All right we’re going to look at this image and try and fix up the double chin in the mom right here. Couple comments though, I always make a few comments when I work on an image.

It looks pretty good, it’s nicely lit, it’s nicely exposed. The mom’s left hand is hidden and her legs look like that she has stomps, kind of, like—kind of see her feet there, so just little, little commentary on the pose if you wanted to go in that direction just to help you out of bit on that. All right, so when it’s tin time, the same strategy is that I used to use in the retouching room years ago when I did everything retouched by hand. It’s kind of tricky, chins are kind of tricky, but here’s how I reduce a chin.

First thing you want to look at is the fact that there’s a shadow right here. See that shadow? That shadow is what’s telling you there’s a highlight, the difference between shadow and highlight creates form. So partially, it’s lighting issue or subtractive lighting. This shadow is probably emphasized by that fact that she is wearing black. Not a big deal. The shape of the chin is rounded so it’s pickling up coming up from this direction here.

So what we want to do is what I'm getting at is you could obviously affected by using flat lighting but you don’t want to do that. You could try pulling your chin out while photograph in it, but people often have a hard time holding that chin out position. I often try having—say in this situation. I would ask the mom to lean in lean forward put her chin up a tiny bit and pull it out like as if there’s a rope stuck at the end of chin and I’m pulling the chin out very gently like a turkey neck, very gently. They often will overdo that and that doesn’t look right, so I’ll get them to do it over again, so that’s partially solving your problem in the pausing, but we’re looking at the shadow.

So what we want to do, first step is we want to reduce the shadow before we do anything else. So we go at the clone stamp, and we go to lighten and a nice little opacity and we start lightening the shadow because it’s the shadow that’s creating the form, the shape, and we want to de-emphasize the shadow. We’re going to go to smaller brush we’re going to go above that line. Sometimes this is all you need to do with some people and it looks good. I think she’s going to require a couple of steps though. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken out the shadow. You see that? It reproduced it substantially from that to that, let zoom in and show you. From that to that okay, let’s work on it a little more.

You know I could finesse this and lighten it a little bit more, but I thin k we’re almost there. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to do the opposite. See this highlight? I'm going to fill that in, I'm going to darken. Instead of lightening, I'm going to darken a highlight, so before we lighten the shadow now we’re darkening a highlight. See that little spot right there? We’ve made it consistent. We’ve made it uniform. See I can also go read in here right here, this area, right here this line here. I could technically lighten that. I could lighten this line and this line and really smooth things out quite a bit. But my guess is a little bit of reality it’s not going to hurt. Now as you requested total removal, that’s fine. You have flexibility to do as much choice as little as you wish. So we’re going to darken a little bit in that lighter area, and that’s going to—again just smooth things out.

Now I always like to finish it by going on to normal and there are a couple of spots, I just—just the couple little areas like right here couple little blurs and spots and she got a little neck thing there. And that’s it, that’s pretty much it. And of course you adjust it to taste and you know I could go in and I could actually darken this area a little bit more, or I could lighten it lighten that shadowed area. And then darken the highlight, there’s a little tiny line right here. See there’s a little tiny highlight line. I can go and then darken that, and that probably would use a much smaller brush. And when you do this, you get very good at it after you’ve done a few tunes. It just takes no time at all.

And the last thing I like to do is just to kind of close it off. Let’s assume I'm happy with that. As a matter of fact, let’s have a closer look. I'm going to show you before and after okay, and I took my time, by the way I'm doing that I wanted to show you guys. So the last step I used is I go to the burn tool and highlights, low exposure, say 15, smaller brush and I'm going to just gently just a touch of darkening just to give that chin a little strength a little bit of contouring. And now if we run this all focused and all the rest of the retouching that we’re going to do on this image you know all and all when you look at the final end result after you finished everything, I think the chin is going to look great, so that’s it that’s all I’ve got to say on that and that’s how I pretty much reduce double chins. If somebody is very, very large and it’s just simple, it’s just going to take you more work, that’s all, so we’re going from that to that. Hope you enjoyed that.