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!

Step 1
First we need to create a new canvas with black background. The following settings are recommended:

Step 2
Create your type mask text using the Horizontal Type Mask tool as shown in the picture below:

Using the Horizontal Type Mask tool pick an area where you want your title to appear and type away.

Step 3
Using the Fill tool, fill the inside of your letters with white colour.

Step 4
Next pick the Smudge tool and smudge the edges of your text. For this pick a big brush area around 35cm diameter.

Step 5
Next step is to colourize your text. Bring up the Color Balance dialogue menu from the bottom right bar of your PS, and play around with the Shadows, the Midtones and Highlights as shown and hit OK. This will give you the burning effect.

Step 6
Moving on we will add some Gaussian Blur effect. Simply go to the Filter menu from the top toolbar, hit Blur and then Gaussian Blur and OK.

Step 7
To create the Neon effect you will need to duplicate your image and choose Linear Dodge on the copied layer. This will give the outline of your layer a neon like fluorescent look.

Step 8
Using the Horizontal Type Tool this time we will create another text layer to fill in the Neon fonts we created in the previous step. Choose the same font size and type the same word/words with your original text and overlay the new layer on top of your original one.

Step 9
Finally we will add the glow to our text. Double click on the layer of your Neon object and scroll down to “Outer Glow”. Change the glow color to a red glow. Your Burning Neon Effect is complete!

To start things of, let’s see where you find the patch tool. The patch tool is found in the tools palette, it is possible that at first glance you’ll only see the “spot healing brush tool”, which is the default value of this particular tools suite. By holding your mouse down over the spot healing brush tool, you’ll see the patch tool as the third choice in the little tools menu that pop up.

The short cut key is “J”, and here’s another very quick but useful tip: If you have a tool with several sub-tools, holding down the shift key, followed by the corresponding short cut key (shift + J in our example) - you can quickly switch between the tools in the tools suite.

So now on to the fundamental questions; what is the patch tool, and what can it be used for? The patch tool works similar to the clone stamp tool, where you’re able to sample an area of an image and apply it on top of the area you’d like to ‘correct’.

In our sample image, we see a woman that has some kind of black eye (more like blue and red!) underneath her eye. So what we’d like to do is of course eliminate this using the magic of the patch tool.

The patch tool works very similar to the lasso tool when starting off. All you have to do is make a selection by clicking and dragging out an area around the area you’d like to fix. You can also use the lasso tool to make your selection, if you do use the lasso tool to make your selection, make sure you go back to the patch tool for the next steps.

When you’ve made your selection using either the patch tool or the lasso tool, all you have to do is drag outward from starting inside the selection. Drag outwards to an area that you want the sample area to be. So in this case, we of course want the blemish area to look similar to the skin area. The awesome thing with the patch tool is that you always get to see a preview of the area you’d like to patch your selection with. Nifty.

Now drag-n-drop; What should have happened now is that it has sampled our area and applied the corrections on top of your original selected area. To fix other smaller areas, you can either use the clone stamp tool, or use the patch tool again. The blemish is completely gone, and it took around a minute!

So if you’re working on an image were there’s a much larger black eye/blemish and the clone stamp tool might not be the best option, check out the patch tool and practice!

This tool can be found on the Healing tools. Click on the Healing tools icon but instead of an instant click, click and hold your cursor. After a moment you will see a fly over menu popping and at the bottom the Red Eye Tool. It is a super easy tool, simply hover your cursor over the red eye and click! What it does is sampling the colour around the red eye and replacing the red pupil with a matching natural colour, from the top toolbar menu you can set how dark you want the pupil colour to be, 50% is an average colour with 100% being super dark and 0% quite light.

With laso tool selected start drawing the outline of the teeth. Use the shift key to correct the parts of the teeth you have missed and expand the selection. When your selection is ready zoom out and hit ctrl+alt+D, this will open the Feather Selection dialogue box, and choose to feather this by 1 pixel. This way you will avoid the rough edges on your selection.

In order to whiten the teeth select the Curves Adjustment Layer, on the diagram that will open put your pointer in the middle and the input about 135 and the output to 132. So using the laso, then feathering the selection and using the curves adjustment layer is a quick way to whiten the teeth on the models of your images.

