Chapter 6. Slim Shady: Slimming and Trimming

For the entire first part of my career, I never did any retouching where I had to slim or trim my subjects, and I think it’s because I used to call them three or four days before the shoot, and warn them not to eat anything but bouillon from that moment on, until two days after the shoot (or when their check cleared, whichever came first). But, after a while, they started catching on, and I’d find them sneaking a carrot stick or some leafy greens on the set, and before you knew it, I was throwing every Photoshop trick in the book at their photos, including the “Stringbean filter,” the “Beanpole maker,” and the often overused “Scrawnify filter.” So, here’s the thing: I know talking about weight issues, even ones we’ll fix in Photoshop, is a touchy topic, and since it’s my goal to deal with my subjects in a caring and compassionate manner, I go out of my way not to use insulting or degrading terms that might offend. To help out with this, I thought that, throughout this chapter, we could use friendly code words instead. So, for example, where you might read the phrase, “...we’re going to make a slight adjustment to the vertical proportions,” you know that what I actually mean is “...this guy’s a porker.” But, of course, I would never say that in print. Also, if you read, “...his face is somewhat rounded,” what I mean is “...this guy’s a porker.” Now, in some cases, it’s not the person’s physique that’s causing the problem, it’s a fold in their clothing, or the fit of their clothing, so you might see me say something like, “...we’re going to tuck in this fold on his shirt,” which of course means “...this guy’s a porker,” or it could mean “...I smell bacon.” Either would be correct.

Overall Slimming

This is one of the fastest and easiest retouches in the entire book, and yet it’s probably one that you’ll use the most. I’ve never applied this technique to a photo and (a) been caught, or (b) not had the client absolutely love the way they look. The hardest part of this technique may be not telling your clients you used it.

Step One:
Here’s the image we’re going to retouch. If you want to maintain the exact same size (height and width) as the original, you’ll need to duplicate the Background layer as your first step. If you don’t care if the final image is slightly trimmed in width, you can just work on the Background layer (though I still always recommend working on a duplicate layer, so all your retouches are separate from the original, and you can undo those any time by just deleting the layer).

©ISTOCKPHOTO/FLASHON STUDIO

Step Two:
On your duplicate layer, press Command-A (PC: Ctrl-A) to select the entire image, then press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to bring up Free Transform.

Step Three:
Now, normally, we press-and-hold the Shift key when using Free Transform, so things stay proportional, but this time, you’re not going to do that. Instead, you’re just going to click on the left-center Free Transform handle and drag it to the right to slim the overall image. If you look up in the Options Bar, you’ll see the W (width) field update as you drag, and for most subjects, you can keep dragging until you hit around 95% (so, just a 5% slimming), as shown here. This 5% rule works great for two reasons: (1) it’s enough that it really makes a difference, yet (2) it’s not so much that it’s obvious something has been done. There are some subjects where you can go a little further, maybe to 93%, but most of the time, 5% is all you’ll need, and sometimes even less than that. Look at your subject while you’re dragging—don’t look at the numbers until you’re done dragging and see where it lands.

Step Three:
When your person looks “naturally” slimmer, press Return (PC: Enter) to lock in your transformation. Doing this transformation leaves you with some excess white canvas area on the left side of the photo, but luckily, your original selection will still be in place (from back in Step Two), so just go under the Image menu and choose Crop (as shown here) to remove the excess white space and crop your image down to size. Press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to Deselect, and you’re done! There’s a before and after on the next page to show you how effective this quick little move is.

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©ISTOCKPHOTO/JUAN MONINO

Slimming One Person in a Group Shot

This is a retouch you do when there’s more than one person in the photo, but you want to slim just one them. This is one of those techniques that, when you look at it, you think, “There’s no way this is going to work.” But it actually works amazingly well, even though it only takes a few seconds, and surprisingly you don’t use any feathering on your selection, which goes against almost everything we’ve done throughout the book. Go figure.

Step One:
Here’s the image we’re going to retouch, and we’re going to make the subject on the left slimmer, while leaving the subject on the right untouched.

