Being able to retouch ‘perfect’ looking skin without completely destroying skin texture or making your subject look like a plastic doll requires patience. A lot of photographers seem to give-up after ten minutes or reach for skin softening actions and plug-ins. These things can be incredibly useful, I use them myself, but I think it’s important to be aware that there is no all-in-one fix when retouching skin and that it’s a combination of different techniques that will give you the best results.
The model in this example already has pretty good skin but I’d like to even it out the even more, paying particular attention to the visible pours on her cheeks and the pigmentation on her nose. One of the most effective ways to do this is by dodging and burning. It’s definitely not the quickest thing to do but I find it gives me the most consistent and natural looking results. I should also point out that using a Wacom tablet will save you a huge amount of time (not to mention your sanity) while doing this.
1. Create a new layer, set the blend mode to Soft Light and fill with 50% grey. You can do all of this at once in the ‘New Layer’ dialog box.
2. Create a curves adjustment layer above your new 50% grey layer and darken the image. The darkening curve will help you see the pours in the skin a lot better while working on your image.
3. Zoom into your image so you can clearly see all the pores in the skin, in this image I was working at around 200-300%. Set your foreground and background colours to the default black and white. Some people suggest that picking light and dark colours from the image itself gives you better results but I’ve never really noticed a difference to be honest. With a very small soft brush set to around 5-10% opacity paint on the 50% grey layer, white to lighten dark pores (dodge) and black to darken light pores (burn). Press the X key to swap between black and white while you work.
4. Turn off your darkening curve to look at your results. I only spent around 15 minutes in this example but you can already see a huge difference. As I said, it might not be the quickest thing to do but it’s an incredibly powerful technique that can help create fantastic looking skin.
100% crop, Before & After:
by Alan
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