Digital Nose Job

This is a very simple technique for decreasing the size of your subject's nose by 15% to 20%. The actual shrinking of the nose is a breeze and only takes a minute or twoyou may spend a little bit of time cloning away the sides of the original nose, but since the new nose winds up on its own layer, it makes this cloning a lot easier. Here's how it's done:

Step One

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Open the photo that you want to retouch. Press the Z key to switch to the Zoom tool and zoom in if needed. Press L to switch to the Lasso tool, and draw a loose selection around your subject's nose. Make sure you don't make this selection too close or too preciseyou need to capture some flesh-tone area around the nose as well.

Step Two

To soften the edges of your selection, go under the Select menu and choose Feather. When the Feather Selection dialog appears, for Feather Radius enter 10 pixels (for high-res, 300-ppi images, enter 22 pixels), then click OK. Now, go under the Layer menu, under New, and choose Layer via Copy. This will copy just the selected area to a new layer (Layer 1).

Step Three

Press Control-T to bring up the Free Trans-form bounding box. Hold Control-Alt-Shift, then grab the upper right-hand corner point of the bounding box and drag inward to add a perspective effect to the nose. Doing this gives the person a pug nose, so release all the keys, then grab the top-center point and drag straight downward to undo the "pug effect" and make the nose look natural again, but now it's smaller.

Step Four

When the new size looks about right, press Enter to lock in your changes. If any of the old nose peeks out from behind the new nose, go to the Layers palette, click on the Background layer, and then use the Clone Stamp tool (S) to clone away those areas: Sample an area next to the nose by Alt-clicking, and then clone right over the old nose, completing the effect.

Before

After