Learn how to manipulate a person’s face with Adobe Photoshop, you can call it a digital face makeover which is done a lot by designers for sites and magazines. I don’t like it to do it over the top so it will be over obvious it was tweaked with Photoshop, I like to do subtle changes so it almost (I hope entirely) looks real. Changes to the hair, lips, nose, skin and eyes are always a focal point of attention for my face makeovers.

The before and after preview:

Step 1:
I’m going to mod this picture I took from a photo sharing site. As you can see she has a pretty nice face, things that irritate me the most as a designer are her lips and skin, so we’re going to do those 2 first. Below is a down-scaled version of the original image.

Step 2:

Now let’s begin for real! First we’re going to handle the skin as it’s the most dificult to manage in this tutorial (I like to do the hardest things first, that’s just me  ). Make a new layer called skin and set the foreground color to #bf8971. Now select the brush tool with a hard brush and brush over the original skin until you covered the entire skin, don’t go over the eyebrows entirely, and don’t go over the rest at all. I have a drawing tablet myself so it’s a lot easier for me to brush in parts (especially near the edges). If your done with that set this layer’s opacity to 30% and it’s blend-mode to Soft Light, then you should have something like this.

Step 3:

Make a selection of your skin layer, you can do this by holding the control key and clicking on the little thumbnail in Photoshop’s layers pallette.

Now that you have your skin layer selected select your original layer (usually called “Background” or “Layer 0″) in the layers pallette, and hit ctrl+C to copy only the part we have a selection of, in this case the skin. Now hit ctrl+V To automatically paste it into a new layer, rename this layer to “Skin with blur” and move it on top of the other skin layer. Make a selection of this new layer as we did before, and go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian blur. The reason we make a selection now is that we’re going to apply a blur which will blur the layer and go over the edges of the real skin, this we do not want so we make a selection so the blur won’t go over the edges of the skin. In the blur window set the Radius to 4.3 pixels and hit OK. Set the blend-mode to Soft light and opacity to 14%.
Step 4:
Let’s tweak those nice shaped lips! As I said the shape is nice but she has very skimpy lips, it was probably winter when this picture was taken huh?  Make a new layer called Lips and brush over the lips with the color #df0000. Change it’s blend-mode to Soft Light and opacity to 22%, eh voila, nice lips at your disposal.
Step 5:
When zoomed into her right eye you can see a vein, we can make it dissapear with a few easy steps.
Zoom in to the right eye just as I did in the screenshot above. Now what you have to do is the following, you select a color (as your foreground color) in the eye next to the vein and brush it on a new layer called “Eye white”. You do this everytime the color becomes darker/lighter, it depends on what direction your going. Are you still following me or did you lose me completely? I certainitly hope not
Step 6:
Let’s color the eyes very sublte, make sure your on a new layer again, call it something like Eye color and set your foreground to #515490. Now brush in the eyes with the brush tool. Set the blend-mode to Soft light and opacity to 57%.
Step 7:
This last step is optional. We’re going to make the hair darker which I prefer and think looks better with this Photoshop makeover. So again, new layer called Hair > Select brush tool > foreground color to #000000 (black) > And brush over the original hair, be sure not going over the edges! Make a selection of the hair layer and blur it once again with the same settings. You should have something like this:
Now set the blend-mode to Soft light, and that’s it!
Now that we’re at the end of this tutorial you can see how all the modifications that we did were very subtle changes to her face, when you see this picture for the first time you would doubt yourself if this was photoshopped or maybe not.