How to Make Someone Look Younger In Photoshop
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- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:35 Apply The Smart Portrait Filter (Facial Age Slider)
- 1:35 Fix De-aging Filter Imperfections
- 2:35 Use the Retouching Tools to Remove Wrinkles and Blemishes
- 5:49 Apply The Skin Smoothing Filter To Make the Face Look Younger
- 7:04 Use The Liquify Filter To Make The Head Look Younger
- 8:10 Add Texture and Sharpen with The Camera Raw Filter
- 9:02 Final Thoughts
Your choices stick across every tutorial on this device.
Make someone look younger in Photoshop with the Neural Filters Smart Portrait slider, then refine the result with the Patch Tool, Spot Healing Brush Tool, and Liquify.
In this course, you’ll learn How To Make Someone Look Younger in Photoshop. You’ll discover exciting tools and learn many tips for de-aging someone. Let’s get started.
Key Takeaways
- The Smart Portrait Neural Filter’s Facial Age slider gives you a fast starting point, not a finished result.
- Run Neural Filters on a duplicate layer so you can mask away artifacts like ghosting around the nose or mouth.
- The Spot Healing Brush Tool‘s Darken and Lighten modes protect skin texture far better than its default Normal mode.
- Heavy skin smoothing looks fake unless you mask it back with a black Layer Mask and paint the blur in selectively.
- The Liquify Face Tool and Forward Warp Tool reshape the face itself, which a slider alone cannot do.
Table of contents
- What You Will Learn
- Requirements
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- Apply The Smart Portrait Filter (Facial Age Slider)
- Fix Neural Filter Imperfections
- Use Retouching Tools To Remove Wrinkles and Blemishes
- The Patch Tool
- The Spot Healing Brush Tool
- Skin Smoothing To Make Someone Look Younger in Photoshop
- Use the Liquify Filter To Make The Head Look Younger
- Final Thoughts
- Tutorial Assets
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Conclusion
- Related Links
What You Will Learn
- How to apply and adjust the Smart Portrait Neural Filter
- How to fix ghosting and other Neural Filter artifacts with a layer mask
- How to remove wrinkles and blemishes with the Patch Tool and Spot Healing Brush Tool
- How to apply Skin Smoothing without losing skin texture
- How to reshape a face with the Liquify Face Tool
Requirements
Before you start
- Photoshop 2021 (version 22.0 or later) or the current version
Keyboard Shortcuts
| Action | Windows | macOS |
|---|---|---|
| Duplicate Layer | Ctrl J | Command J |
| Deselect | Ctrl D | Command D |
| Zoom Tool | Z | Z |
| Stamp Visible (copy all layers to a new layer) | Ctrl Alt Shift E | Command Option Shift E |
| Add a black layer mask | Hold Alt, click Layer Mask icon | Hold Option, click Layer Mask icon |
| Increase brush size | ] | ] |
Apply The Smart Portrait Filter (Facial Age Slider)
First, duplicate your layer. Press CtrlJ (Windows) or CommandJ (macOS) to work non-destructively.
To make someone look younger in Photoshop you can use the new Neural Filters. Go into Filter > Neural Filters. From the Beta Filters, enable the Smart Portrait.
Smart Portrait is still listed under Beta Filters in the current version of Photoshop. Adobe has not moved it to the Featured Filters list.
To make your subject look younger, drag the Facial Age slider to the left.
Or you can drag the Facial Age slider to the right to make them look older.
In this example, we will drag the slider all the way to the left to make them look younger.
Tip: If the effect looks unnatural, try checking the Retain Unique Details checkbox.
Make sure to Output to a New Layer and press OK.
Fix Neural Filter Imperfections
Note: As impressive as Neural Filters are, they are not perfect. Sometimes you will notice blurring, ghosting, or other imperfections.
In this example, you will notice ghosting on the subject’s nose. To fix this issue, you can use a Layer Mask to hide the imperfections.
With the Duplicate Layer active, create a new Layer Mask.
Select the Brush Tool, and paint on the mask with black to hide the ghosting effect. Or you can paint with white to reveal anything you painted away.
Use Retouching Tools To Remove Wrinkles and Blemishes
Another important step in making someone look younger in Photoshop is to remove wrinkles, blemishes, and other imperfections.
Photoshop has a myriad of tools that you can use to retouch an image. We’ll look at the essential ones you should know.
The Patch Tool
From the Toolbar, select the Patch Tool, and use it to remove blemishes or other imperfections.
To do so, simply click-and-drag around the blemish area you would like to remove. Then drag the selection to another area of similar content that looks good.
