Skin Smoothing Technique

Posted on September 22, 2008 by Phil   2 comments

In this tutorial I am going to introduce you to an easy to remember skin retouching technique that will give professional results. Most tutorials I have read myself on this subject leave the skin blurry with total loss of texture, here’s how I do it….

Tutorial image:

Summer Days by jojomarie

Step 1:

The image we just downloaded is perfect to show just how great this technique can be so lets open it up in Photoshop and crack on. First things first create a copy of the background layer for us to work on by right clicking the background layer and choosing, you guessed it, duplicate layer. Name the layer healed and press ok. Take your healing brush tool and select a source from a nice clear part of her cheek by holding down alt and clicking on the area. With our source set, clean up some of those freckles by simply clicking on them making sure you are using a nice soft brush which is slightly larger than the freckles we want to get rid of. Once you have removed the worst of the freckles you should have something like my image below. I also cleaned up the mouth sores with the clone tool so if you know how to go ahead and do that too.

Step 2:

Now we have a nice base to work from to smooth the skin out. Duplicate the healed layer twice naming one smoothed and one texture, move the texture layer to the top and hide it. Select the smoothed layer and go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and choose a setting of around 7 pixels, if you use too much the end result will look quite blotchy. Next we want to apply a layer mask to the smoothed layer which should now look very blurry and out of focus. Do this by clicking on the circle within a square icon at the foot of the layers palette. Fill the layer mask with black using either alt + backspace if it is your foreground colour or ctrl + backspace if it is your background color and the image should now look as it did before we added the blur.

Step 3:

With the layer mask selected we want to take the brush tool with a nice soft brush and our foreground color now set to white and paint in the main skin areas to show the blurring. Be careful not to paint over areas of detail like the nostrils, mouth and eyes as this will look unnatural. Painting around the hairline can be done with the brush set to a lower opacity of around 30%. You can change the opacity of the brush on the fly by simply pressing the 1-0 keys, 1 being 10% and 0 being 100%, as well as altering your brush size using the [,] keys.

Step 4:

We should now have some nice smooth looking skin with all our facial detail in tact but it kind of looks fake as the skin texture has been totally smudged away. Un-hide the top layer we named texture and de-saturate it using ctrl + shift + U. Now go to Filter>Other>High Pass and select a setting that shows the details of the skin and face without it looking too sharp, I set this to 4.5 pixels but you can experiment until you get the look you like. Accept the High Pass filter by clicking Ok and next set the layers blend mode to overlay.

Step 5:

Now although we have skin texture back and it looks really nice and smooth you may have noticed that our texture layer has totally over sharpened the eyes, mouth and hair. Well we only want to affect the areas we blurred so lets copy our layer mask from the smoothed layer to the texture layer by holding alt and dragging it up onto the texture layer.

So that’s it! I told you it was easy, Get the full impact of your transformation by hitting the F key until your image is set against a black background, then press the tab key to hide your palettes, press ctrl + 0 to fill the screen with your image and finally hit F12 to see the non edited image (thats if you didn’t save it half way through), now use ctrl + z to view your before and after.

Subtle but impressive!!