d like to show you the beauty of Adobe Camera Raw and its Heal tool as well as the Clone tool. A combination of these tools can allow any blemishes or unwanted marks upon an image to be quickly and easily removed. Simply choose an area that you’d like to replace and move the green circle over something similar.

The size of the area to be healed or cloned can be altered using the mouse. It’s best when these tools are used in combination and I’d at least try and find a similar area of skin in terms of color, tone, texture and such to replace it.

Notice the marks on her face, some on her chin & around her nose.

As this was mostly a rushed job, I haven’t tackled all of the spots and such upon her skin; it was late and I was simply playing about with possibilities after reading a few tutorials online. However, I don’t think that Adobe Camera Raw should be underestimated. To use this:

• Open Adobe Bridge
• Find the image you’d like to edit.
• Double Click (or right-click & choose “Open in Adobe Camera Raw”) on PC
• From there, once you’ve finished playing with the image, you can move onto Photoshop.

I must point out that the alterations you make to your image in Camera Raw are not actually applied to the image itself. It appears that they are stored either as a set of instructions within the program or a seperate file that Photoshop and other programs can then read and act upon.

Quite useful. Extremely simple. Powerful. I’ll post a color-corrected (I know the colors are off) version of the completed image when I move onto the next stage, in which I plan to manipulate this image further.