Look your best
George Cairns shows you how to retouch your portraits in minutes
Perform quick and easy digital retouching to improve a portrait
Before having their photo taken, the subject of a portrait shoot will want to look their best. They’ll brush their hair and may well apply make-up to create the appearance of healthier-looking skin. Despite personal grooming, however, the end result may be disappointing; they may be having a bad skin day and be unable to successfully conceal a spot, for example. A decent lens and flash lighting can also reveal every pore and blemish, which may not be especially flattering.
Professional photographers can pop filters, such as the pro-mist filter, over their camera’s lens to add a healthy glow to a subject’s skin and give it a smoother, more flattering appearance. We can produce similar results using a range of Photoshop Elements’ retouching tools.
If you’re new to Elements then the Guided Edit mode has a handy Perfect Portrait Touchup option that takes you step-by-step through the techniques you need to use to create a more flattering portrait. It gathers all of the most useful retouching tools together in one place, and enables you to smooth skin, conceal spots and even brighten the whites of your subject’s eyes.
As well as presenting you with these handy retouching tools, the Guided Edit mode also introduces you to useful filters like Diffuse Glow. This enables you to fake the skin-flattering pro-mist filter technique employed by professionals without the need for specialist camera kit. Guided Edit also boasts other useful options, such as Restore Old Photo, so you can enhance old family portraits by removing dust and scratches.