On this area I am noticing there is some red around the nose and I am not going to use the healing brush for that and I will show you why. You probably already know why but if I try to heal areas that are going into an edge or an area of contrast, you often can get a smudge mark. That happened to work well. Let me try to undo that. Let me show you a better way anyway to do that. I am going to create another new layer and I am going to call this my Airbrush Undernose.

And with this layer highlighted because this is where I am going to tag it. I am going to switch from the healing tool to the brush tool and then I want to go and I still have airbrush selected but I want a smaller airbrush here. So, I am going to sample this skin color by holding down the Alt key on a PC, Option key on a Mac. It temporarily changes to the eyedropper tool and when I click notice the foreground color switch to that sampled color.

Before doing that, you might want to click on your eyedropper tool and make sure that your sample size is a 3x3 or 5x5 average depending on how big your image is. So, with that foreground color, select it and I am going to go back to my airbrush tool here and I am going to just pop in some color here and I am going to come over here to this side where it is a little red looking and sample this skin tone and I am going to click some of that over here to get rid of that red over here like so.

What I am going to do is blur this layer just to make it blend a little bit better. So filter blur and use your Gaussian blur. And you can dial that in and look in your image window to see when you have got a blend that you like. See there is before and there is after. It blends a little bit better going like that and then we are going to just lower the opacity a bit of that layer and then turn the visibility off and on so you can see these differences, these little changes that you are making while you are working.

Now we are going to create another layer, click the new layer icon and every new layer, we are working our way, remember from bottom up will come in. The new layers will come above the last layer highlighted and name your layer. Here, we are going to target the circles under the eyes so I am just going to type that in so I know where it is in case I need to change it, Ctrl - to zoom out a bit. And then my spacebar will toggle my hand temporarily and I can still have my brush tool active.

We are going to use the same airbrushing technique to take care of dark circles under the eyes so I am going to come over here and sample a color and I am going to make this a little bit bigger and I am going to just brush over like this and then maybe sample a little of this lighter color here to brush in there, come over here, Option or Alt-click in the skin area up here and brush in this area here.

Now we are going to use the same and let me mix that a little bit and then go to filter blur, Gaussian blur. And again that will mix those colors that we did for under the eyes and we will take care of the over spray a bit. And I will lower the opacity a bit. And then what I am going to do is add a layer mask to this so I can take care of the over spray that went in the eye so click on the Add mask icon and this time, we are going to paint with black with this thumbnail.

And this is very important when you are working on a mask this has to be outlined with the mask thumbnail. It also has to say layer masks somewhere in your title bar up here so that when I paint with black, I am not painting black pixels, I am just hiding the information on that layer. I am coming here taking care of that over spray that happened from here. Now let us look at before and after just on those dark circles, just very subtle. I may want to lower the opacity a little bit so that there is a little bit of contouring coming in because you do not want it totally flat under the eye.

And so these are some of the basic steps that start out with your retouching and we need to zoom out a little bit and look at it. I think I like it like that and again, it is personal taste how far do you want to go with the opacity of these things. Now, what I am going to do so that my layers pallet does not get too unweildingly long is I am going to create a group within a group. I am going to take this layer which is highlighted, hold my Shift key down and click down on that powder layer so that all of these are highlighted.

My Shift key is still held down and this is important because we are going to put all of this into its own group. Shift key held down, click the new group icon and then I am just going to call this base make up and now we are ready to continue with some other make up with this collapse, I just want to show you that inside you have not lost anything. All those layers in the other group is in there but we are having a much more manageable layers pallet by grouping things logically.

The next thing that I want to do is I am going to zoom out a bit on this picture is I am going to work on bumping up her hair color. We are just going to get and we are going to put on eyeshadow and blush and make the eyes whiter and make the eyes pop. We are going to do this all using adjustment layers. So when we are working our way up, so I am going to start out here and I am going to select the curves adjustment layer.

When this dialog box opens up in the channels window here, you are given the composite channel to work with, the red channel, green and blue. The thing that you have to know about color in Photoshop that you are also given the opportunity to work with cyan, magenta, and yellow; they are contained in these channels as well. In the red channel, you have got cyan, in the green, you have got green and magenta, in the blue, and it controls blue and yellow. So we have got red cyan, green magenta, blue and yellow. So if I look at this image and say, I want to make her hair redder; I could go in to the red channel and see this diagonal line and curves? Anything that is to the upper left will make things redder. Anything that is to the lower right will make things more cyan. So if I click a point on this line and drag upward, you can see the image gets redder. When I drag downward, it gets more cyan. So I am going to just add a little bit more red here and I am going to click Ok.

Now of course that made every single layer and that is underneath this curves layer redder. I do not want everything redder; I just want her hair redder. So what I am going to do is invert this mask to black by pressing Ctrl+I on a PC or Command I on a Mackintosh. So now it is as if we did not even make that adjustment but what I can do now, you got it. I am going to switch to white, get my airbrush, make it big and fat and I am going to start painting in here and see how I am bringing out the red in her hair.

And again any kind of over spray, we can come back by just switching to black and that will take care of that and our left bracket key to make the brush a little bit smaller so it looks like she just stepped out of the beauty shop.