How Jan Wischermann evens out skin with dodge and burn and keeps its texture.
In a close-up, most of what looks uneven is small patches of light and shadow. Fix those, and the skin looks clean while every pore stays where it was.
Dodging means lightening, burning means darkening. In high-end beauty retouching you use both on a very small scale: you lighten the small dark patches and darken the small bright ones, until the transitions across the face run smoothly. Nothing is blurred, nothing is copied over. That is why dodge and burn is the standard for high-end skin retouching in beauty and campaign work. It takes longer than a filter, but the result still looks like a person. Jan works the same way on campaigns for clients like Armani Beauty, and on this image, which Per shot for the hair care brand Urban Alchemy. It is the one Jan uses to teach skin retouching inside the Lab.
The order Jan follows on every high-end beauty retouch: clean-up, then light, then colour.
Look under the eyes and along the cheek. The pores are the same in all four images. Only the spots and the light have changed.
Three ways to work on skin, and what each one does to its texture.
Changes only light and shadow. Texture is never moved, copied or blurred, so the skin stays believable even in a billboard crop.
Splits the image into a colour-and-tone layer and a texture layer, so you can work on one without the other. It is fast and powerful, and that makes it easy to smooth skin into plastic.
Replaces pixels with pixels from somewhere else. Use it for anything that should disappear. For evening out light it is the wrong tool, because it moves texture around.
Frequency separation looks like the shortcut to high-end retouching, and sometimes it is the right tool: Jan uses it for shiny highlights or for larger patches of tone. For evening out skin he works by hand: healing and cloning for what should go, dodge and burn for the light. It takes longer and keeps the texture believable. The light you shoot with decides how much work the skin needs, so start there: our beauty lighting breakdown shows the setups behind our beauty images.
Most uneven skin needs more darkening than lightening. Dodge too much and the face goes flat and bright.
They exaggerate on purpose. Use them to find the problems, then judge the result in colour.
Even everything out, then lower the layers until the skin looks natural again. That looks more natural than stopping halfway.
Curves move saturation too. If dodged areas look grey or burned areas look too rich, correct the colour before you move on.
Members get Jan's full retouching courses, on beauty and campaign images, and every tool he uses in the Toolkit.
Dodging lightens, burning darkens. In skin retouching you use both on small areas to even out patches of light and shadow, so the skin looks smooth while its texture stays untouched.
For evening out skin in high-end beauty work, most retouchers prefer dodge and burn, because it never moves or blurs texture. Frequency separation is faster and useful for specific jobs, such as shiny highlights or larger tonal patches, but it easily makes skin look plastic.
It depends on the image and where it will be used. A billboard needs far more detail than an Instagram post. Dodge and burn is the slow part, because it is built up in many small passes.
Partly. Capture One has dodge and burn brushes on its layers, and they work well for broad contouring before you go into Photoshop. The fine work on skin is still done in Photoshop, where you have curves, masks and help layers.
Jan's full retouching courses, the Toolkit and 60+ lighting setups from editorials and campaigns
