Adding color to the cheeks and eyelids

Here we're going to take a look at how we can add or enhance makeup color. Now, there are so many different techniques that we can use, yet I just want to show you a couple that will work pretty well. One of the things that I want to do is I want to add a little bit of color to the cheeks. I want to add some life or health here to the photograph and also just a little bit of fun visual interest. In order to do this, I'm going to create a new layer. So we'll click on the New Layer icon and we'll go ahead and name this new layer cheeks. Next step, we'll grab our Brush tool by pressing the B key.

And then, if you hold down Option or Alt, it will temporarily turn this tool into the Eyedropper, where we can then sample a color from our photograph. In this case, I'm sampling this nice, deep red here and I'm going to darken that up even more. And I want a nice, deep tone, because later this is actually going to become a pretty bright hue, and you'll see that in a couple of minutes. Let's click OK. Next, we want a nice soft edge brush, no Hardness there, a little bit increase on the size. Opacity, let's crank that all the way up, and here all that we're going to do is just start to add some of this color.

Now, in this case I'm adding this shape right here and also one over here and it looks overdone. It looks too far too much. Yet keep in mind that a lot of times when makeup artists add color, what they do is they add a strong intensity and then they soften it up. Well, before I soften it up, I'll press 3 to go to 30% Opacity, then I'm going to just paint in a little bit more here around these edges, just have a little bit more of a transition. Well, next step is going to be to change the blending mode, and in order to see the texture underneath this, I'm going to change this to a blending mode of Color.

And this blending mode works really well, already softening up everything we've done, yet still a bit too harsh. And now you can see why I chose that darker color, because this is pretty bright here. All right. Well, here we're going to go to Filter. We'll choose Blur and then Gaussian Blur. And what we want to do is we want to diffuse our brush strokes here. So we're just going to crank this up, looking at the face, so we have this really nice, just soft patch of color right here. Go ahead and click OK. Well, that was pretty easy, wasn't it? We simply painted some color, changed our blend mode to Color and then applied a Gaussian Blur.

Yet, at this point let's say we don't like the color. Well, what do we do? Do we delete the layer and start over? Not at all. There is a simpler way. There is a great shortcut to open up Hue/Saturation, in order to make a Hue/Saturation adjustment to a layer, and that shortcut is Command+U on a Mac, Ctrl+U on Windows. What we can do now is we can drag this Hue slider one way or another in order to dial in the exact color effect that we want. We can of course increase the color or perhaps go for a little bit more of a muted earth tone.

So again, we have lots of flexibility here in regards to the overall color. And I'm just going to modify this a little bit and I think that looks kind of nice. And then I'll click OK. Now, if ever this is too intense, we'll diffuse it again. Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, and as we continue to diffuse this out, you're going to see the color is going to become much more subtle. Click OK. Well, now here we have it, before and then after. Really nice and realistic color shift or color addition to this area of the photograph. Well, how else can we work with color? Let's say we want to work on the eyelids.

One of the adjustment layers I like to work with quite often is called Color Balance, simply because it's a real easy way to mix color. And you can see that we can modify these sliders one way or another, just modifying the overall color or color shift across the image. Well, what we want to do is limit this just to this area here. So we invert that mask, Command+I on a Mac, Ctrl+I on Windows, grab our Brush tool. We want to paint with a nice low Opacity. And then we also want a nice small brush and we want to paint with a low Opacity, we're painting with white, so that we can bring this in incrementally.

We don't want it to all come in at once and really overpower the image. So I'm just painting back and forth here over this area. Now, if you want a stronger effect, just paint at a higher Opacity. I'll crank this up a little bit just for illustration purposes to show you that we can really go for it with this type of color. If you really want to have a strong color effect, you can do that here. And the great thing about this is we can also lower Opacity and kind of create a little bit of a taper, so that this dissolves into that background area, a little bit smoother edge there. Nice! The other thing I love about these type of layers is we can modify the color other ways.

If we want to change the hue, we simply drag a slider, and then we have a very different interpretation of that image. Now, one of the things I want to point out here is many people stop at this juncture, but we don't want to do that, and here's why. If we make a real strong color shift, and we make one that's just super dramatic, we can see that it's not exactly interacting with the underlying tonality very well. Well, we know how to do that, right? What we do is we take this to a blending mode of Color. When I choose Color, what you're going to see is it's all of a sudden going to respond to those underlying tones much more effectively.

Next, here I can then go in and also work on my mask a bit. And what I want to do is just fix this edge I notice. So I'm going to paint with black across that edge and right there as well. Now, this effect is a little bit too intense for me, so I'm going to modify this and change my color mix here. So I've something perhaps a little bit more subtle, that kind of fits the overall image. I think that looks pretty good. Here we have it, before and then after. Our overall before and after, before and then of course now after.

Now, here at this juncture, what we could do is leave these colors really punchy and interesting, or we could lower the Opacity, make them a little bit more earth tone and a little bit more of a subtle accent. And just for the sake of experimentation, I'll go ahead and lower the Opacity here on that color and also on the cheeks. And I want to do that just to illustrate this idea that when working with makeup, a lot of times you need to experiment and then you need to try to evaluate the photograph and say, what will make this image look good? Now, sometimes that's going to take some really punchy, interesting, and surreal colors.

Other times, perhaps a bit more subtle. And here you can see, by using these various color techniques, you can dial in whatever type of color you want, for your particular task at hand.