Skin Smoothing in Photoshop

This set of video tutorials will teach you how to get that smooth, glamourous look for your model’s skin. You’ll learn how to:

• Fix minor and major blemishes using the patch, healing brush, and clone tools.
• Apply surface and gaussian blurs to help smooth the skin.
• Use layer masks to control how intensely the skin smoothing is applied.
• Implement other techniques used by pros.

Glamour Glow Skin Retouch: Photoshop Retouching

Starting with a copy of the background layer, the narrator uses a combination of a heavy gaussian blur and the overlay, screen, or soft light blend modes to help add some extra punch to a model’s skin. Once you’ve achieved a pleasing amount of glow, it shows how to mask out the subject’s face and paint back in most of the detail that is lost from the application of the gaussian blur. He also demonstrates how to use Photoshop’s Diffuse Glow filter to sometimes achieve the same glamour glow effect.

Photoshop CS4: Soft Skin

Here, you’ll learn how to smooth and soften skin by using a gentle application of the Surface Blur filter, along with some masking. Surface blur works similarly to gaussian blur, but helps keep some object’s edges sharper (i.e. jaw lines, eye sockets, nostrils, etc). After the surface blur, he uses a very subtle smart blur as well, which helps further refine the skin smoothing effect. Once the skin is smooth enough, use the eraser tool to erase areas you still want sharp (eyes, hair, lips, & teeth especially), and then make a brightness/contrast adjustment layer to perfect the skin tones.

Photoshop: Smooth Skin

Here is another way of using the smart blur and surface blur to achieve smooth skin in Photoshop.  He shows a bit more about how to pick more pleasing, “correct” settings for each of the blurs, and uses masks to block out parts of the photo that should not be smoothed.   The keyboard shortcuts mentioned in the video are also quite helpful.

Smooth Skin in Photoshop

This video has no narrator (it opts for some pleasant classical music instead), but does a wonderful job of showing a fashion magazine style skin makeover of a model.  Between different blurring methods, layer masking and blending modes, clever use of sharpening, and more, you’re bound to learn something about how to make a subject’s skin look smoother and more pleasant.  It may be a bit over-the-top for most images, but if you really need to achieve that high-fashion style image, this tutorial is a great place to begin to learn how to accomplish that.