How to Add Skin Texture to a Photo in Photoshop
One of the difficult tasks of retouching skin is maintaining skin texture. With modern retouching trends leaning more to realism, its important to know how to preserve skin texture. However, what do you do if there is barely any skin texture to preserve or sample from? Well, you are going to need to create the texture or maybe find a good skin texture brush to use. In this video, Aaron Nace of Phlearn demonstrates a great way to create skin texture with a custom brush and how to use it.
Here’s a little break down of the Aaron’s steps:
- The first step is to create a blank document in Photoshop.
- Add a new transparent Layer above the white Background Layer. On this layer you will create black speckle shapes to make the texture. Aaron mentions its best to make these shapes different in space, shape and size. You also don’t want to make these speckles perfectly round, since skin texture is not perfectly round.
- Next, you will need to turn this speckled layer into a custom brush. Do by going to Edit > Define Brush Preset.
- Now you can use the brush. Open the image you want to add texture to. Add a new transparent layer on top of the image layer(s).
- Before painting the textures, go to Brush Presets and make changes to the Shape Dynamics. Adjust settings the settings close to what Aaron does in the video.
- After Brush adjustments are made, you can start painting the skin texture onto the image. First paint the shadows with a darker paintbrush skin tone color. Next, paint the highlights with a lighter skin tone color.
- Lastly change the blending mode of this skin texture layer to soft light.
- Make any additional changes and adjustments you want to make.
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