There are five quick tips for retouching in Photoshop that are essential to know. Learn them so you can retouch your photos. 

These 5 tips are the result of years of experience and are very useful to you.

1- Select a part of the image according to the brightness for retouching 

In Photoshop you can select a region based on the brightness of an image (bright pixels). The easiest way to select bright pixels in an image is to press Ctrl + Alt + 2  for retouching .

If you do not remember the keyboard shortcut , you can do this by holding down Ctrl and clicking on RGB in the channel panel for retouching .

While selecting is enabled, you can create an adjustment layer to apply the changes.

This The adjustment layer only targets the bright pixels of your image. If you try, you will notice that you only affect bright pixels.

You can target dark areas by reversing the selection. To do this, select the new layer that you named the mask and click the Invert option in the Properties panel .

However, if you make adjustments, dark pixels will be affected, not light.

2- Dot washing tool modes – light and dark

A quick and efficient way to get rid of wrinkles, blemishes and other facial anomalies is to use the modes available in the Spray Healing Brush Tool and Content-Aware.

First, think about the blemishes, wrinkles, or other facial abnormalities that you are trying to eliminate. Do you want darker or lighter skin tones?

In this case, the wrinkles are darker than the skin color. This means that you need to lighten those wrinkles.

Select the Spot Healing Brush Tool, in the Settings bar, click Content-Aware, and in the Mode drop-down menu, select Light.

Then start painting with a small brush on the wrinkles and remove them. But you will not miss important information and highlights. The Spot Healing Brush tool only targets dark pixels that are wrinkles.

If the spots and blemishes on your skin are lighter than your skin, such as light wrinkles on the lips, select Darking from the Mode drop-down menu and remove their color.

 

3- Open an image in two windows

In Photoshop, you can open an image in two windows and put them together to work on the details and the big picture at any time. This method is great when you work with two monitors. But even with a monitor, this technique can be very useful.

To open a document in two windows, go to:

Window> Arrange, “New Window for [File Name]

go. Then select Window> Arrange> Two up Vertical to put the two windows side by side. You can then zoom in on one window and not on another.

These two files are not separate. They are one document, and any settings you make will be immediately displayed on the other.

4- Purposeful selection with color range

The Color Range command can be a great tool for selecting difficult areas of an image. However, if you simply use Color Range on a complex image, it may not give you the results you want. Sometimes there is a lot of data about an image and you only have to focus on one area.

To focus the color range on only one area, select a select area around the desired area. A simple rectangular selection would be appropriate.

 

Then go to Select> Go to Color Range and you will see Currently the Color Range focuses only on the selected area.

Select the red color of the shirt using the eyedropper and then use the fuzziness slider to adjust the selection.

Keep in mind that otherwise you may choose the hands or railings on which it rests, because the skin color and the color on the grater are much bolder than the red color of the clothes you are trying to choose.

But you can use the Lasso tool to select these areas quickly, only the red of the shirt is selected.

By selecting active, you can create a Hue and Saturation Adjustment layer that only targets red on the shirt. Use the color slider to change the color of the shirt.

5- Use Lab color lab mode

Most of the time you work with RGB or CMYK in Photoshop. But there is another color mode that you can use that is very useful in certain situations. If you go to Image> Mode> Color Lab, you can change the color mode of your photo to Lab.

Color Lab mode has three channels Lightness, A, and B.

• The Lightness channel contains image details and light values.
• “A” is the relationship between green and red. This is the same color used as the color slider in Lightroom and Camera Raw.
• “B” is the relationship between blue and yellow. This is the same color as the Temperature Slider in Lightroom and Camera Raw.

One of the major advantages of working with Lab color mode is that the lab separates the color details (brightness) from the color. This separation allows you to work with color without affecting the details or vice versa.

 

For example, you can green a shirt red by repeating the layer, then selecting “A” from the channel panel, and pressing Ctrl + I to reverse the channel.

Note that the color of the image has changed, but the details remain.

You can use the mask layer so that the relevant settings include only the clothes.

Another advantage of using Color Lab mode is that you can make the photo brighter without affecting the colors. If you apply any smoothing filter to the Lightness channel, you only target the details and leave the color for retouching .

The following example has a sharpening filter that is common in both cases The image is also applied by changing the Lightness channel in the Color Lab. I have created an extreme effect to make it more noticeable.

Note that when applying the Sharp filter to the Lightness channel (right), the color at the edges does not saturate or change. They just get lighter or darker. While in normal photo layers, edge pixel saturation increases.

 

As a side note, Photoshop does not include image details when adding a Sharp filter. These details are also corrected by adding contrast to the edges of the photo for retouching .