Photoshop Tutorial - Smoothen Skin

In this tutorial I'll be teaching you how to smoothen the skin of a picture.




Photo from http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1027409
Original picture:

























Lets go!


Step 1:
Retouching skin is rarely an easy task. There are no absolutes when it comes to making skin look the “right” color, smoothing out wrinkles, or reducing blemishes and blotchiness. This tip will take you through one popular technique for smoothing skin texture for a younger, smoother look.




Duplicate the background layer.

The Surface Blur filter was introduced in Photoshop CS2. Rather than blurring your entire image, the Surface Blur filter provides a “smart” smoothing effect that protects areas of contrast or detail. Notice in our example how the skin is smoothed, yet the pupil edges in our subject’s eyes remains crisp.

Choose Filter > Blur > Surface Blur

Blur the new layer to the point where the skin imperfections are no longer noticeable, but no further than that. The Radius option specifies the size of the area sampled for the blur. The Threshold option controls how much the tonal values of neighboring pixels must diverge from the center pixel value before being part of the blur.

Step 3:

Add a layer mask to your upper layer.

This way we can use the blurred layer to smooth out skin blemishes while allowing the crisp details from our model’s eyes, lips and hair to show through. 

Just go painting black with a hard brush on the places where you want more detail.

Now put this layer to 50-80% opacity, because you will get a more realistic effect.

Sorry for not posting pictures along with this tutorial!