How come celebrity models do not look exactly the same in the magazines as in the real life? Of course there is something going on behind the curtains, but what is happening?

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By now, we know that photo editing tools such as Adobe Photoshop can be used to manipulate photos and make people look “good”. Have you ever wished that you could look thin whenever you look at your photos? If you ever wished for a miracle, this tutorial is here to help you. In this step-by-step guide, we’ll explain how to make someone look thin using Photoshop.

Step-by-step tutorial:

1. First, open the picture you want to modify. Go to File -> Open and then choose the photograph.

2. Then, go to Filter menu and select Liquify.

3. A separate window will be opened for performing the Liquify effect.

4. In the new window, select the “Freeze Tool” for freezing the areas of the photograph that you do not want to make thin. As an example; the head is an area that we do not wish to make thin. Therefore, the background and the head area will be frozen using Freeze Tool.

Once the areas that do not need to be touched are marked, they will be highlighted in red. You can use different brush sizes (select from the right panel) carefully selecting the areas you do not want to be retouched. If you want to magnify the image for better visibility, press “ctrl and +”. Now, we’ll start with the body areas that are not highlighted in red and make them slightly thinner.

5. Now that you’ve got the parts that you do not want touched; go to the “Wrap Tool” located in the toolbar.

6. Make the brush size bigger, about 125 will be the ideal. Now touch the edges of the body area with the selected brush to make them look thin. For touching up the fine areas, simply use a smaller sized brush. Carefully touch the edges of the area while making sure they do not look abnormal or out of shape. Once you are done with thinning the body area, you’ll get an image similar to the one below. The cleared areas are the areas that have become thin.

7. Once you are done with the thinning, click OK in the right panel to go back to the image’s main window.

8. Save the thinned image and compare it with the old one. You will instantly see the difference between the two — differences such as the ones shown below are not uncommon.

Final words on making someone look thin using Photoshop

Making someone look “good” with Adobe Photoshop is just a couple of minutes away and it is as easy as this mini-guide illustrates. You can make anyone look thin with a few clicks of your mouse but do remember that your creativity and artistic ability needs to be used when attending to the task. So go on and make people look slim and beautiful!

We will start off by enlarging the breasts and for this we will use the Liquify dialogue box and from this we will choose the Bloat tool. Once you have the Bloat Tool selected you will need to adjust the brush settings, we will go for a rather big brush size in this case around 400. Set the brush density pretty high as well whereas the brush height is up to your liking. Once you have your brush settings done click and hold around the area you want to enhance. Click OK to accept the changes.

Now that we have enlarged the breasts we will give them some depth by using the Burn tool. Choose the burn tool from the left sidebar and at the top at the settings select midtones and set the exposure at 20%. On Photoshop CS4 check off the protect tones.

Once done that go to the cleavage area and burn the area there slightly. Finally take the Dodge tool select midtones and exposure again around 20% and paint right next to the area you burnt before to lighten it up and add more depth, until you get the desired effect.

We can apply the liquify filter to correct some facial features and augment a photo for example and is particularly handy if you make a lot of digital photo processing and this is how we do it. After we have our photo ready, we choose Filter -> Liquify and this will bring forward a separate panel with our picture.

On this panel if you zoom in you will notice that photoshop has applied a Mesh on top of your picture.

On this view we are able to bend and shape the edges of our pictures. This is handy for a variety of reasons examples are the bend of the nose, the openness of the eyes etc. It is very important not to overdo it with this feature because in the end it can be quite obvious that we used a filter.

Tip! If you don’t see the Mesh, click on the bottom your right hand side bar View Options-> Show Mesh. For more details choose Mesh Size -> Small.

By clicking and dragging on the facial characteristics we can affect the way a face looks. For instance try to spot the differences on the following two pictures. Can you spot the enhanced areas?

It’s a good idea once you get the liquify filter done to go to Fiter -> Blur -> Surface Blur and it only affects the surface of your image and it’s a good way to smooth out the skin look on your portraits.

Hope you have fun trying out this feature!

In this tutorial we will learn how to make people look old. Using photoshop, we can do something in a short amount of time, which would take nature decades to accomplish. Using the proper tools, you can create a realistic old looking person out of a young vibrant individual. But to make it believable, we need to understand the natural effects on the face of an old person to imitate it through photoshop tricks.

The main areas to be worked on should be: wrinkles, white hair (unless you don’t want them dyed), loose falling skin, probably double chin too if the lady is fat. Adding accessories like a scarf or glasses can be good as it creates realism. Now, let’s start afresh with a picture of a young lady.

We will use the picture of gorgeous Aishwarya Rai who is a popular actress from the Indian Film Industry. Let’s make her ready for the role of an old lady in some random movie of your choice.

Adding Wrinkles
Our first task is to add wrinkles under the eyes of our actress. Select the ‘Burn tool’ which is most suitable for this task with these settings:

Use it to create natural impressions under the eyes like you use a brush. Draw multiple thin lines starting from the edge of an eye and go down along the curve. You should now get a result which that looks something like this:

Observe the slight wrinkles in the picture above. Create more these below the cheek, chin and the neck area as well as under the eyes. Also, use the ALT-button while drawing these wrinkles to activate ‘dodge tool’ - which makes a popping out effect. It should appear like veins on the neck part. Try practicing a little and you will understand the need of both tool (burn and dodge). Now your picture will look something like this:

Using the same technique, draw wrinkles on the forehead. Create horizontal curvy lines of worry on her forehead. Your result will now look something like this:

Now we will create a pull-down gravity effect on the skin. For this we will use the ‘Forward Warp’ tool under the Filter > Liquify menu. Use this to slightly pull the under-eyes, cheeks, and chin down. Also pull the nose down and make it slightly bigger. The nose is one part of the body that always keeps growing which is of course something we’d like to take into consideration while manipulating. Take care while adding these effects as too much would make her look like a zombie.

We must also makes the lips thinner as lips tend to become thinner with age progression. You can do this by using the warping tool we used before. Now your result should look something like this:

So now we’ve made her skin look old but her hair is still black as it was when we started. Let’s fix her eye-brows first. Select the brush tool, and choose the grass brush with following settings.

Open the brushes pallet from the Window > Brushes menu or by pressing the F5 shortcut key. Check ‘shape dynamics’ and use following setting. Tick the Flip Jitter on for both X and Y.

Choose a white foreground color and a Grey background color. Then create a new layer and start drawing on her eyebrows to paint white hair with a natural looking jittery effect.

Now we need to apply the same technique to her hair. On a new layer, paint using a brush. Keep the brush size low to something like 3 or 4. Keep the opacity low at about 30%. Draw strings of hair repeatedly in the direction of the hair flow. Your picture should look something like this:

If you wish, add artifacts like glasses to create more interest and intellect.

Here you see the original picture along with the after-shots. Amazing result, isn’t it?

Using this technique you can impress your friends by creating their future look. It will need some practice and patience but is worth the effort.