©ISTOCKPHOTO/JASON STITT

Step Two:
Get the Rectangular Marquee tool (M), and make a rectangular selection over most of your subject (as shown here). It’s okay that we’re selecting right over her nose and part of her mouth, though I generally try to avoid having the selection go right through an eye.

Step Three:
Now, you’re not going to feather the selection to soften it and you’re not going to put it on its own separate layer (both of these are reasons why this retouch doesn’t make much sense, but stick with me, because it really works). Instead, press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to bring up Free Transform around your selected area, grab the left-center point, and drag inward to the right (as shown here) until your subject looks slimmer. Once they look good, press Return (PC: Enter) to lock in your transformation, and then press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to Deselect. Now, you’ll have to use the Crop tool (C) to crop the image down to size (and to get rid of that white gap on the left). You’d think there would be some kind of seam or line, but there’s just not (as long as you don’t feather). A before/after of the retouch is shown on the next page.

Download this image. See pg. xi.
©ISTOCKPHOTO/BRAD KILLER

Reducing a Double Chin & Thinning the Face

There will be times where you want to slim just one or two areas on your subject’s face, and not affect the entire image, like we did previously in the “Overall Slimming” technique. For reducing a double chin, jowls, or just thinning the face (and leaving the rest untouched), your first thought might be to grab the Liquify filter, but sometimes you can get the job done more efficiently using a different tool, or by using Liquify in combination with other tools, like we’re going to do here.

Step One:
Here’s the image we want to retouch. Basically, we want to reduce her double chin, lighten the shadow areas beneath her chin, and then because of some of the changes we’ll make, we’ll need to finish off with a simple Liquify adjustment, and together these do a really nice job of slimming and trimming the face and reducing a double chin.

©ISTOCKPHOTO/WILSON VALENTIN

Step Two:
Get the Lasso tool (L) and draw a very loose selection around your subject’s jaw and the lower part of the face on both sides (as shown here). Now, soften the edges of the selection by going under the Select menu, under Modify, and choosing Feather. When the Feather Selection dialog appears, enter 10 pixels and click OK.

Step Three:
Go under the Filter menu, under Distort, and choose Pinch. When the Pinch dialog appears, drag the slider to the left to 15% (as shown here). This particular filter doesn’t show a full on-screen preview, so you have to look inside the filter dialog’s little preview window to see how this affects your subject (I chose 15% here, but depending on your subject, you might need to use slightly more or less, but keep the amount fairly low, because you’ll probably apply this filter more than once. As usual, that depends on your subject). To see a quick before and after of what the filter is doing, just take your cursor and click-and-hold right inside the preview window to see the before, then to see the after, release the mouse button (or unclick your pen).

Step Four:
Click OK, and the Pinch filter is applied to your selected area (as shown here). I’ve found that, in most cases, applying the filter once just isn’t enough (it’s too subtle), so to apply the same filter again, using the exact same settings, press Command-F (PC: Ctrl-F).

Step Five:
Now that we’ve applied that Pinch filter, next let’s try to lighten the shadows on her neck to de-emphasize the depth of the double chin. While your selection is still in place, press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to put that area up on its own separate layer. Now, to lighten those shadows, you could use the Dodge tool at a low opacity, and paint over the shadow until it lightens, but in this case, it’s faster to lighten that entire area. So, go under the Image menu, under Adjustments, and choose Shadows/Highlights. When the dialog appears, drag the Shadows Amount slider to the right until the shadows have lightened up pretty significantly (I dragged it to 63 here). By the way, if your Shadows/Highlights dialog looks much smaller than this one, it’s only because you don’t have the Show More Options checkbox at the bottom turned on.

Step Six:
On this particular image, there’s an orange color cast on the area under her chin, and it’s made more obvious by lightening the shadows in that area (while that might be just on this particular image, I still think we need to fix it while we’re here). Click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and choose Hue/Saturation from the pop-up menu. Then, get the Targeted Adjustment tool (TAT, for short) from the top-left corner of the Adjustments panel. Click it right on the orange part of her chin, and drag to the left to reduce the reds in that area (as shown here).

