Removing or Lessening Wrinkles with Photoshop Elements

Open the photo you want to remove wrinkles from. The photo I am using is shown below of Jack Nicholson:

Duplicate the Background layer by going dragging the background copy to the duplicate layer button at the bottom of the layer palette. (FYI: The Background photo is not a representation of this activity.)

Your layer palette should now look like this:

Zoom in on the photo using the zoom tool .

Select the Healing Brush tool from the Toolbar .

Then, choose a soft-edged brush from the brush settings located at the top of the document window. Choose a brush size that’s close to the size of the wrinkles you want to remove. Here are the settings I used.

Find a smooth area that’s somewhere near the wrinkles (perhaps the upper cheek if you’re removing crow’s-feet, or if you’re removing forehead wrinkles, perhaps just above or below the wrinkle).

Hold the Alt key and click once to sample the texture of the skin from that area. Now, take the Healing Brush tool and paint over the wrinkles. As you paint, the wrinkles will disappear, yet the texture and detail of the skin remains intact. As you drag the healing brush notice the small crosshair that appears where you defined your smooth area. This is what is being painted over the wrinkle. You may need to define your initial area several times to get your desired result.

Now to make the photo look realistic, you could simply go to the Layers palette and reduce the Opacity of Background copy layer to bring back some of the original wrinkles. I used the value of 70%.

This lets a small amount of the original photo (the Background layer, with all its wrinkles still intact) show through. Keep lowering the Opacity until you see the wrinkles, but not nearly as prominent as before. Below shows the original as well as the edited photo.

Before	After