No matter how young or old the person, just about every face could benefit from a little bit of retouching. Whether you’re removing drool or spinach from a baby’s face, smoothing wrinkles on a client portrait, removing temporary blemishes (pimples) or permanent ones (birth marks), the amount of editing you do to someone’s face is a very, very personal choice. I know photographers that will completely change the shape of a client’s face to “optimize” the portrait (because the client asked to, of course), and others that will do nearly no retouching at all. 

The “Ideal Version of Yourself”

Personally, my goal is to make an optimized image of a person, which I will call the “ideal version of yourself”. Showing the client an image of themselves that is they way they see themselves. What I mean by that is that I will eliminate any temporary marks — pimples, shaving cuts, that sort of thing. I will soften wrinkles, but not remove them. Any freckles, moles, ages spots or other even scars will generally be left in place (unless the client wants them gone, of course). Sometimes I’ll de-emphasize a mark by making it a little lighter or desaturating it a bit, but unless specifically requested, I won’t remove it. And I’ll never change the shape of a face.

This is of course my own personal philosophy. At the end of the day, I’ll do whatever the client asks for. But based off of this, let’s look at a portrait and see how I’d work with it.

In DxO PhotoLab, this is pretty straightforward using the Repair tool. All you have to do is…

1. Click the Repair tool
2. Choose a brush size
3. Start clicking on blemishes. You should adjust the brush size as you go, making them slightly larger than the area you intend to remove. You can also click-drag to remove a mark  like a strand of hair.
4. To view the repairs that you’ve made, click the Show Masks button

 (post continued on DxO's Blog; link below…)

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