Makeup makeover - part 1

For the purpose of this tutorial I will use this picture of a girl by the pool. To make the changes I make more visible, I will crop the left half of it.

Now, first thing we need to do is to «clean» the face from unwanted details. The tool that is commonly used in re-touch process is HEALING BRUSH TOOL and we are going to use it for three different reasons.
a) to remove unwanted objects covering the face- in this case the girl's hair.
b) to remove blemishes, acne, scares etc. I suggest you to be moderate when doing this as we don't want to make an alien face, just to improve the look of the skin. There's no reason why someone should have a life time photo-memory of an acne but, on the other hand, it's not neccessary to remove freckles or «beauty-signs» from the skin to make a person look more beautiful. Personally, I think freckles are beautiful! :-) Now, if you're using the same picture as I am, you'll notice this girl has got very clear skin and this step won't take us a lot of time. I'll simply remove the hair from her cheek and make some small corrections where it takes.
c) now we start applying makeup. It's important to create some kind of a guideline before you start. What you're going to do depends of what you want to achieve (fresh look, slight change of the colors on the faces already covered with makeup, just a touch of gloss, heavy evening makeup...). If you're a woman and wear makeup, making such guideline shouldn't be too hard for you. Just think what cosmetic products you use and what kind of effect you want to achieve with each one of them. Then find adequate PS tools to achieve the same effect in a retouch process. If you're a man (and don't wear make up :-) ) just start paying more attention to beautiful women around you (shouldn't be too hard!).
The reason I'm mentioning «guidelines» is that HEALING BRUSH TOOL can be used as a PS version of base cover or foundation if you like. Face covered with foundation and/or compact powder should never look shinny so, unless you've decided to apply moderate makeup without compact powder on the skin- you'll need to remove shinny parts of skin from her face. I've decided to apply something we could label as evening makeup to make it more interesting and, therefore, I'll use HEALING BRUSH TOOL to make her skin look matte and equally smooth on all parts of her face.

Now, let's go through a-b-c steps one at the time.
a) first select Healing brush tool and make sure to set mode to Screen (as shown). Find an adequate brush size (I used size 35), Alt+click on a nice looking part of her skin to get the clone source (you can use the forehead skin as I did) and then simply apply that source to the skin covered with hair step by step. Once you've finished removing the hair from her face you might see dark areas as a result of this process. To get rid of them just change the mode to Normal and repeat the same process until you get good results. If the areas are really, really dark, carefully use Dodge tool (mode: Midtones) to lighten them up. Clone-Dodge-Clone until you're happy with what you see!

b) retouch part. This girl has got nice and young but I've marked a few spots we could label as wrinkles with blue and I will use Healing brush tool to remove or at least reduce them a bit. Of course, this is optional!
c) and finally, I will «apply some foundation» to make her skin look matte. The tool is still the same- Healing brush tool only now we are using Screen mode again.
Just a small tip- when making corrections on very narrow parts such as her nose, small wrinkles or areas around her eyes, make sure to use a smaller brush, large brushes could deform the natural curves of the face!

By the time you're finished with all this you're picture should look somewhat like my c) picture.

Now let's do something about her eyebrows. Zoom one of her eyes and, by using Healing tool and a tiny brush, clone the parts covered with unwanted hair as shown in the picture A. When you're done, select Polygonal Lasso Tool and make a selection similar to the one I've made (picture B). Now, go to Edit> Copy (or simply Ctrl+C, for Mac users Command+C) and then Edit>Paste (Ctrl+V) to create a new layer from that selection. Finally press Ctrl+T to activate Free Transform Tool and drag selection over the eyebrow to cover its upper part (picture C). When you're done, press Enter to exit Free Transform and select Eraser with a soft brush (smaller one), reduce Opacity to 50% and carefully erase extra parts of your new layer to give our new eyebrow more natural look (picture D). Now, repeat steps A-D on the right eyebrow.
You can see my result on the picture E.
Tip; if you find it easier, you can make selections with Polygonal Lasso Tool for the areas under the eyebrow as well.


Now, we want all parts of the skin to be in the same layer so, with the top layer selected (that should be the last one you've made) click «Create a new set» icon (folder-shaped icon in the bottom of your Layers panel), click on a small arrow that will appear beside Layer Set icon to change its direction (it should be pointing right) and, one by one, drag and drop layers into it, starting from the one under the Set layer and finishing with your original image. Once all the layers are in the Set folder, press Ctrl+E to merge layer set.

To get the sunset mood, I increased the amount of cyan and yellow for Reds using Selective color tool (Image>Adjustments>Selective color). No need to make a selection before doing this as there’s only the pool water behind the girl and this change will have no impact on the background.
And now comes the fun part. Let us start applying some real makeup. I’ll start with her lips. What tools you will use to change the color of her lips depends of what kind of lipstick you want to apply, I’ve decided to apply half-transparent and not too shiny lip-gloss. To do that we’ll have to mask her lips. Select Magnetic Lasso Tool (“a”) and use it to select the area of her lips. Now, we’ve got a rough selection (image 1) and need to make it more precise otherwise she will look funny after applying lipstick. First go to Select>Inverse (or simply Ctrl+I) and then click the Quick Mask Button (“Q” button in the picture) and the area selected with the Lasso tool should now be covered with color (probably red). Now you need to add mask (color) to the parts of her lips that are still outside of the selection and remove extra color where it takes. Select the Brush Tool (image “b”) and make corrections. Use black for the foreground color to apply mask and white to erase extras (the color covering her teeth etc.). (Simply press “X” button to switch back and foreground colors- image “c”). Finally, it should look somewhat like image 3. Now switch back to Normal mode (“N” button) and invert selection again (Ctrl+I).

TIP : Sometimes the lips-area can be very hard to select. If it happens and you see the Magnetic Lasso tool is not helping you at all, try to use Polygonal Lasso tool instead or simply switch top the Quick Mask Mode right away and make the selection only by using that tool.