How To Make Someone Older In Photoshop – Young To Old Tutorial
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Jump to a step in the video (9)
Click a time to play the video from there.
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:43 Use the quick selection tool to remove the foreground from the background.
- 1:19 Use the "refine mask" panel to refine your mask.
- 7:50 Use the patch tool to add wrinkles to your image.
- 12:43 Use the liquify tool to make a face look older.
- 14:40 Create "old-looking" ears.
- 17:50 Add "old" eyebrows to your image.
- 19:25 Create a brush to paint facial hair.
- 24:49 Add white hair to your image.
Your choices stick across every tutorial on this device.
You can make someone older in Photoshop by borrowing wrinkles, ears, and hair from photos of older people and blending them onto a younger face.
This is a compositing job, not a filter. Every wrinkle in the final image came from a real photograph.
Beginners can follow every step. You need one portrait, four reference faces, and a little patience.
By the end you will have aged a face by decades, from sagging eyes and deep wrinkles down to white sideburns and nose hair.
The video was recorded in Photoshop CS6, and every step still works in the latest version of Photoshop.
Going the other direction? Here is how to make someone look younger in Photoshop.
Key Takeaways
- Aging a face is borrowed texture. The wrinkles come from photographs of older people, not from a slider.
- The Patch Tool set to Destination drags wrinkles off a reference face and onto your subject.
- The History Brush plus Edit > Fade History Brush is the volume knob. It decides how much of each wrinkle survives.
- Liquify handles shape, not texture. Sagging eyes, a heavier nose, a softer jaw, and a wider face.
- A custom hair strand brush with Angle Jitter set to Direction paints eyebrows, sideburns, and hair that follow your stroke.
- Small true details sell the age harder than wrinkles do. Nose hair, ear hair, white eyelashes, and the blemishes you already have.
Table of contents
- What You Will Learn
- Requirements
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- Step 1: Cut Someone Out in Photoshop
- Step 2: Match an Older Face in Photoshop
- Step 3: Add Wrinkles With the Patch Tool
- Step 4: Fade Wrinkles With the History Brush
- Step 5: Use Liquify to Make Someone Older
- Step 6: Older Ears and Eyebrows in Photoshop
- Step 7: Build the Hair Strand Brush
- Step 8: Add Older White Hair in Photoshop
- Step 9: Small Details That Make Someone Older
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Make Someone Older in Photoshop
- Related Links
What You Will Learn
- How to cut a subject off its background with the Quick Selection Tool and a Layer Mask
- How to line a reference face up with guides so the features land in the right places
- How to move wrinkles with the Patch Tool and control them with the History Brush
- How to reshape a face in Liquify so it reads as older
- How to build a hair strand brush for eyebrows, sideburns, and white hair
Requirements
Before you start
- Photoshop CS6 or the latest version. The video uses CS6 and the steps have not changed.
- A photo of yourself or another person, shot straight on and centered in the frame
- The four reference photos of older faces, included in the download below
Practice Files
Download the four reference photos of older faces used in this tutorial and follow along step by step.
Keyboard Shortcuts
| Action | Windows | macOS |
|---|---|---|
| Select the Quick Selection Tool | W | W |
| Toggle Quick Mask Mode | Q | Q |
| Select All | Ctrl A | Command A |
| Deselect | Ctrl D | Command D |
| Layer via Copy | Ctrl J | Command J |
| Free Transform | Ctrl T | Command T |
| Merge down | Ctrl E | Command E |
| Show or hide guides and extras | Ctrl H | Command H |
| Fade the last operation | Shift Ctrl F | Shift Command F |
| Undo | Ctrl Z | Command Z |
| Decrease or increase the brush size | Left Bracket or Right Bracket | Left Bracket or Right Bracket |
Step 1: Cut Someone Out in Photoshop
Grab the Quick Selection Tool, then click and drag around your subject until the whole person is selected.
Click the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. Photoshop turns the selection into a mask.
Open the Properties panel from Window > Properties and click Mask Edge. Set the View to Black and White so you can see the mask on its own.
Raise Smoothness a little until the jagged edges soften, then click OK.
Add a new layer under your subject and fill it with 50% gray. A flat gray background makes every halo and stray pixel obvious.
Open Mask Edge again, switch the View to On Layers, and drag Shift Edge into the negative numbers. That shrinks the mask and the halo disappears.