Photoshop will then remove the blemish by taking the selected area and blending it with the area with the blemish.
The Spot Healing Brush Tool
Another fantastic retouching tool you could use to make someone look younger in photoshop is the Spot Healing Brush Tool.
First, create a new layer, then activate the Spot Healing Brush Tool from the toolbar.
Then from the Options Bar enable the Sample All Layers checkbox. This will allow you to work non-destructively.
From the Blending Mode dropdown, select the Blend Mode better suited for the task at hand. You will most likely use Normal, Darken or Lighten.
If the blemish you are trying to remove is darker than the skin tone use Lighten. If it’s brighter than the skin tone use Darken.
Then simply paint over the wrinkle or blemish to remove it.
Skin Smoothing To Make Someone Look Younger in Photoshop
Now that we have no wrinkles and no blemishes in our image, we can apply a global skin smoothing effect to make the model look even younger.
Select the topmost layer, and press CtrlAltShiftE (Windows) or CommandOptionShiftE (macOS). This copies the contents of all the layers and pastes them into a new layer.
Then go to Filter > Neural Filters. From the Featured Filters, select the Skin Smoothing filter.
Move the Blur slider all the way to the left, set the Output to Current Layer and press OK.
As you can tell, the smoothing effect is too strong and it looks very unnatural. To reduce the smoothing effect, create a black Layer Mask to hide all the contents of the layer.
To do so, hold Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) and click on the new Layer Mask icon. Then use the Brush Tool to paint with white to reveal the blur effect over the required areas.
Use the Liquify Filter To Make The Head Look Younger
To make someone look younger in Photoshop, you also need to adjust the shape of the face. We will use the Liquify filter for this.
Start by clicking on the topmost layer, hold Shift (Windows) or Shift (macOS) and click on the first layer to select them all.
Then, right-click and select Convert to Smart Object. Now you can treat this image as one, and apply any adjustment you like nondestructively.
Go to Filter > Liquify
From the Liquify Toolbar, enable the Face Tool. Photoshop will then display overlays over the face and you can use these controls to make structural changes to the face.
You can move the nose up, make the eyes wider, and make the face thinner.
With Forward Warp Tool you can push and pull areas of the face to make it look younger.
For example, you can lower the hairline and move the chin upwards a bit.
Final Thoughts
Now you’ve learned to de-age a face in Photoshop, try it out with your own projects.
Tutorial Assets
To follow along with this tutorial, you can download this image.
Frequently Asked Questions
Open Filter > Neural Filters > Beta Filters and enable the Smart Portrait filter, then drag its Facial Age slider to the left. Clean up the result with the Patch Tool, the Spot Healing Brush Tool, and a light Skin Smoothing pass, then reshape the face with Liquify.
Yes. Smart Portrait is still listed under Beta Filters in the current version of Photoshop. Skin Smoothing, the other Neural Filter used in this tutorial, is a Featured filter and is not beta.
Neural Filters run an AI model over the photo, and it does not always blend perfectly at the edges of a change. Duplicate the layer first, then paint the imperfections away on a Layer Mask so the original pixels show through underneath.
The Patch Tool works best on a larger blemish, since you drag in a whole replacement area by hand. The Spot Healing Brush Tool is faster for small, scattered blemishes, especially when you set its mode to Darken or Lighten to protect the surrounding skin texture.
Apply the Skin Smoothing Neural Filter on a merged layer, then hold Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) and click the Layer Mask icon to hide the effect completely. Paint with white on that mask to bring the smoothing back only where the skin actually needs it.
Yes. Drag the same Facial Age slider to the right instead of the left to add age rather than remove it. For a much more dramatic aging effect, a dedicated compositing technique produces more realistic results than the slider alone.
This tutorial was recorded in Photoshop 2021 (version 22.0), when Neural Filters first shipped. Every tool it uses, including Smart Portrait, the Patch Tool, and Liquify, still works the same way in the current version of Photoshop.
Conclusion
You now have a complete workflow to de-age a face in Photoshop, from the Smart Portrait slider through retouching, Skin Smoothing, and Liquify.
Work through each step on your own photo, and keep every adjustment on its own layer so you can always dial an effect back if it looks too strong.
Comment on the video if you get stuck on any step.
Selections and Masking Mastery
Complete course includes 2.5 hours of step-by-step lessons, 6 structured modules, downloadable practice files, and custom Photoshop brushes. Everything you need to master selections and masks in one place.
Keep going
Next, learn how to swap faces in Photoshop with precise, manual control.
Related Links
Final Image
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