Tip #2701 - Freckles Be Gone
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Freckles
Be Gone
Do you have freckles?
Do you wish you could take them away sometimes? Or maybe you have a child
or grandchild that would like to see what they would look like without
freckles. Although freckles are kisses from angels, it's sometimes nice
to change your look, at least in photos. If you're interested in that,
this tip is just for you!
Let’s start
with the image above with freckles. (This is where you would open your
image that you would like to change in Photoshop). After you open it,
duplicate the layer by dragging the layer with the picture on it to the
new layer button or with your layer selected, go to Layer,
Duplicate Layer. At this point, you should have two layers.
One will be the original and the other is a copy.
Now, with the copy
layer selected, go to Filter, Blur,
Gaussian Blur. Play with the slider until the freckles
are cleared. The main point here is to keep a balance between too much
blur and too many freckles showing.
Now, we are going
to play around with the history brush. Most people don’t use it
too much, however, in this job, it’s a very important part of the
operation. Go to Window, History to
bring up the history palette.
In the history palette
that opens up, click on the duplicate layer so that the image returns
to the original form it had before we used the Gaussian Blur. Click once
in the little box that sits toward the left of the Gaussian Blur state.
Now, we need to select the History brush tool from the
tools palette.
We are just going
to paint over those freckles to remove them. To avoid creating a blurry
version of the picture, change the History brush’s mode to "lighten."
The last step in this
exercise is to paint over the freckles in the image with the history brush.
Feel free to change the setting of the brush, such as the opacity or the
brush size to make the image seem more real. We don’t want the image
to look too "clean" either. Zooming into the image for extra
finesse is also a good idea. After I went through these steps, this is
what I ended up with:
You can remove freckles
from almost any kind of image. Some of them might prove challenging, but
by tweaking the history brush settings and zooming in, you should be able
to get rid of even the most troublesome of freckle marks. So, say hello
to freckle freedom. Well, digitally at least!
~ Yogesh Bakshi
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