Removing wrinkles from a person in a photograph is a fairly easy process. There are different ways of getting rid of wrinkles in a photograph but the best way (and the easiest way) I’ve found is to use the “spot healing brush tool” (see below). Other ways leave noticeable blur marks and are more time consuming and less accurate.
Follow these steps to get started with removing wrinkles from your subjects face or body in your photographs.
1. Open Photoshop and open the image you want to edit
2. Right click on the background under the layers window and click “duplicate layer”. You now have two layers.
3. Ensure your second layer is the active layer and click on “spot healing brush tool” in the sidebar.
4. Find an area of skin close the wrinkles that shares the same color and light attributes. Click “alt + left click” now move the spot healing brush tool over the wrinkles and either drag it along in the direction of the wrinkles or just “dab” it on the wrinkles one click at a time. If you make a mistake simply just click the “undo” button under “edit – undo”.
During this stage it’s important to ensure you’ve selected the right brush size. If the brush is too large, it may create noticeable marks on your photograph. For the image above I used a brush size of 7 (you can change this in the upper left hand corner of Photoshop).
It’s important to enlarge the photograph so you can see the small details of the wrinkles. It’s easy work, but to get it done perfectly you must spend some time trying different approaches and brush strokes to removing the wrinkles.
In the image above (top of blog post) I removed the majority of the wrinkles in the man’s face, especially around his eyes. Notice the changes are subtle as to make the photograph still appear natural. You can’t remove all of the wrinkles from the body or face of a 40 or 50 year old without the image looking unnatural.
Good luck with you photo re-touching!