Beauty touch-ups are a popular form of digital retouching in portrait photography. The techniques usually involve reshaping on enhancing parts of an image as well as removing unwanted and distracting elements. Whether you are going for the glamorous magazine look, adding artistic effects to your photo or just looking to remove some blemishes, PHOTO-PAINT provides you with an array of tools to help you get the job done.

Today I am going to show you how to use the new Liquid tools (PHOTO-PAINT X7) and the new Healing Clone tool (available in CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X7 Update 2).

These tools behave similarly to other brushes in PHOTO-PAINT. This means you use them by dragging them across your image like a brushstroke. As with any other brush tool, you can use them with a pressure sensitive tablet. You can also easily make the nib larger and smaller by dragging up and down while holding down SHIFT or using the nib radius slider on the property bar.

The new liquid tools allow you to reshape areas of the photo with minimal blur. You can Smear, Twirl, Attract and Repel pixels around your image while preserving other areas.

The Liquid Smear tool lets you push pixels around with your cursor. The direction of the smear follows your brushstroke, as if you were pushing around wet paint.  You can adjust the strength of your smear using the property bar pressure slider.

The Liquid Smear tool was used here to warp the pillars of the building.

In portrait retouching, this tool is particularly handy when reshaping body areas. For example, you could turn the corners of a mouth up to create a little smirk or bring up the neckline on a revealing dress.

The corner of the model’s mouth was slightly turned up.

You can achieve more interesting effects by using the Liquid Twirl, Attract and Repel tools. The Liquid Twirl tool rotates the pixels around the center of your nib in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. The Liquid Attract and Liquid Repel tools push the pixels toward and away from the center of the nib.

The windows at the bottom have a twirl, attracted and repel liquid effect.

These tools come in handy in portrait retouching as well as adding fun artistic effects to your photo. For example, you could use the Liquid Repel tool to make the model’s eyes appear larger.

The model’s eyes were made larger.

While the liquid tools are great for reshaping and distorting areas of your photo, the Healing Clone tool, on the other hand, allows you to move or remove areas of a picture seamlessly.

The Healing clone tool is similar to the clone tool in that you sample the pixels from one source area and copy them to another target area. However, the healing clone samples only the texture from the source area and merges it with the colours of the target area, which results in a seamless blend.

For example, you can sample skin from one part of the body and apply it to another part of the body even if these two parts have a different shade or light gradient. This is particularly handy when moving or removing blemishes, scars, and tattoos.

The blemish on the model’s chin was removed by sampling from her forehead using the healing clone.
Even though the skin tone in the forehead is different, the texture is smooth so the healing clone blends it nicely.

When you combine these tools together with all the image adjustment labs and tools of PHOTO-PAINT, you’ve got yourself a well-rounded photo editing suite capable of tackling any job yielding professional results.

Photos by Jesus Rivera Photos