There’s a lot of really bad ’skin softening’ tutorials on the internet, the majority of which just leave your subject looking like a blow-up doll….erm, not that I have ever owned one. Obviously, this is just my opinion and you should use whichever method/action you are comfortable with but I thought by sharing two of my favorite softening techniques it would give you some alternatives to play with.
First thing I should say is that both these techniques works best when applied to skin that has already been retouched. By retouched I mean removal of blemishes, marks and stray hairs with the healing brush, patch tool, or clone stamp tool. It’s important to have good, clean skin before you start. Second thing is that this first technique is the simplest of the two and is a little ‘ghetto’, but it works really well and is fantastic at getting rid of those fine little hairs on arms and legs.
First thing we need to do is make a selection of the skin. There are so many ways to make selections so just use your preferred method. For this tutorial I used a combination of the ’select colour range’ command, painting with the ‘quick mask’ to clean up the selection (eyes, mouth, hair etc) and the ‘refine edge’ command to feather the selection and the contract the selection away from the edges.
[click the thumbnail for larger version]
With your selection active jump the skin up onto its own layer by selecting the ‘Make layer via copy’ command from the ‘Layer’ menu or using the key command, Apple+J.
Blur the skin with the gaussian blur filter. This is the ‘ghetto’ part I talked about earlier, I normally hate ‘blurred’ skin but we’ll fix that in a minute. I used a radius of 14.4 which is probably too strong. On a high-res file a radius of 8 - 12 should do the job. Click OK to apply the effect.
Add some texture back into the blurred skin using the ‘add noise’ filter. I used monochromatic and gaussian at a radius of around 0.75 - 1.0. You shouldn’t really have to go over 1.0.
Open the blending options for the skin layer by going to Layer/Layer Styles/Blending Options or simply double click the right hand side of the skin layer.
Go down to the ‘blend if’ section of the window and on the ‘underlying layer’, holding the Alt key, drag both the black and the white sliders. Holding the Alt key while dragging the sliders should split the sliders in two. Pull the black towards the right, and the white towards the left. The sliders under the bars represent the spread of lightness values from 0 (black) to 255 (white). Splitting the sliders in this way creates a smooth transition from blacks in the underlying layer (un-blurred) into the blurred layer and the whites in the underlying layer to the blurred layer. Confused? Basically it allows the important stuff like the highlights and shadows in the pores of the skin to peek through the blurred layer, creating a more natural blend in the skin.
Click OK and add a layer mask to the skin layer. Invert or fill the mask with black to hide the softening. With a large soft brush, paint with white on the layer mask to reveal the softer, smoothed skin tone avoiding edges and details that maybe got a little too blurred first time round.
You might want to lower the opacity of the skin layer as it’s probably a little strong, but that’s up to you. It can be very easy to get carried away. Below is a before and after at 50% zoom.
At 100% you can see the skin is soft and much more even, but retains detail.
As I said previously, this is my goto technique for the fine hairs on arms and legs. Just be careful not to overdo the blur and play with the opacity of the skin layer once finished. When I get a chance to write the next tutorial I’ll show you the more complicated technique.
Big *hug* to Carlos Amoedo for letting me use this image for the tutorial.
Image © 2008 Carlos Amoedo
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