I live in Australia and as you know the weather can get quite hot here. A nasty result of this for photography is sweat sheen and “shiny face” syndrome. These can make a photo look rather horrid. Even in cooler conditions, a little bit of humitidy coupled with the use of the in-camera flash can make a face look positively pasty.

In my first PhotoShop tutorial I will show you a simple but very effective way to reduce, or even remove, the sweat sheen on a photograph. Essentially it mimics the process of applying pancake makeup to the subjects after the picture has been taken.

This tutorial was written for Photoshop CS4 but should work for earlier versions. A layer approach is used so that the original image is not modified at all. However, always work on a copy of the image just in case you make a change and save it by accident.

The specific tools and techniques used in the tutorial include:

• Layers
• Blend modes (specifically the "darken" mode)
• Paintbrush tool.

In a nutshell
A new empty layer is created on top of the background image. The blend mode is set to “darken” and a soft-edged brush is used along with selective colour-picking to apply a correction (artificial makeup)onto the new layer. Just turn the correction layer on and off to see the before and after images.

The video of this tutorial is just over 5 minutes long and shows the process step-by-step.