• Reset your workspace to Essentials, then back to Reset Essentials.
• Open your Layers panel, and select the Background layer by clicking on it.
• Your first task is to create an Adjustment Layer to try to minimize the magenta color cast of the dress, using Color Balance. The Color Balance button in the Adjustments panel looks like a tiny scale. Drag the sliders and watch the appearance of the image change; you want less magenta but you don't want the dress to turn too greenish either! Just do your best by eye. The great thing about Adjustment Layers is you can always go back and adjust it again.
• Now, Zoom into the area where you see the man's forehead. You can zoom by hitting 'Z' for the Zoom tool, then dragging a marquee (click & drag a rectangle) around her arm.
• Now we will try a few retouching tools and see which works the best to edit out the forehead. Look for the Patch tool in your Tools
panel. It might be hiding under another tool like the Spot Healing Brush. Draw a loose selection around the man's forehead, connecting your starting point with your ending point. You will see the 'marching ants' of an active selection. Then, still with the patch tool, click and drag upwards from the middle of the selection. Photoshop will apply pixels from around the selection and attempt to blend them within the 'patch'. It does a pretty good job, and allows us to move to the next spot retouch tool.
• Next we will try the Clone Stamp, which requires you to sample an area to copy or 'clone' those exact pixels, and then use them to paint over the area you want to cover up. With this tool, you should be able to cover the man's forehead, or minimize it so much that it's not distracting anymore. Hold down the alt/option key and sample an area of the background outside the man's head, then paint with those pixels to cover up the rest of the areas of the man's forehead.
• So far we've been working on one default 'Background' layer. Notice that layer has a lock icon on it, towards the right. Click and drag this lock icon to the trash icon at the bottom of the layers panel to unlock it.
• Duplicate the entire layer by dragging it down to the New Layer icon (look for a little page icon near the trash icon). Now you have two background layers, two layers with the same dancer image, with all your retouching on both.
• Rename both layers: The bottom one Dancer 1, the top one Dancer 2. Turn off the visibility of Dancer 2 (top layer) by clicking on the
eye icon for that layer.
• We are going to make the Dancer 1 layer grayscale. There are a couple ways to do this, we'll try just one technique today. Select the Dancer 1 layer, and go up to your Adjustments panel. Locate the 'Hue / Saturation' adjustment and click to apply it. Drag the saturation slider all the way left to desaturate (remove all hue or color) from this layer. Use the lighten slider to brighten up the image and lessen the contrast.
• Select Dancer 2, and turn on the visibility again by clicking on the eye icon. Now we will add a Layer Mask to hide the background, and show the background on the layer beneath.
• With the Dancer 2 top layer selected, locate the 'Add a Mask' button at the bottom of the Layers panel. It looks like a little camera. When you click it, you'll see a white rectangle appear next to the thumbnail of Dancer 2 in your Layers. This white rectangle represents your mask. White = reveal, Black = hide. We will paint with black on this mask to hide the background!
• Ensure your mask (represented by the small white rectangle in your Dancer 2 layer) is selected and active, not the image thumbnail, in your Layers for this next step. Hit 'B' to select the Brush tool. Then hit 'D' to make sure you have 'Default swatches selected, which will be Black and White. You want to paint with black, and so you want black to be the front color. You can reverse the foreground and background colors by clicking on the double arrows above those colors.
• Paint with black over all the background areas in your photo that are yellow-green, the ceiling and walls. As you do this, you are masking out the background on the Dancer 2 layer, and you should see they gray background of the Dancer 1 layer start to appear! Also note that your mask thumbnail will start to show black areas that represent where you are masking.
• To get in some detailed areas, you'll need to zoom in again. Your keyboard shortcuts are great for this. Hit Z, drag a marquee to zoom, then hit B and start painting on your mask again.
• If you mess up while masking, you can paint with white to reverse the masking effect!
• If you want to start over, right-click on the mask thumbnail and select 'Delete Mask'.
• As our last step, we'll crop the image to get rid of a few distracting areas along the edges. The Crop tool shortcut is 'C'. Ensure the dropdown menu in the Options bar says 'Original Ratio' which preserves the photo's aspect ratio (width to height). Trim the photo just a bit, then save.