Step Seven:
Press Command-I (PC: Ctrl-I) to Invert the layer mask on this Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, so the version of her chin with the desaturated reds is hidden behind a black mask. Now, take the Brush tool (B), choose a medium-sized, soft-edged brush at 100% opacity, make sure your Foreground color is set to white, then paint along the underside of her chin to remove that orange color cast.

Step Eight:
Press Command-Option-Shift-E (PC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E) to merge your layers up onto a new layer. Now, step back and look at the image. One side effect of applying the Pinch filter two or three times is that your subject’s chin tends to get a little pointy. If that happens, go under the Filter menu and choose Liquify. Choose the top tool in the Toolbox (the Forward Warp tool), choose a really large brush size, and gently nudge the chin back up into place. Also, now that her chin area is much smaller, I’d take that same brush and push in a little bit on both the left and right side of her face to trim the face a bit, as well.

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©ISTOCKPHOTO/QUAVONDO

Thinning Arms or Legs

We use the same technique on arms that we do on legs, and because you’re working with larger areas here, we actually do all our trimming by picking up and moving parts of the arm (or leg) itself, rather than just pushing it around with Liquify. The technique you’re about to learn is probably the most popular method of thinning arms and/or legs, because the results, especially along the edges of the arms and legs, are right on the money.

Step One:
Here’s the image we want to retouch, and because it was taken with a 24–70mm wide-angle lens (at 40mm, on a full-frame camera), the image looks a little distorted near the edges, which makes her arms look much bigger than they actually are, so we’re going to retouch each arm down so they look normal-sized. Again, although we’re doing this technique on our subject’s arms, it works exactly the same way on legs.

Step Two:
Start by getting the Lasso tool (L), and draw a selection that is at least an inch onto the subject’s skin (like you see here), and then as you continue making your selection, make sure you include a large chunk of the background, too (as shown here).

Step Three:
You’re not going to feather the selection (we don’t want the edges to be smoothed). Instead, first let’s just put our selected area up on its own separate layer by pressing Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J). Now, switch to the Move tool (V), and drag the selected area inward toward the arm to trim it right up. Make sure the bottom-left side of the arm (right near the elbow) stays in line with the part of the arm you didn’t select just below it (as shown here). Now, the arm is much thinner, but we have two new problems to deal with: (1) there’s a big nasty chunk taken out of her arm up near her shoulder, and (2) there’s a visible edge from where you made your selection earlier. We’ll fix those next.

Step Four:
First we’ll fix the chunk, so press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to bring up Free Transform. We’re going to rotate this arm piece layer, but before we do that, go up to the Options Bar. Do you see that tiny grid of nine dots up in the top-left corner? Those correspond with the nine points of the Free Transform bounding box. By default, the center point is selected, which means if you rotate, it will rotate your image around the center point (kind of like the way a steering wheel works). However, in this case, you need it to rotate from the bottom-left corner point. That way, the bottom-left corner stays in place (which is want we want, since it’s already perfectly lined up), while the rest rotates. So, in that little grid, click once on the bottom-left corner dot to select it, then move your cursor outside the Free Transform bounding box to turn it into a two-headed arrow. Now, click-and-drag counterclockwise to tilt your arm piece until it lines right up with the rest of her shoulder (as shown here), which covers that chunk. Once it looks good, press Return (PC: Enter) to lock in your transformation.

Step Five:
The second thing we need to clean up is the edge. So, click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to add a layer mask, then press X to set your Foreground color to black, get the Brush tool (B), choose a medium-sized, soft-edged brush, set your brush Opacity to 100%, and paint right over that line, and the edge goes away (as shown here).

Step Six:
Next, you’re going to work on the lower part of the arm (it still looks kinda thick, and now it doesn’t match with the thinning you just did on the upper arm). Start by making a merged layer (a new layer that looks like a flattened version of your image) by pressing Command-Option-Shift-E (PC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E). Then, use the Lasso tool again to make a selection similar to the one you did on the upper arm (like you see here).