Go too far and you get a hard edge. Pick up the Brush Tool and repair the mask by hand. White brings pixels back. Black takes them away.
Do not fuss over the ears or the hair. You replace both later.
Note: The Mask Edge button is still in the same spot in the Properties panel. Since the 2015.5 release it opens the Select and Mask workspace instead of the old dialog. Both controls this step uses, Smoothness and Shift Edge, live under Global Refinements. Walk through it in this two-step process for better cut-outs.
Note: Dragging the Quick Selection Tool around a person still works, but current Photoshop can do the first pass in one click with Select Subject. Start there, then clean up the mask exactly as described above.
Step 2: Match an Older Face in Photoshop
Guides do the alignment work here. Go to View > New Guide, choose Vertical, type 50% for the position, and click OK.
That drops a guide down the center of the canvas. Move your subject so the face sits on it.
Add guides at both edges of the face, the hairline, the center of each eye, the nose, the mouth, and the chin. These are the landmarks you will match the reference face to.
Rename your layer “original”, duplicate it, and name the copy “old 01”.
Go to File > Place and bring in the first reference face. Hold Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) together with Shift while you drag a corner handle, and the image scales from its center.
Line the reference hairline, eyes, nose, mouth, and chin up with your guides. Rotate and squeeze it until the features sit on top of yours, then press Enter.
Right-click the placed layer and choose Rasterize Layer. Select everything with CtrlA (Windows) or CommandA (macOS), crop down to the head and a little neck, then invert the selection and delete the rest.
Hide the guides, drag the reference head off to one side of the canvas, and merge it down with CtrlE (Windows) or CommandE (macOS). Both faces have to share one layer for the next step to work.
Warning: Guides and extras hide with CtrlH (Windows) or CommandH (macOS). On macOS the first press can ask whether you want to hide Extras or hide Photoshop itself. Choose Extras, or the whole application vanishes.
Step 3: Add Wrinkles With the Patch Tool
Select the Patch Tool and set the mode to Destination in the options bar. Leave Transparent unchecked.
Draw around a wrinkle on the reference face, then drag that selection over to the matching spot on your own face. Photoshop drops the wrinkle in and blends its edges.
Deselect with CtrlD (Windows) or CommandD (macOS).
Straight out of the tool, it looks too harsh. That is normal, and Step 4 is where you dial it back.
There is a second way to aim the patch. Draw the exact shape you want on your own face with the Lasso Tool first, drag that selection across to the reference face, then patch it back.
Now the wrinkle arrives at the width you chose instead of the width you guessed. Hold Shift with the Lasso Tool to add to a selection, or hold Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) to switch to straight segments.
Tip: Remove facial hair before you patch over it. Take the Clone Stamp Tool, hold Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) to set a source point, and paint the hair away. Patched texture lands much more cleanly on bare skin.
Step 4: Fade Wrinkles With the History Brush
Open the History panel and click back to the merge step. Click the small camera icon to save that state as a snapshot.
Click the empty box to the left of the snapshot. The History Brush now paints from it.
Return to the patched state, pick up the History Brush, size it up, and paint the new wrinkle away completely.
Now go to Edit > Fade History Brush and drag the slider. You are choosing how much of that wrinkle comes back.
Around 61% works for the first patch and about 32% for a later one. Delete the whole wrinkle, then fade it back in. That is the working rhythm for the rest of the face.
The fade dialog also opens with ShiftCtrlF (Windows) or ShiftCommandF (macOS).
Finish each patch by feathering its seams with a soft Brush Tool.
Note: Nothing about this workflow has changed in current Photoshop. The History Brush, snapshots, and Edit > Fade all behave exactly as they do in the video. If the History Brush shows a stop sign, the document no longer matches the snapshot. Pick an earlier history state as the source instead.
Step 5: Use Liquify to Make Someone Older
Texture alone will not do it. A face also changes shape with age, and that is what Liquify is for.
Go to Filter > Liquify and increase the brush size until it covers the area you want to move.
Push the outer corners of the eyes down so they sag. Work gently and do not distort the eyes themselves.
Add volume to the nose and let the tip drop a little. Noses get bigger and heavier over time.
Soften the chin. A sharply defined jawline reads as young.
Widen the face slightly, because most people carry a little more weight later in life. Click OK when the proportions look right.
