STEP 1
The first thing to do is to locate yourself a photo that is in need of an airbrush. I have selected this – less than amazing – picture of Cameron Diaz.
The technique will work particularly well here because she has a good portion of her face showing to the camera.
You will likely want to duplicate the photo layer so that you can switch between them for a before/after effect.
STEP 2
What we need to do now that we have found our picture, is to select the targets face. There are a number of methods, but by far the easier is by using the quick mask tool.
Switch to Quick Mask mode, then select the brush tool and set the brush to a suitable size for your image (mine was 35px – 45px). Make sure the brush is set to soft (aprox 20% Hardness).
STEP 3
With your brush – paint in the face. It should appear as if you are painting in semi-transparent red. And should look similar to this (i’m only half way through in this image)
STEP 4
Exit the Quick Mask tool by pressing Q, or by selecting the normal mode from the left hand tool panel. You should be left with the face selected.
STEP 5
Quickly inverse the selection to grab the face: Selections > Inverse.
Now that we have selected Cameron’s face, we need to feather the selection to give a gradual transition from normal to airbrushed face.
To do this we’re going to use: Select > Modify > Feather (Just Select > Feather in older versions of Photoshop) and set the feather to about 12px. (This may vary depending on image size)
STEP 6
To achieve the airbrush effect we are going to blur the selection using Filter > Blur > Guassian Blur | 3px radius.
This leaves the image looking a little too smooth, so to add some texture back in use Filter > Noise > Add Noise | 2.5%, Uniformed, Monochromatic.
STEP 7
Just to finish up my airbrush make over i have used the sponge tool to saturate the lips slightly and then the burn tool to bring out some of the colors in the hair and eyes.
Here is a side-by-side before and after!
Great tutorial . Thx for that but why are you inversing the selection after getting out of the quick mask mode ?
wow! thx u! ur awsome! im using it on me and my friends!
thx u!
Vinit, When you create a mask in Photoshop and then exit the mask tool you select everything that was not included in the mask.
In our case we mask the face, so when we exit the mask tool we select everything but the face. So inversing the selection grabs the face again.
Enjoy :-)
Dave
wouldn’t be easier to just Guassian Blur the whole photo with one of those layer masks and using that to get rid of the parts you want? i might be missing something here but that seems to give you more control, and it also lets you reduce how “fake it looks by reducing the opacity of the brush …
I like the “noise effect” first time I hear of it and have been lookin for a way to make pix less fake so thanx for that =D
BUt i think the eye looks a bit too fake. It would be a better idea if u blur the blue u put a little so it doesn’t look so akward :D
GREAT TUTORIAL.
@Vampy – just using blur makes the photo look too fake. The use of the ‘noise’ we add in this method gives the skin back some realistic texture.
@Xena – yes, of course you can alter the eyes to taste :-)
Dave
Thank you so much! I can not tell you how many different places I have looked for a tutorial on airbrushing faces that ACTUALLY WORKS with Photoshop 6.0… This is great!
Thanks again :)
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