Photoshopping the Blonde Lady, a lesson in retouching.

This is the picture we started with, for our lesson in retouching.

The aim was to 'just take a few years off'. Not, to retouch her into someone unrecognizable, just enough to be flattering.

 The tools I concentrated on were the spot healing brush, for automatically correcting areas, and the healing brush, a source selected brush.

The biggest change to my image was made using a gaussian blur on a mask layer. I 'blurred' the entire image, then 'painted' the detail (like eyes) back in.

And here is my final image!

My final steps were with the dodging and burning tools to add some light or dark back into a few areas, like the nose. Which had lost some tone with the spot healing.