A quick portrait retouching technique using Clarity (CC 2014.1)

- Let's take a look at another technique that can save you time by quickly softening skin and sharpening eyes and lips. We're going to use the adjustment brush in camera raw, because we want to control exactly where the effect is applied. We'll select both the waterfall and the Icelandic girl image, and then use command r or control r in order to open those files in camera raw. Now if you weren't following along with the last video, and the girl still has some little freckles and moles, if you want the image to look the same as what we're looking at, then scoot over to the snapshot panel and simply click where it says "Spots Removed." Then we'll return back to the basic panel.

Then we'll select the adjustment brush by tapping the k key on the keyboard. We're going to reset all of the other sliders to neutral by clicking the plus or minus button next to clarity. In this case, we'll click minus, you can see all of the rest of the sliders are reset to zero, and then I'm going to increase the negative clarity amount to, maybe somewhere around 60. Now we need to check our brush for a moment, so let's scroll down and make sure that our brush has a large feather on it and I wanna change the flow.

I wanna lower it down so that it takes multiple paint strokes in order to build up the skin softening effect. You might also want to show the mask while you're painting, that's up to you. It'll just show an overlay. In this case I have it set to the default color, which is white. I'm also gonna zoom in once by using the command plus icon, or control plus icon on windows, and then I'll use the spacebar in order to center the girl more closer towards the center of the frame. Now I've got a large brush and every time I paint with a brush you can see what's happening.

I'm slowly building up this adjustment, and everywhere that we see that white, that's the mask that's showing. So again I'm going to slowly build up the adjustment, course I can get a smaller brush here and I can go into different areas and I'm not really worried about whether or not I paint over the eyes and lips because I can always remove that in a moment. So let's say I've got that painted up the way I want, now in order to erase the effect from the eyes all I need to do is hold down the option key.

Now when I hold down the option key my paint brush is too large. So I'll use the left bracket in order to decrease the size of the brush, and I also need to decrease the feather amount. So let's go ahead and drag that feather down to maybe just nine or 10 here. This is gonna give me a much harder edge brush, so again I'll get a little bit smaller brush and you'll notice that when your brush gets really small, when it's smaller than those cross hairs, the round circle part of the brush actually disappears. If we wanted to we could zoom in, we could use command plus, in which case now the brush would appear bigger.

But remember, if you let go of the option key or the alt key you're back to painting with the adjustment brush, not erasing, so don't forget to hold down that option or alt key. And in this case my brush is even still too small, but watch what happens when I start painting over the eye area here. You can see that it's basically cutting a hole in this mask that I've created. And of course if you make a mistake just use command z or control z to undo that, and then remember to hold down the option or the alt key. Or if you don't want to do that, just click over here where it says erase, and then we can paint with the eraser.

Basically again we're just punching a hole in the mask. And I'm gonna paint several times right around the eye area here, maybe also in the eyebrow area to make sure that those eyebrows, all those little hairs stay sharp. And then we can move to the right hand side. Again I'm just cutting a hole in the mask because remember when I started painting here, I was painting with a negative clarity and that's gonna help soften the skin but I don't want to soften her eyes. We can also come down here to the lip area, I probably don't want the lips softened either.

And we'll just paint that kind of a hard edge brush, I'm just gonna continue painting. If I wanted to get a softer edge brush, all I need to do is increase the feather a little bit and then paint. If I've made a mistake here we just need to change from the eraser to the add option, and then we can come in and just add this, and have a little bit more delicately right there. You can swap back and forth as many times as you want of course. Now let's go ahead and hide the mask for a minute by unchecking it, and I'm gonna zoom in one more time using command plus or control plus to make sure that we can see the difference here.

I held down the spacebar in order to move the girl's face into the center of the screen. I'll hold down command and option and tap the p key to toggle off the effects. Command option again with the p key to toggle them on. So the great thing about using the negative clarity is that it works without removing any detail. It's not smudging any pixels or covering up any pixels, it's just decreasing the contrast in those areas. So you can see where there was kind of deeper shadows under the eyes and around the mouth here.

When I hold down the command option key and tap the p key those are hidden. It's almost like someone's holding a little reflector right in front of her and bouncing up a little bit of light into her face making that light a little bit softer. Of course we could also do the opposite effect, if you happen to have a picture of a very weathered looking fisherman or you're looking for that kind of gritty athletic look, instead of decreasing the clarity we can go up here and increase the clarity. And that of course increases the shadow.

Not at all the look that I want for this girl, so I'll leave it back down to a negative 60 or 70 clarity. Course I can amplify this effect even more by creating a new adjustment and loading it with a positive clarity. Now here I wouldn't want to paint in her skin but what I could do is, making sure that my flow is set down, I could simply paint over her eye area and maybe over her eyebrows and you can see that it's helping it to look at little bit sharper, maybe down here in the lip area as well.

It also made it a little bit darker though, so I'm just gonna scroll up a little bit and then maybe increase my shadow slider a little bit to just lighten those eyes. I'll hold down command and option and tap the p key to toggle off the effects, command option again with the p key to toggle them on. We think it's too much of an effect we can decrease the positive clarity, decrease the shadows a little bit and then again use the p key before and after. I should also mention that if you've taken the time to set up a variety of different adjustments here, and you think that you're going to use these adjustments over and over again, you can use the flyout menu here next to the adjustment brush, and you can save these as a new local correction setting.

It's almost like you're saving a preset for the brush. So in this case I might want to save this as Add Clarity and Increase Highlights. And when I click Ok, you'll notice that the next time that I select that list, you can see that preset. So this way I don't have to go in every single time and adjust all of my options. If I use the same options over and over again I would simply save a preset. Before we wrap up, I'll just move over to the waterfall image for a minute. I just want to point out that you can also apply a positive or negative clarity slider to an entire image.

So, I'll put back the brush by tapping the k key, now I'm back to the basic panel here, and I can use my clarity slider to either increase the clarity in order to add contrast in that mid-tone area, or I can use it to decrease clarity, softening the whole image and giving it kind of a dreamier look. But since I typically like more control over the areas that have this decrease contrast applied to it, I'll typically use the adjustment brush in a selective adjustment as opposed to the clarity slider here as a global adjustment.