Easily Smooth and Soften Skin In Photoshop | High-End Retouching Techniques [FREE Action Included]

[Music] hi welcome back to the photoshoptrainingchannel.com I'm mrs. Ramirez in this video I'm going to show you how to smooth skin in Photoshop you're going to learn two powerful skin softening techniques both of these techniques are non-destructive which means that you'll be able to come back and make adjustments to your edits at any time but most importantly these methods leave the skin texture intact which will give you a beautiful smooth skin without it looking too soft or too fake the first technique will take advantage of a brand new feature of Photoshop CC if you're in an older version of Photoshop then don't worry the second technique will work with Photoshop cs6 it does require a few more steps but it gives you total control over your image and your skin softening effect it makes sure that you stick around into the very end of the tutorial because I'm going to be sharing with you a free Photoshop retouching action this action will allow you to apply the second technique with just one single click so that you can start smoothing skin right away okay let's get started this is the portrait that we're going to work with again this first example is for the latest version of Photoshop Photoshop CC if you're working on an older version then you can fast forward to the second technique and you can follow along with that so with this layer selected I'm simply going to press ctrl J command J on the Mac to duplicate the layer this step is not really necessary but it will help me show you a before and after when we're done now before you smooth the skin of any portrait what you have to do is remove large blemishes that the skin smoothing technique may not get rid of if you zoom into your portrait you may see some larger distractions she actually doesn't have too many maybe this one here maybe this blemish there it's not a lot but we'll remove it now that way things are much easier when we apply the skin smoothing technique so what you want to do is create a new layer to work and under strucked ability we're gonna make all our adjustments in this layer I'm gonna rename it and I'll call it Spot Healing because I'm going to use the Spot Healing Brush tool with that layer selected go into the Spot Healing Brush tool found in the tools bar make sure that sample all layers is selected and before we actually start working with it I want to show you one thing I'm going to use a right bracket key on the keyboard to make the brush larger you can see the preview there that shows you how big your brush is if you don't see that that's because the caps lock key is enabled so if you see a crosser like that one just tap on the caps lock key to disable it and the brush preview comes back so what I want to show you is how most people work with this tool most people just work with this tool with the normal setting notice that the mode is set to normal and that just means that Photoshop samples pixels depending on where you paint and in most cases that that's a really good job unfortunately if you zoom in you'll notice that sometimes it destroys the texture of the skin and that's because we're targeting all pixels and usually we don't want to do that we want to target specific pixels so I'm going to undo those adjustments and what you want to do is select your Spot Healing Brush tool then in the mode select either darken or lighten the mode that you select depends on the blemish or distraction that you're trying to remove if the distraction is starker than the skin tone select lighten if the distraction it's brighter than the skin tone select darken so let me show you how this works I'm going to click on lighten and I'm just going to start removing some of these distractions and notice that as I do that I'm not destroying the highlights of the image I'm just removing the darker pixels so I'm removing the darker blemishes and keeping the bright areas which will allow me to keep the skin texture so I'm going to double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen and I'll just remove some of the darker blemishes in the image fairly quickly here she actually doesn't have too many I'm just showing you just in case your image has larger blemishes that the skin smoothing technique will not get rid of so I'm just removing some of these blemishes and that's the before and the after really quickly we were able to clean up her face I'm gonna zoom into the corner over her mouth and there's a white spot there that I want to remove but watch what happens with that same technique if I make my brush a little smaller with the left bracket key and tap it will not remove that distraction because it's brighter than the skintone so I don't want to lighten it instead I want to darken it so I'll select darken and I'll just remove that blemish and notice how I didn't affect the shadows in the darker pixels only the brighter pixels and that's why I recommend using modes because you will eliminate only the pixels that you're targeting and I can switch in between them I can go back in to lighten and just maybe remove some of these spots but this is really not necessary the skin smoothing technique will get rid of those spots I'm going to double click on the hand tool again to fit the image to screen and you can see the before in the after so once you remove the larger blemishes from your image what you need to do is select your Spot Healing layer hold shift and select your portrait layer and right click and select convert to smart object that will place the two layers into a smart object a smart object is a container they can hold one or more layers and you can apply adjustments distortions and filters non-destructively which means that you can always come back and edit them at any time so with this layer selected I'm going to go into filter Camera Raw filter and the Camera Raw filter allows you to adjust the tonality color in details of a photo and that's what we're gonna use to create beautiful soft skin we're going to use one of the brand new sliders in Photoshop CC the texture slider which can be found in the basic panel right above the D haze and clarity sliders I'll zoom in so that you can see how it works the texture slider allows you to enhance texture or reduce texture so notice that when I reduce the texture it smooths out the skin I might not want to go all the way to the left maybe at about negative 75 and if that's still not smooth enough for you you can adjust the clarity you bring the clarity back down to the negative values it'll also smooth out the skin I probably