Step Seven:
Put that selection up on its own layer, like we did before, and get the Move tool again. Drag the lower arm piece inward toward the center of that part of the arm (as shown here) to thin that part considerably.

Step Eight:
Now, add a layer mask to this layer, and with the Brush tool (same settings), just paint right over the visible edge on the arm to blend your retouching seamlessly right in (as seen here). It’s looking pretty good, except for one thing: there’s a little lump of skin left over from your move, on the bottom side of her upper arm, right near the inside of her elbow (it’s above and to the right of where you see my brush cursor here). That little lump has got to go!

Step Nine:
Create another merged layer (the flattened-look layer). Get the Clone Stamp tool (S), and choose a small, hard-edged brush, because the edge on her arm where you’re going to retouch is a hard edge (actually, after you choose your hard-edged brush from the Brush Picker, you can get better results here by lowering the Hardness amount to around 75%, so it’s a “mostly-hard-edged brush”). Also, make sure your Sample pop-up menu in the Options Bar is set to Current Layer. Now, take the Clone Stamp tool, Option-click (PC: Alt-click) somewhere on the background, but right nearby the area you want to fix (as shown here), and then just clone that little lump away by painting right over it (as seen here). The little plus-sign cursor shows how close to where I would be cloning that I sampled (Option-clicked).

Step 10:
Now, switch to the other arm, and we’re pretty much going to do the same thing, but I think I can save you one step in this process. Instead of moving the piece of arm, then rotating it into place, to avoid having that big chunk cut out, we can just rotate to trim up the arm, which removes the whole chunk thing altogether. Start by getting the Lasso tool (L) and selecting the part you want to move inward (as shown here).

Step 11:
Press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to put that selected area up on its own layer, and press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to bring up Free Transform again. Up in the Options Bar, make sure the bottom-left corner point is selected in the grid (so, the bottom-left corner of your selection is locked into place), then just move your cursor outside the Free Transform bounding box and click-and-drag counter-clockwise to rotate to your selected area inward (as seen here). Don’t lock in your transformation just yet, though. Now, to get the top part of her arm to perfectly match up as you rotate, just Command-click (PC: Ctrl-click) on the top-right corner point of the bounding box, and you can distort that side of your selection as you drag to make it match up perfectly. Basically, it’s going to fall a little tiny bit short, so by holding that keyboard shortcut, you can just stretch it to fit. Once it looks good, press Return (PC: Enter) to lock in your transformation.

Step 12:
You’ll still have a hard edge to deal with, so click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to add a layer mask to this layer, make sure your Foreground color is set to black, get the Brush tool, and paint over the edge to blend it in right away (as shown here). There’s one more thing left to do.

Step 13:
Start by making yet another merged layer. Then get the Lasso tool one more time, and select the top part of her arm (as seen here). Put that selection up on its own separate layer.

Step 14:
Bring up Free Transform again, but this time you’re going to need to rotate, with the top-left corner locked down, toward the elbow (so it rotates around that point instead). So, go up to the Options Bar and, in the grid, click on the top-left corner point. Now, rotate that part of the arm clockwise until it almost meets up with the rest of her arm. There will be a small gap in the skin where it doesn’t meet up again, but now you know what to do: press-and-hold the Command (PC: Ctrl) key, grab the bottom-right corner point on the bounding box, and just drag it until it aligns perfectly with the rest of the arm (as seen here).

Step 15:
Time to deal with the hard edge again: add a layer mask to this layer, and paint in black over the edge to blend it away (as shown here). Note: If you think the elbows look a little too pointy, make another merged layer, go under the Filter menu and choose Liquify. Use the top tool in the Toolbox on the top left, and just nudge those pointy elbows up a tiny bit to flatten them out (I didn’t do that here, but I thought I’d mention it, just in case). Also, while I was at it, I nudged the skin of the armpit on the left to the right a little bit.

