I’ve been doing a lot of senior photos recently, and one of the concerns that some of my clients have is acne. I’m not one to toot my own horn, but I’ve got a pretty good process for removing acne and blemishes while still keeping my clients looking like themselves. It only takes a couple of minutes, but it gives great results.
Since I love my process so much, I thought I’d share what I do here.
It’s always my goal to have my client look the way they would on their best day while retaining as much skin texture as possible. After all, acne isn’t forever and there’s no reason for a forever photo to have a temporary blemish.
Here’s how I make that happen.
If you aren’t interested in watching a video, I’ve also broken the steps down into text for you here. Let’s start with the before image.
Step 1: Remove Skin Redness
Create a hue/saturation adjustment layer and select just the reds. This will look bad for a minute. Drag the saturation to 100. Then pop down to the color range and drag a little towards the blue.
Then take the saturation back to 0. Now you can bring the hue up to around 15 or 20. Feel free to add some lightness if you want. Here’s where it gets fun.
Invert your layer mask (command I). Your photo will go back to normal, but this allows us to only use that layer mask on the areas we’d like. Set your brush tool to white. Now you can use the brush tool to paint on the adjustment where you want it. In this case, you’d be going for areas with lots of redness. As you paint, you’ll see the redness decrease.
Duplicate your original, then combine your copy with the saturation layer (command E). You should be seeing significantly less red now, but we’re not quite perfect.
Step 2: Use Photoshop’s New Tools
Now we’re going to use the tools that Photoshop just released and make the skin look even better. Go up to your menu and select “filter”, then “neural filter”. Turn on skin smoothing. It’s not going to look great. Say ok anyway. We’re going to use a few tricks to make it look nicer.
Drop in a new layer mask on and invert that layer mask. Now you can use your brush tool in the same way we did in step one. You can just paint right over the acne and the neural filter will show through.
To help find the zits, create a black and white adjustment layer and pull the red to the left slightly. Now they’re very dark and you can see where the acne is. Use the brush tool to paint over those dark acne spots.
Turn off that black and white layer and you’re in good shape (you can even delete it). Merge again! Now the skin is starting to look much better. Just a few more tweaks to make.
Step 3: Brighten the eyes.
Now we’re going to do a few adjustments that will help other features on the face pop. Start by duplicating the top layer, then adding a “high pass” filter (in the menu under filter, other). I like to use it set at 7. We’re going to do the same layer mask trick we’ve been doing: drop in a layer mask then invert it. You can use your brush to paint over his eyes.
Head over to the layer kind selection and choose “hard light”. This will help to sharpen his eyes and lighten them a bit.
Let’s take it a bit further. Use a curves adjustment layer and pull it way up. Everything should be looking pretty bright. But we only want this effect in his eyes. Hold down option and grab the layer mask we were just using to lighten the eyes, then drag it to your curves adjustment layer. Now the brightness is just showing through in the eyes. Feel free to fiddle with the intensity or lower the opacity if you need to. A little goes a long way here.
Step 4: Brighten the teeth
The last area we’re going to adjust is the teeth. Add a new adjustment layer and choose the yellows: pull it all the way over to 100 just as we did with the redness in the skin. Then pop down to the color range and drag it a little towards the greens.
Take the saturation back to zero but put the lightness way up. Drop in a layer mask and invert it, then paint over the teeth to bring the adjustment through. You may need to adjust the color range as you start painting to make the impact you want.
If it’s too much, pull the opacity down until it’s right where you want it.
Step 5: Final Notes
I like to use shift/option/command/e to copy all the layers. Now you can use the spot healing brush to deal with any final acne. Once you’ve done all the previous steps, the spot healing brush works much better. This will give you a nice, finished product.
Group all your layers and now you can see your before and after!
After:
