Where Art & Engineering Collide

Applying SPF35 In Photoshop

Posted on 24. May, 2009 by Terry Reinert in Tutorials

I was post processing some images or Jeannie from JeannieFit today and came across a perfect chance to write up a quick tutorial on how to apply sunscreen to a model in Photoshop. Well, we aren’t exactly putting sunscreen on her skin… we are just removing the harsh colors of a sunburn using an adjustment layer and a layer mask. What may seem like an hour long task of skin smoothing and color correction really only takes 2 minutes with this technique. Check it out…

1. Open the image in Photoshop and perform the Camera RAW conversion adjusting the vibrance and saturation for the background and clothing. Don’t worry about the sunburn color of the skin. For this image I added a little vibrance in Lightroom to get a nice deep blue sky which did cause her skin to get slightly more red than before.

The image out of the camera – feel the burn!

2. Add a Hue / Saturation adjustment layer above the background image. On the resulting dialog, select Reds from the drop down menu or press Command-1 (Control-1 on PC). This feature allows you to select which color channel to apply the hue and saturation adjustments to. Leaving it set to Master will apply the adjustments to all the color channels (i.e. the Master channel).

3. Reduce the saturation of the Reds channel until the sunburn color is reduced and the skin looks good. Do not go too far or the skin will lack its proper color. Do not worry about the changes to the clothing or background that take place during this step.

4. Add a layer mask to the adjustment layer and fill it with black. You can do this by pressing option when clicking on the Add Layer Mask icon in the Layers pallet or by adding a layer mask and then using the Edit->Fill tool to fill it in. There are multiple other ways of doing this too but those two should be enough to get you started. You will notice that the changes you made to the skin color are gone once you apply the black layer mask.

5. Select the brush tool, set the foreground color to white, and make sure that you have the layer mask selected. Paint just the skin area that you want to adjustment layer to apply to. As you paint you will notice that the color changes made from the adjustment layer are now applied just to the areas that you are painting.

Your layers pallet should look similar to this when you’re done...

That’s it… No more than two minutes to fix what was caused by a few hours of direct sunlight and no sunscreen!

Image after the adjustment layer and layer mask is applied…

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5. Dreamy Look Tutorial

Tags: Adjustment Layer, Layer Mask, Tutorial