Download this image. See pg. xi.
©ISTOCKPHOTO/CHARLES DANIEL HOWELL

Getting Great Abs

If you want to take your subject’s abdominals up a notch, it’s a matter of just over-emphasizing what’s already there (or creating what’s not there) by adding shadows and highlights to add definition and a toned look in that area.

Step One:
Here’s our shot to retouch. We’re going to basically dodge and burn the abdominals to accentuate the lines that are already kinda here, and make them really stand out, which gives your subject’s abs that “cut” look. We’re going to start with burning, so go ahead and get the Burn tool (press Shift-O until you have it). Up in the Options Bar, set your Range to Midtones, and your Exposure to 10%, so we can build up our strokes gradually. Make sure the Protect Tones checkbox is turned on.

Step Two:
We’re going to do our dodging and burning on a separate layer, but we’re going to use a special Soft Light gray layer for this (a layer filled with gray, but in Soft Light mode, it ignores the gray fill, and instead provides us with a great base to dodge and burn upon). Start by going to the Layers panel’s flyout menu and choosing New Layer. When the New Layer dialog appears, choose Soft Light for your Mode, and then turn on the checkbox that now appears below it for Fill with Soft-Light-Neutral Color (50% Gray), and click OK. Now, we’re ready to start dodging and burning.

Step Three:
Choose a medium-sized, soft-edged brush from the Brush Picker, and then look for any natural shadow areas in the abdominal area (no matter how slight) and start painting a few strokes down that external oblique line (as shown here, where I’m painting a dark vertical stroke down to the left of her navel). You’re going to have to paint a number of strokes here to get it to build up, because our Exposure is set so low. Go ahead and make it darker than you think it should be, because we’ll be able to adjust it to the right amount later, since our burning is on its own separate layer.

Step Four:
Now, burn the shadows on the right external oblique side (though there really isn’t an ab line there), and down the center vertical ab line leading down to the navel (as shown here). I know, at this point, things are looking pretty overdone, but again, we’ll tweak this in the final step to make it look more natural.

Step Five:
Next, you’re going to paint a few horizontal strokes coming inward, to the center, off those vertical burn lines you just created on each side. You’re actually going to start right at the line, and then paint kind of an arc downward a little (like the arrow shows here) to help build up more depth.

Step Six:
Now, switch to the Dodge tool (press Shift-O until you have it) to lighten the areas right beside your shadows to give the abs more definition. Use the same settings up in the Options Bar (set the Range to Midtones, and the Exposure to 10%), then choose a little smaller, soft-edged brush, and paint a line just to the left of your left burned stroke (as shown here). This helps make the abs look deeper and more defined. Continue this for the other areas you burned, using the Dodge tool to create highlights beside your shadows.

Step Seven:
Next, choose a larger-sized, soft-edged brush and paint over the four areas surrounding the navel to make them brighter, so they looked “raised” up a bit, which further helps the definition (as shown here).

Step Eight:
Now, once you’re done with this dodging, we can finally tone the whole effect down quite a bit, so we have a natural-looking retouch. Go to the Layers panel, and lower the Opacity of your Soft Light layer (as shown here, where I lowered the Opacity to 40%) until the abs look natural (as seen in the After photo on the next page. Again, how low you go will be different depending on the image, but for this particular image, 40% looked about right).

Download this image. See pg. xi.
©ISTOCKPHOTO/DASHEK

Fixing Clothes (Lumps, Bagging & Folds)

I give the clothes a once over in every portrait I retouch, because whether your subject is trim or not, having funky lumps or folds in their clothes can really be unflattering (and make your subject look heavier than they are, no matter how they’re built). Even if your subject is wearing tight-fitting clothes, you’ll find spots where the fabric has folded or rolled, and it really spoils the lines of the clothing, so it’s definitely worth doing.

Step One:
Here’s the image we want to retouch, and if you look at the right side of her blouse, there are lots of little areas along the outside that need smoothing out.

