Face sculpting

F a c e S c u l p t i n g

Software engineers at Adobe keep coming up with brilliant ideas to expand Photoshop’s capabilities. A recent development gives us the ability to sculpt faces -- and by that I mean we can actually change the features of a face. The mouth, nose, jaw line, eyes, length of the chin and shape of the face can all be tweaked for better or for worse. You can make a face more beautiful and you can do the opposite. It’s quite intriguing and it definitely has applications in perfecting portraiture and travel pictures. For example, study the portrait below. The original version is on the left. In the modified rendition on the right, I enlarged the eyes slightly, narrowed the face and jaw line, and decreased the width of the model’s mouth.

The before and after portrait on the next page was similarly sculpted. I narrowed the nose, enlarged and widened the eyes, narrowed the young woman’s face, shortened the forehead slightly, and decreased the space between the

chin the mouth. These are not gross changes, but in fact they are very subtle and you have to look at the image carefully to notice the changes. However, when you look at the overall face it’s obvious there is definitely a change.

It is interesting to note that the most subtle changes in the features of a person’s face can significantly alter their appearance.

The controls for face sculpting in Photoshop are found using the pulldown menu command, Filter > Liquify. On the next page I show a screen capture of a portion of the dialog box that opens when Liquify is selected, and there you can see the sliders used to alter the features of faces.

Note that in the eye section, you can modify In altering a person’s appearance, assuming you want to make them more attractive, it’s helpful to understand the factors that contribute to a beautiful face. Standards of beauty vary from one person’s taste to another’s and from culture to culture, but over the years I’ve studied the facial features of hundreds of female fashion models from all over the world. These young women were selected by countless numbers of photographers, photo editors, fashion consultants, as well as by the art directors of thousands of companies for whom the models are working, and generally they have six features in common:

1. Large eyes set wide apart 2. Narrow nose

3. High cheekbones 4. Square jaw 5. Full lips 6. Long neck

In addition to these features, models usually have perfect teeth and they are very slender with long legs.

Obviously, not all faces fit these criteria, but knowing what makes a face more attractive by most people’s standards can guide you in using the sliders in the dialog box.

For the portrait of the young Turkish girl I photographed in Cappadocia, below, I narrowed her face and nose, thickened her upper lip slightly, enlarged and changed the shape of her eyes, and increased the distance between her eyes.

How far you carry this technique depends on you as the photographer. If you are trying to please the subject, you may not want to change a person’s appearance so drastically they no longer resemble themselves. On the other hand, as an artist, you might want to create the most beautiful face possible irrespective of where you started from. But knowing you have these options gives you tremendous creative control. §