Note: Pushing pixels by hand still works. Current Photoshop also detects the face inside Liquify and gives you labeled sliders for the eyes, nose, mouth, and face shape. For this exact job those sliders are faster and much easier to undo. See two tools to adjust facial features in Photoshop.
Step 6: Older Ears and Eyebrows in Photoshop
The video does not click through every move here. It says so out loud and shows the method instead, so that is how this section handles it.
For the ears, trace a reference ear with the Lasso Tool. An easier route is Quick Mask Mode, where you paint the ear in with black.
Copy the ear to its own layer with Layer > New > Layer via Copy, then drag it over your own ear.
Press CtrlT (Windows) or CommandT (macOS) and drag the pivot point down to the bottom of the ear. It now rotates and scales from that point, which makes the match far easier.
Run it through Liquify once more so the borrowed ear takes on your own shape. Add a Layer Mask and feather the edges with a soft black brush.
If the ear reads too red, go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation, nudge the hue toward yellow, and drop the saturation. Image > Adjustments > Color Balance handles anything that still refuses to match.
Eyebrows come next. Draw a Marquee selection over a patch of clean, wrinkle-free skin, grab the Patch Tool set to Destination, and drag that texture onto the eyebrow to erase it.
Then bring it partway back with Edit > Fade, around 41%. Old eyebrows thin out. They do not disappear.
Tip: Two shortcuts save a lot of clicking in this step. Q (Windows) or Q (macOS) toggles Quick Mask Mode, and CtrlJ (Windows) or CommandJ (macOS) runs Layer > New > Layer via Copy. The bracket keys size the soft brush, [ (Windows) or [ (macOS) to go smaller and ] (Windows) or ] (macOS) to go bigger.
Step 7: Build the Hair Strand Brush
One custom brush draws every hair in this image: the eyebrows, the sideburns, and the nose hair.
Draw a path shaped like a single hair strand. Set a soft Brush Tool to 2 pixels with black as the foreground color.
With the Path Selection Tool active, stroke the path with that brush. You now have one thin, tapered hair.
Go to Edit > Define Brush Preset and the strand becomes a brush.
Open the Brush Settings panel, which CS6 calls Brush Preset Options, and enter these values.
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Angle | 90 degrees |
| Roundness | 100% |
| Spacing | 25 |
| Size Jitter | 100% |
| Minimum Diameter | 1% |
| Angle Jitter | 9%, with Control set to Direction |
| Roundness Jitter | 19% |
| Minimum Roundness | 25% |
| Smoothing | On |
Direction is the setting that matters most. It turns every strand to follow the stroke, so the hair grows the way you drag.
At a large size the brush looks like nothing much. Bring the size right down and short strokes start to read as real hair.
Step 8: Add Older White Hair in Photoshop
Set the foreground color to white, take the hair strand brush down to a small size, and draw the eyebrows on a new layer.
Lower the layer opacity, press CtrlT (Windows) or CommandT (macOS), and choose Warp to bend the eyebrow into a better arch.
Duplicate the layer, shift it slightly, and lower its opacity to build density. Put both layers in a group so you can control them together.
Sideburns use the same brush on another new layer.
Pure white is the mistake everyone makes. Lock the transparent pixels on the hair layer, sample a brown from the skin, and use Edit > Fill with Foreground Color.
Then go to Edit > Fade and settle around 75%. The hair now borrows some color from the face instead of glowing.
For the hair itself, copy a section from a reference photo and paste it over your forehead. Flip it horizontally if the part falls on the wrong side.
Bring the guides back to find the hairline, scale the hair down until it fits, then hide the guides again.
Add a Layer Mask and paint black with a soft brush to cut the haircut in.
Then take the Smudge Tool to that mask and drag strands out past the edge. A smudged mask is the difference between real hair and a flat pasted shape.
Step 9: Small Details That Make Someone Older
This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that does the convincing.
Use the hair strand brush at a tiny size to add a few strands of nose hair and ear hair.
Whiten a handful of eyelashes. Lashes lose their color with age too.
Dot a little white above the lip where dark stubble used to be.
Keep your own blemishes. The marks above and below the lip stay in the final image on purpose. A face with no marks at all reads as retouched rather than old.
Remove the original hair if it pokes out past the new hairline, and paint in a little extra skin above the forehead so the mask blends.