don't want to go too far with the clarity and if you want to learn more about the texture and the hay sliders then I have a video on adjusting texture and Photoshop I explain in a lot of detail what these sliders do so I highly recommend watching that video I'll place a link down below in the description but anyway once you set your texture down you might want to go into the detail tab and just add a little bit of sharpening just so that you get some of that skin texture back also here's a trick for you if you hold alt option on the Mac and click on that masking slider notice how the image turns white that means that the entire image is being affected by that sharpening effect if I drag to the right only the areas in white will be affected so maybe you can adjust that accordingly depending on your portrait in this case it really is not gonna make a huge difference so I'll leave it at zero but that tip may be really really valuable for other types of images so once you've set your sharpening you can just press okay and Photoshop applies that effect but it applies it to the entire image and we don't want that we only want to apply to certain parts of the image so what we're gonna do is click on the layer mask for the smart filter and we can then press ctrl I command I on the Mac to invert or you can click on the invert button in the properties panel to invert the mask notice now how the mask is completely black that means that everything is hidden with a mask black hides white reveals in the different levels of gray give you different levels of transparency so what I'm gonna do now is with the brush tool I'm going to make sure that my foreground color is set to white which it is and I'm just gonna paint in the areas where I want to apply the skin smoothing effects so not every or just in the areas that require a little bit of smoothing and that will quickly smooth out her skin we'll be able to see a lot of detail and all this is non-destructive we can edit it so if I make a mistake I can just paint with black and remove the effect from that area switch back to white and I'm switching between white and black by clicking on this arrow you could also press the X key on the keyboard or swap back and forth and just paint with white in the areas where you want the effect I'll zoom in just show you one other thing you could also use a mode with the Camera Raw filter much like we use with the Spot Healing Brush tool and if you want to use a mode you can double click on this icon here which brings up this window this window is a lot like the fade command it allows you to bring down the opacity of the filter and it also allows you to change the blending mode so we can change the blending mode to lighten and notice how much brighter the highlights get so if you want to keep the original highlights change the blending mode to lighten I'm gonna keep it at normal because I think it looks better in my case and opacity at 100 works I just wanted to give you that option in case your portrait requires it I'll press ok and we're back to where I was before what I'm gonna do now is simply double click on the hand tool and click on this eye icon so that you can see that before and the after much much better also since all this is non-destructive you can always double click on the Camera Raw filter label and make further adjustments you can come in and adjust how much texture we're gonna have how much sharpening you're going to apply press ok when you're done and Photoshop applies those new adjustments to your document once again before and after and as you can see this is a very powerful technique for smoothing skin in Photoshop I highly recommend that you use it what I'm gonna do now is show you how to do something similar in an older version of Photoshop it's gonna require a few more steps and I'm going to provide an action that you can simply run and apply the effect your portraits to save you a little bit of time first I'll show you how the technique works and then I'll show you where you can download the free action the first step is to select the portrait layer right click and select convert to smart object and I'm going to press ctrl J on Windows command J on the Mac to duplicate that layer one time and I'll do that again to duplicate it a second time so now I have three smart objects it's important to note that when you duplicate a smart object they remain linked to the original so if you change the contents of one it will change the contents of all and that's gonna be really important later on in the tutorial for now I'm going to place these Smart Objects into a group so I'm going to select them both by holding shift and pressing control G on Windows command G on the Mac and I'm going to expand the group so that I can see the contents and I'm going to work with the bottom image first and even though I don't need to I'm going to disable this layer so that you can be sure that I'm only working with this first to placate and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to apply a filter I'm going to apply the blur filter so I'll name this layer blur then go into the filter menu and select blur Gaussian blur and this is going to blur my image and what you want to do is just blur it up to a point where you lose all details so in this case we can take it up to maybe 6 pixels and we are losing all the detail in the image and what the blur filter does is remove high frequency information if you don't know what frequency is or what it means then check out that video I referenced earlier in the tutorial the one about enhancing textures in that video I go into great detail about what frequency is how it works and what you can do with it so watch that video I'm placing a link right below in the description but anyway just know that Gaussian blur removes detail high frequency information 6 pixels I'll press ok I'm gonna enable now the second layer and with this layer we're going to apply a different filter and we're going to use the high-pass filter high-pass is the opposite of blur it removes the low frequency information so it only keeps the details and texture of a layer so I'm gonna go into filter other high pass and I'm going to enter exactly the same value 6 pixels and I'll press ok then I'm going to change the blending mode of this layer to blender with the layer below and I'll select linear light and then bring the opacity down to 50% and that virtually gives us the same image that we started with I'm going to enable the portrait layer and if I disable the eye icon for group you can see that it's virtually the same image is slightly different and that's