Digital Nose Job

This is a very simple technique for decreasing the size of your subject's nose by 15-20%. The actual shrinking of the nose is a breeze and only takes a minute or two. You 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

Open the photo that you want to retouch. Press L to get 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 precise because you need to capture some flesh-tone area around the nose.

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 around 22 pixels), and then click OK.

Step Three

Now, press Command-J (PC: Control-J) to copy your selected area onto its own layer in the Layers palette.

Step Four

Press Command-T (PC: Control-T) to bring up the Free Transform bounding box. Hold Shift-Option-Command (PC: Shift-Alt-Control), then grab the upper-right 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, but you'll fix that in the next step.

Step Five

To get rid of the "pug-nose" effect, release all the keys, then grab the top-center point and drag straight downward to make the nose look natural again, but now it's smaller. When the new size looks about right, press Return (PC: Enter) to lock in your changes. If any of the old nose peeks out from behind the new nose, click on the Background layer and use the Clone Stamp tool (S) to clone away those areas: Option-click (PC: Alt-click) an area next to the nose to sample it, and then paint (clone) right over it to complete the retouch.

Before

After