The subject is already cut off its background, so drop in any backdrop you like, or put the original one back.
Frequently Asked Questions
Mask the subject, then drag wrinkles from a reference photo of an older face onto your subject with the Patch Tool. Reshape the eyes, nose, and jaw in Liquify. Finish with white eyebrows, sideburns, and hair painted with a custom hair strand brush.
Destination reverses the normal behavior of the Patch Tool. You draw around wrinkles on a reference face, drag that selection onto your subject, and Photoshop blends the texture in. Leave Transparent unchecked so the full texture carries across.
The Mask Edge button still sits in the Properties panel, but since the 2015.5 release it opens the Select and Mask workspace. The two controls this tutorial uses, Smoothness and Shift Edge, are under Global Refinements. Everything else about the step is the same.
Yes. You lift the wrinkles, the ears, and the hair straight out of photographs of older people. Four reference faces are enough for one portrait, and they are in the download above.
The History Brush paints a saved history state back into the image. You take a snapshot before patching, paint the fresh wrinkle away, then use Edit > Fade History Brush to decide how much returns. Fading to somewhere around 30 to 60 percent keeps a wrinkle believable.
No. Liquify changes shape and not texture, so it can sag the eyes and widen the face but it cannot add a single wrinkle. Pair it with patched texture or the result looks puffy rather than old.
Pure white reads as fake. Lock the transparent pixels on the hair layer, fill with a brown sampled from the skin, then use Edit > Fade at around 75 percent. Pull a few strands past the edge of the Layer Mask with the Smudge Tool so the hairline is not flat.
Make Someone Older in Photoshop
Nothing in this workflow is automatic. Every wrinkle, ear, and hair in that face came out of a real photograph, and that is exactly why the result holds up at full size.
Work in order and it stays manageable. Mask, wrinkles, shape, then details and hair.
Watch the full tutorial above to see every pass happen in real time, and comment on the video if a step gives you trouble.
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
Now run the technique in reverse and learn how to make someone look younger in Photoshop.
Related Links
Final Image
Drag the slider to see before and after
awesome young to old 🙂
Yup!
Thanks for the detailed explanation,, but to tell the truth, you could have cut a good 10 minutes or more out of this video because you were over-explaining everything.
actually, I really think this video could have been 9 or 10 mins tops!
its frustrating to have to listen to something for 30 mins that could have been done in 10.
but it was a good detailed tutorial… (for people that dont mind giving up 30 mins of their time to learn something simple)
James,
Thanks for your comment!
You might be a bit more advanced than most people who visit my site. The overwhelming amount of messages I receive are appreciative of longer videos since most people are starting out. The few messages I get about the videos being too long are usually from more experienced people. Personally, I am more like you, I prefer to watch the shorter videos but I have the advantage (and I’m guessing you do as well) of having experience.
Also thanks for checking out my stuff!
wow cool
Thank you!
where is the old people photo you said it would be on website
On this page! Above the comments!
You Did a Really Great Job!
But like the Other Poster noted, there was a lot of wasted time,
mostly in not utilizing the Reason that You went to all the trouble to Carefully Scaling the Images of the Older Persons.
Instead of having to individually cutting and pasting Wrinkles, While Your Original Layer and Older Person Overlay are still in alignment, Add a Layer Mask to Your Old Image, and then Invert the Layer Mask to 100% Black (Transparency).
Then You can just Freely Paint on Wrinkles any where you would like them to Appear without having to think about it, by Paint with White Paint.
This gives the Photoshop User the Freedom to use all of the Layer Blend Modes and Transparency Options as they Create their New Image.
I Hope that will Help in Future Tutorials in Simplifying what seems to be a Complex Process.
Fantastic Work that You Accomplished Here.
Take Care,
Tracy Mapes
Tracy, thanks for your comment!
I will try to simply things a bit more!
I was very interested in your aging video, but because I don’t belong to any social groups, I was not able to download the tutorial.
There’s a grey “X” on the top right you can click on. You are not require to go through a social network.
Great tutorial, clearly explained. I learned some things for sure. I never use the History Brush but may give it a try now. I also didn’t know the 50% guides trick, going to use that for sure. PS: It’s amazing how anyone can be “frustrated” by a FREE tutorial video ;-).
Thanks, Sean!
I used to use percentages all the time with guides, but now I’m more into Guide Guide. It’s a great Photoshop plugin and it completely turbo charges your guides.