Also, check out how to make digital cosmetic surgery. Remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder!

The first thing is ‘letter spacing’ or ‘tracking’ with another word. It is simply the space between the letters in a word, you can stretch them to make it equal to the word below, or squash them together to make your word look special.

The more detailed bit called ‘the kerning’, it is the space between the individual letters. It’s important not to confuse kerning with tracking, even though it’s very common. Here’s a more detailed picture to show the difference between the two.

The third thing to know when working with typography is called ‘leading’, it is the space between two lines of types, whether it is the lines of sentences or a list of words. The leading is simply how close the lines are together.

Play around with these three, and you’ll quickly find yourself a master at creating typography and cool logos!

The last mode will bring up the color table, from it drop down menu, Choose black body. Using ctrl+a select everything in your image and then ctrl+c to copy everything. Then with F12 bring back the original image and straight after ctrl+v to paste the modified image you just created with the 3 steps mentioned above.

Finally drag the Blend mode to Luminosity, if you want to touch it up add a little noise by Select -> Filte r-> Noise, 3% should be sufficient for a relatively small photo and that’s it!

On our example picture there is an unwanted piece of trash at the left of the image. We want to get rid of that but without giving the image a fake appearance.

What we need is the Clone Stamp tool, this will allow us to choose a sample from our image such as the grass in the background and paint that over another location on our image.

Once selected move your cursor to a clean area of your image near the item you want to remove and press and hold the alt key and click. Now that we have the sample we can begin painting over the unwanted item. As you paint using the Stamp Tool you will notice that the object is replaced with the pattern of the area you selected earlier. Every now and then you may need to reselect an area to use as pattern so that the result will not look very canonical.

With some practise and a little time you can easily perfect this method.

First go the top tool bar of your Photoshop UI and choose Image-> Image Size. A dialogue box will open and what you want to do is play around with the Width and Height boxes you can set these in centimetres, pixels and inches.

Tip! A width of about 200 pixels is as big as a thumbnail image, if you set the width to 200 you will notice that the height will change to 163, this is because the box constrait proportions is checked.

You can uncheck the Constraint Proportions box if you want to achieve a custom size for your image but keep in mind that this might distort your image.

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But don’t be too disappointed. With some good photography skills and a little digital editing, you can create great looking pictures on your own. In this tutorial we’ll look at how you can fix your make up after the pictures are taken. This is called airbrushing in the digital editing world. We’ll start with a picture of a girl, note that her face has some blemishes that we’ll need to fix to make her skin smooth and silky.

Open the picture that you wish to edit in Photoshop. Create a duplicate layer start working with that. Photoshop has a very useful tool which is called “spot healing tool” to remove spots from skin. Use it to remove any obvious spots. Dont’ worry if you couldn’t remove all of them, we’ll get to them a bit further down in this tutorial. To achieve a soft skin look, we will use the filter Noise -> Dust & Scratches, keep the radius just enough - making the skin look soft and graded, don’t care about the eyes.

Now we will do further removal by bluring the image. Use the Filter Blur -> Gaussian Blur with a radius around 3 depending on the size your image. Tweak to find the right value.

Also, make sure to add a natural look. To do this we’ll put a uniform noise to the picture. This is achieved using Filter -> Add Noise, use the settings below:

Our skin is ready, now we need to graft it on the picture. Make sure you’re on the skin layer. Add a layer mask to it. Fill the mask with black color using the paint bucket. This will hide your skin layer and the original picture will appear. Select the brush tool and start painting over the skin with white color. Your new smoother skin will start appearing as you paint. Paint only the skin part leaving the eyes and the lips intact. To check out what you have painted, change the blend mode of your masked layer to ‘difference’ and the opacity to 75%. You can now clearly see what part has been painted and what haven’t.

Once you are finished with painting the skin. Turn back the blend mode to normal and the opacity to 100%. Here’s the results that you should see at this point:

The skin has improved drastically without losing any detail on the places which matter - like eyes and lips. Here’s the before and after picture, take a closer look at the details:

Using this technique you can improve your pictures without spending on expensive make up products. It’s reasonably easy to implement and looks great! Hope you enjoyed it.

Here’s another airbrush technique.