A friend told me that, while working a photography internship in New York City, he found a folder titled “SUPER SECRET DO NOT OPEN” on one of the photography workstations. Naturally, the folder was promptly opened. Its contents contained before and after photos of celebrities. He said Jennifer Lopez’s legs looked like potato salad before a graphic artist had painstakingly sculpted her trademark rump.

Despite the funny nature of the story, it’s true. In my brief stint working at a magazine I found that people who look attractive in real life are still unfit for printed perfection. Something can always be done even to the most glamorous person.

While this concept of imperfection is pretty depressing, the techniques used to achieve perfect can be useful to enhance your photos or digital work. Pretty much anything can be altered. No one wants to remember that zit the size of Montana you had or the time your sister tried to cut your hair and actually left a scar on your cheek instead.

Let’s be honest; not everyone looks their finest year-round. A little color correction and healing can drastically improve a photo’s quality.

Color Correction

Basically anything that goes to print or is put on the web has contrast added to it. Everyone needs more contrast. Really. Take, for example, the stunning picture of me below.

I recommend adding adjustments through the layers panel so you can turn them on, off, and edit them later.

Up the contrast a bit and lower or raise the brightness according to your likes. Before the adjustment I appear sad, dapper, and possibly lacking in street cred. Afterwards however, I’m “poppin’.”

Particularly against a white background such as this, a little contrast will add to the picture. Even if you decided to lower the saturation or make it black and white, contrast adds useful depth to the picture and stops it from looking so washed out.

Heal and Stamp tools

The heal tool came out with Photoshop 7 and until CS2 its usefulness eluded me. However, the heal tool and stamp tool combine for a powerful editing combination when it comes to making uggies look like superstars. Typically, brush size is determined by what you need to get rid of, but when it comes to hardness I recommend using between 60 % and 100% on a round brush; I seem to get the best results that way.

With your options set, all you have to do is alt+click on a part with similar consistency. Heal will match and average colors to the best of its ability, so you need to ensure you’re trying to cover up an area with similar skin types, otherwise it can look strange. Below is an example of the heal tool used extensively.

The above image also utilizes an airbrushing technique, most notably on the hand, that is quite simple. Duplicate your working layer, incase you screw up. Take a large, soft brush, lower the opacity (5%-25%) and select a color in the area of what you want to go over. Keep your brush on normal in the dropdown box and then lightly go over the area to remove skin cracks and discoloration. This method can take some fine-tuning and a couple of tries to do right. Don’t overdo it or people will look regrettably unnatural.

Liquify

This filter tool is perhaps God’s gift to editing. To use the liquify filter, you’ll need to select the area you want to edit with the box selection tool. Liquify tends to use a lot of resources and to avoid bogging down the filter, only select what you need to edit.

There are many options in the liquefy panel and a lot of different uses for them and I invite you to explore all of them, but for the purposes of this I’ll just show the basic liquify tool.

Brush size is determined by what you need to do of course. I recommend keeping the density at 25, otherwise it might move the image too much. Pressure between 75-100 work well, but you can lower it as needed. If you mess up, simply hit “Restore” under the reconstruct options to revert back to the original. In the image preview click and drag inwards to remove ugly potbellies, wide faces, and sausage arms. Try to do it all in one stroke to avoid making the curves look jagged and fake.

Changes made by the liquify tool are subtle, but when combined with other aspects of Photoshop in this article they can be quite extensive as you can see left and below.

Watch as this image rotates between before and after shots. Pay attention to the elbows and knees.

Now, pass the potato salad.