PS.
It’s crazy to me too!
Thanks for the insightful tutorial! Never too old to learn. 🙂
Regarding the tutorial files, is it at all possible to get higher resolution files to prevent the image from looking pixelated?
Lori, I don’t have the rights to distribute the hi-res files. However, this tutorial is not dependent on those files. You can use whatever photos you like to achieve a similar effect.
i really like how you teach this, but i don’t understand on how to take off the old man after words. i mean after you Merge Layers, after you put the wrinkles on, how do you take off the old man and leave your picture with the wrinkles. because after you stop and pause, that’s where i get lost and don’t know how to take off the old man.
Christina,
You mean at the end?
If so, you should have at least two layers that are virtually the same, except for the face. Just add a layer mask to the top layer (the one with the old person’s face) and mask out the things you don’t want.
Hope this helps!
Great video!! More than helpful tutorial!! But in the beggining i seem to have a problem…i select myself with the quick selection tool but then the “add mask” in the layer section is not clickable!! So as the layer mask in the layers tab at the top!! Any idea on what im doing wrong?? 🙁
George,
Is the layer that you are selecting a “background” layer or a locked layer?
awsome so werthot!
Hi,
thanks for the tutorial. i’m having trouble merging the layers. i can merge (ctrl + e) the layer with the picture of the first old man ‘old 1’, however once you pause and restart the video with the second old man image if i try to merge these ‘old 2’ it merges instead with the layer below ‘old 1’. Please can you advise what i am doing wrong?
Luke,
I don’t recall exactly what part this happens on so if you want to tell me what minute in the video it occurs I can see and give you a specific answer.
In general, however, you can select more than two layers (shift click on them) and then do the merge.
Hope this helps.
At 12:32, you pause the video to add more wrinkles. When you come back you have a new layer with a new image of an old man but the wrinkles you have added on old 1 is still visible. How would you do that?
I merge the new layer to old one. So I bring in the new image. Then Merge it to the layer below.
thanks
You’re welcome!
thanks you sir
You’re welcome!
Hi, I’m looking forward to trying this thank you. Just wondering, the pictures of the older people that you use… Do they need to be similar resolution to the photo of yourself?
Thanks again
You’re welcome, Amanda!
Yes, the closer the are in resolution the better results you get. But depending on the area, you may get away with using a lower resolution image.
Hi so can this work aging someone who has past?! Example he past very young would to see what he would look like today
Yeah, but it will be of course an artistic interpretation.
I need some help. I am unsure how to get rid of the pictures of the older people after you have used them with the patch and lasso tool. I don’t want my final product to have a random picture of an old person. If you could please explain what I do to get rid of the image that would be great!
This is for a school assignment.
Thank you.
Also, this has been an awesome and very helpful tutorial! Unlike some others, I find the explanations and detail very helpful!
Thank you, Chloe!
Place the original image above everything else and just mask out the face. This will reveal the face that you worked on.
I have a project/job where I have to change an image of a 20 something female (both full frontal face and at a 45° angle to the camera) and age her to a 30 year old, 40 year old, 50 year old and 60 year old.
Is this a job you might consider taking? If so, let me know your costs and I can run it through my account group.
To summarize, it would be 4—10 year incremental aging images of a 20 something female in two angles. Total of 8 images.
Thanks.
Alan, I am not available for freelance work at the moment. Thank you.
Hi,
I’m doing a project where I have to age a 16 year old boy but only slightly, to make him look like 30 years old. I was wondering what techniques you would suggest, since the age is not much and wrinkles and all kind of haven’t existed yet. Thank you.
I would make the face fuller, make jaw bigger, add maybe a few wrinkles around the eyes. It all depends on how the boy looks.
Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing.
You’re welcome!
Can’t follow this tutorial as Photoshop has been altered now. Can’t find “Mask Edge” even at 1 minute mark. Will search for something more compatible with current version of Photoshop.
You are an artist Jesus, I’ve enjoyed so many of your video’s. Being 72 now is there a video on going from OLD to Young? (lol)
This is awesome. Thank you
Can you please show us to make image slider like you did.
You’re welcome! The slider is a WordPress plugin called TwentyTwenty.
Thank you for the video. I just can’t find the link to download the old people photos. Can you please let me know where I can download them?
Thank you once again