because we use the filters to separate each frequency and put it in its own layer then we use the blending mode to combine the frequencies and give us the original image back so now we have the texture on one layer and the colors and another layer and we're going to adjust each layer independently to soften the skin and the reason that I went through that long explanation is so that you understood what those filters did behind the scenes now that you know what these filters are doing we're gonna change the settings so that we can get smoother skin and reduce the intensity of the skin texture and we'll start with the blur filter in the blur layer that will click on the Gaussian blur label and maybe increase this to about 8 pixels so we get a much much smoother transition of her skin tones and I'm going to double click on high-pass and reduce it so it reduces down to 3 pixels and press ok and that's the great thing about working with Smart Objects you can always come back and make adjustments later so these settings on work I can always adjust them so with the group selected I'm just gonna double click on the name to rename it and I'll call it skin softening and I'm going to create a layer mask but I'm going to hold alt as I click on the layer mask icon which is option on the Mac to create a black mask which hides everything in that group and I can simply paint with white on that mask to reveal the effect like so so notice how I'm just revealing that skin softening effect on those areas this is very similar to what we did in the previous example and I'm going fairly quickly here but obviously take your time in your image and I'm going to click on the eye icon so that you can see that before in the after and you probably have already noticed one thing that I didn't do my Spot Healing Brush tool adjustment and that's why I have a blemish here and some of the blemishes on her nose so remember this is a smart object we can always come back and edit it so if I double-click on the smart object it will open up in a new tab and I can do the same technique create a new layer select the Spot Healing Brush tool make sure that lightin is my mode and I can just paint away some of these larger blemishes that you see here her nose and on other areas of her skin the white on her mouth so I changed it to the darken mode on the Spot Healing Brush tool I'll quickly remove those white dots then I'm going to close a smart object save it and those changes are applied to the image remember these smart objects are linked so the updates will happen on all instances of those duplicated smart objects and that is the great thing about working with smart objects you can always come back and edit your adjustments that way you get the best smooth skin as possible again these adjustments are all subjective do what works best for your image but generally speaking you don't want to push the effect too far but that is up to you to decide what I want to do now is show you the free action that I mentioned earlier in the tutorial this action will help you create all these layers and folder just with one single click so check out the link down below in the description so you know where to download the file once you download your file into your computer bring it into Photoshop and the way that you would do that is by going into the actions panel you can click on this icon or go into the window menu in actions and click on the flyout menu and select load actions and load that etienne file onto your computer and you should see a skin softening action you know you need to do is hit the play icon the action will run Photoshop will ask you how much blur you want to add so I think I added six pixels to start with in this video so press ok then the action will ask you how much high pass you want to add I'll go to 2 in this case press ok and you'll have instructions on what to do next paint with white using the brush tool on the groups layer mask to reveal the softening effect and you can check out more of my tutorials on my website ptc viscom and this is who I am I'll press stop and I can continue working with the brush tool I can paint with white on the group's layer mask to reveal the skin smoothing effect if you expand the group you will see the layers at the action created and you will see an extra layer that I did not show in the tutorial this blur at its layer allows you to locally fine-tune the blur in other words you can blur small portions of the image without affecting the rest of the photo let me show you how it works select the lasso tool in the options bar add feather the feather determines how soft the edge of the selection will be I don't want the sharp selection so I'll use a feather of 10 pixels then make a selection around the part of the face that you would like to edit I'll select her forehead then go into filter blur Gaussian blur and increase the blur until you have a soft smooth area without blotches of color and press ok then I'll press control D on Windows command D on the Mac to deselect I'll collapse the actions panel and disable the blur edits layer to show you the before and the after you can see how much smoother the skin looks in this area in a real project I would need to go and fine-tune some of the edges of course but I think that you get the idea how this works and by the way let me know in the comments below what you think about these techniques if you like them then click on that like button now also if you're brand new to the Photoshop training Channel then don't forget to click on that subscribe and notification buttons that way you're notified whenever I post a new tutorial and you don't miss any new Photoshop tips and tricks also if you enjoyed this video then don't forget to check out my tutorial on creating skin texture from scratch is one of my 90 second Photoshop tips I'll place a link to that video right below in the description thank you so much for watching and I will talk to you again in the next Photoshop tutorial

Channel: Photoshop Training Channel

Views: 226,009

Keywords: High-End Skin Softening, Smooth Skin in Photoshop, Soften Skin in Photoshop, skin retouching, retouch skin, airbrush skin, skin texture, skin smoothing, frequency separation, retouch, portrait retouching, blemishes, fashion photography, portrait photograhy, Skin Softening, advanced retouching, high-end retouching, skin retouching actions, 1 click skin retouching, jesus ramirez, jrfromptc, photoshop training channel, photoshop tutorial, ptcvids, high end retouching tutorial

Id: ry9FFnE8s1g

Length: 19min 37sec (1177 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2019