Smooth Skin Tutorial

I learned something recently that has completely changed how I edit portraits, and made me much more willing to take a few of myself.  :)  So I thought I'd share it with you!  I'm going to show you how to smooth skin using Photoshop Elements.

Here is the original photo.  Not bad, but lacking a little oomph.  And since I have rather large pores my face always looks a bit spotty.

I start out by editing the lighting and color.  Since this tutorial is about smoothing the skin I'm going to focus my post on that.  But so you know, I adjusted the levels to lighten the photo a bit, increased the hue saturation, bumped up the color curves, and did a tiny dodge on the eyes.  You can just do any of your normal edits small or large before smoothing the skin.

I begin with the healing brush tool (looks like a bandaid).  You can use the spot healing brush which just samples immediately around the area of your spot, or you can use the healing brush tool like I did.  

I like to zoom in my photo to the spot I am healing so that I can see better.

With the healing brush tool you tell it where to sample by holding alt and clicking where you want to copy from and then you paint over the spot.  I prefer this method because sometimes your spots are close to things like your eyebrows, or hair, or something else and if you just spot heal you get weird coloring from the other things around it.  With the healing brush you decide where to sample from so you get better coverage.

Now that you have your spots cleaned up go over to the layers palette and right click to duplicate layer (or go up to layer, duplicate layer at the top)

When it asks you if you want to duplicate layer, click ok.

With the duplicate layer selected go up to Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur.

Use a radius of 10 pixels.  This will make your whole photo very blurry.  Don't worry, we'll fix that!

Go back and select the BACKGROUND layer again (bottom one).  Once again right click and duplicate layer.

It will ask if you want to duplicate again, say ok.

You now have a layer called background copy 2.  Click on that layer and drag it to the top of all the layers.

Now that the 2nd copy is on top of the first copy you can't see the blur anymore.  It is hiding underneath the 2nd copy so we need to reveal it.  But only where we want smooth skin.  That way you keep the detail in the rest of the photo.

Be sure the top layer is selected (Background copy 2).

Select the eraser tool.

In the top tool bar be sure that a soft edge brush is chosen (looks gray).  I set my opacity at 50%.  I wouldn't go higher than that.  For children and men I tend to go down to more like 30%.

Your brush will look like a circle.  I couldn't get that in the screen shot.  You can change the size of your circle at the top or a shortcut is to click the bracket keys.  The right bracket makes it bigger and the left bracket makes it smaller.

Be careful not to erase over lines that give definition to your face.  Don't erase over lips, or eyes, or eyebrows.  Be careful and use a small brush if you are going to erase on the nose.  I like to be sure to get under the eyes, the cheeks, forehead, and chin.  Some people don't touch the nose at all.  For pics of me I do, but with a very small brush, because of how big my pores are.  It would just be too noticeable if I didn't get those areas at least a little bit.

When you have it the way you want it go back over to the layers palette, right click and flatten image.

Then save and you are finished.

And here is the finished photo.  

Here are the two side by side so you can see the difference.  It's subtle, but that is what you want.  Makes it look more natural.

Hope you've enjoyed learning this technique as much as I did!