Step Two:
Go under the Filter menu and choose Liquify to bring up the Liquify dialog you see here. Zoom in tight on the area where we want to retouch (the right side). You can see, once you zoom in, there are all sorts of areas sticking out, pushing in, and just bagging up. What’s going to make this one a little tricky is that window frame behind her, because we’re going to make sure we don’t distort that frame while we’re fixing her blouse. We’re going to use the first tool in the Toolbox, the Forward Warp tool, for most of our retouch, so go ahead and click on it now (if it’s not already selected).

Step Three:
Choose a brush size that’s just a little bit larger than the fold you want to tuck in, and just push it in to the left (as shown here). But wait!!!! The fold we’re working on here is right along a detail area of the window frame, so you’re going to need to make sure your cursor is directly on that line in the wood work, and that you keep your cursor in a straight path going left as you move the brush. That is so it extends that part of the frame perfectly as you paint. Give it a try and you’ll see what I mean.

Step Four:
Fixing the next fold up is easy, because there’s no detail area or line there in the window frame—you can just push it in to the left, and the frame moves with you to fill in the gap (as shown here).

Step Five:
For the rest of her blouse, the song remains the same—you push in parts that need to be pushed in, and if an area has dipped in, you can gently push it back out (just make sure you make your brush size a little bigger than what you’re pushing out). Again, here we’re going right along a line in the window frame behind her, with my cursor starting right on the line, so the frame moves right along with me as I push.

Step Six:
Go ahead and get the easy stuff out of the way. Following along the edge of the frame, like you see here, makes most of this pretty easy and routine at this point, so just keep doing what you’re doing.

Step Seven:
Now, move down to her b-double-oh-tee-why and retouch the area sticking out there, as well. So far, so good.

Step Eight:
When you get to these larger parts of her blouse, along the sleeve, you have bigger areas to move, and you’ll need a bigger brush (if you use a smaller brush size, it will move in little chunks, which makes it harder and more time consuming to even everything out). The problem here is that, if you use a larger brush size (like the one you see here), it’s going to move and distort the line where the window meets the frame. So, you’ll need to freeze (lock down) that area, so it doesn’t move when you move her blouse. Get the Freeze Mask tool (F) and paint a stroke right down that line (as seen here in red. The frozen area shows up in red, so you’ll know which parts are frozen), then just gently push the sleeve area inward, and you’ll see that the frozen area stays locked down. If you want, you can now use the Thaw Mask tool (the tool right below the Freeze Mask tool in the Toolbox) to unfreeze that area.

Step Nine:
Okay, here’s where it starts to get sticky. I want to move this next section of her blouse inward a bit to smooth it out, but when I tuck that area in, it smudges the frame behind her (as seen here, where the bottom of the frame just kind of smears). My first thought was to freeze that area, and I tried that, but it’s just too close to the blouse and it didn’t really work at all. In this case, you’re better off trying to fix this after the fact with the Clone Stamp tool, so that’s what we’ll do. After you’ve moved the blouse, go ahead and click OK.

Step 10:
Now that we’re done Liquifying, get the Lasso tool (L) and draw a careful selection around the area you’re going to retouch. You can make it larger than the area, but make sure you’re careful to keep it right up against her blouse (as shown here). The reason we do this is that, by putting a selection there first, it’s like putting a fence around the area, and keeps you from accidentally cloning over an area you don’t want cloned. So, it’s kind of like freezing her blouse, because now you can only clone inside that selected area. The good news is that you can sample (Option-click [PC: Alt-click]) outside the area, but you can only paint inside it.

Step 11:
Now, get the Clone Stamp tool (S), press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key, and click once on the part of the frame you want to clone just outside the selected area. Click right on one of the seams, and then move straight downward and start painting to clone in that part of the frame (as shown here). One thing that really helps when cloning along a straight line like this is that once you Option-click that spot, and you move your cursor down to where you want to start cloning, it shows a preview inside your brush cursor of what you’re about to clone. I know this sounds kind of funky just reading this here, but once you try it, you’ll see what I mean, and how helpful it is.

Download this image. See pg. xi.