Guest post by Matthew Bridge Wilkinson

There has certainly been a flurry of interest in the press of late regarding Photoshop, and what the public would probably refer to as airbrushing. It’s fair to say there has to a degree been a backlash against heavily edited images. There is a bit concern that photo editing pictures to a point where they are far from reality has a negative impact on people in our society.  There has been a lot of discussion to date about the ethics of photo editing, and the unrealistic expectations of personal appearance born from this.

That debate I expect will go on, but you know what, between you and me, many of my customers regularly ask if I can “airbrush” them. They don’t want me to lengthen their legs, or enhance their figure. They want me to get rid of their spots, hide their wrinkles or remove dark circles under the eyes after a heavy night on the town.  Even my youngest of clients will sometimes ask me to make their skin just a little smoother.

So that dear reader is what you will find below. One of a few methods that I use to smooth skin, remove blemishes and get rid of any redness. It is really very simple, is non destructive to your image and if done correctly will look natural. I expect professional re-touchers will no doubt think my methods are somewhat crude but they work really well for me and for my clients. Importantly it allows a very quick retouch of a portrait that enhances the subject whilst allowing me to be done within 10 minutes on a full retouch. This article won’t go into technical details, nor will it show you my entire retouching repertoire but it will simply show you one simple skin retouching technique that you can easily recreate.

In the interest of this article I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS5. My reason for this is simply that I am trialing the software at the moment. This should mean that anyone can try this tutorial for free without any confusion between versions. In theory this tutorial can be easily adapted to any version of photoshop or even other software. I use a PC so any reference to Control below can be replaced with Command on the Mac.

Let’s start by opening an image in Photoshop, this is of my good friend Lola, who has great skin but like anyone a few natural blemishes and some uneven tones. My sample image has been chosen simply because it shows the skin close up.

With the image open Press Control J to copy the image into a new layer, this ensures that the editing is non destructive and we will always have our original to return to should we not like the results.

Rename this layer to Edit.

Use the Spot Healing Brush on the edit layer to remove any large spots, pores or scars. Ensure the brush size is only slightly larger than the blemish to be removed. In a later article I will show you how to reduce wrinkles or bags under the eyes with the patch tool but for now our model doesn’t need this.

From the Select menu choose Colour Range

This will allow you to select particular parts of the images, in this case just the skintones. Click anywhere on the skin and you will see an image similar to the below example

To add more to the selection, Hold Shift and Click on the skin. To remove any part of the selection, hold down Alt and click on the area of the image you want to remove. The aim is to get all of the skin without any other distractions, but don’t worry too much if some of the hair, clothing or background is selected, we can remove this easily after with the eraser tool.

Click Ok and you will see a “marching ants” selection appear over the image.

Press Control J again to copy the selection into a new image. This will make a selection of just the skin. Rename this new layer to Soften.

Turn off all layers beneath the Soften layer, so we can see what we are working with and you should see something like this. Your skin area will be selected and much of the rest of the image will not. However some areas we don’t want to be smoothed are selected in my example, so we need to carefully erase them with a Soft Edged Brush, namely the eyes, eyebrows, hair, lips and any background distractions.

Gently erase with a soft edged brush until your layer it looks similar to the second image. There should be nothing in the layer except for skin.

Once you have nothing but skin on your layer hit Control J again to duplicate that skin layer. Rename this new layer to Texture. You should now have 4 layers as below.

Enable the bottom layers again but disable the top layer called Texture

Select the Soften layer.

What we are going to do now is blur the soften layer, this will get rid of the texture on the skin and also reduce any redness or blotchiness present in the skin tones.

Go to the

Filters> Blur > Surface Blur

Set your Radius to around 20-35 and your Threshold to 20-25. It’s ok that it looks unnatural because we will add the texture back on in a moment. We can also use Opacity of the layers to adjust our effect to taste, if the blur is too much simply reduce that layers opacity.

As you can see now the skin is very blurred and looks completely unnatural, not flattering just a bit weird but it has got rid of any obvious blemishes and smoothed the skin tones, reducing redness.

Now however we need to use that second skin layer to add back in the texture of her skin.

Reselect the Texture layer and enable it.

Select:

Filter > Other > High Pass Filter

Select a pixel range of between 4 and 8 pixels or to taste. What you are looking for is the point at which the texture of the skin and pores begins to reappear. Feel free to adjust so they are quite obvious whilst you play with the technique and find your preferred settings.  Remember that you can adjust opacity of this texture layer too after, so don’t worry too much if you go a bit too far.

Change Blending Mode to Overlay (or soft light) and your subject should look normal again.

You should now see the texture laid back over the skin but without any of the colouration of the unsmoothed skin. This also makes the skin look realistic again.

On my example the blur was a little over done so I reduced the opacity down to about 75%, the same with the texture it was a little strong in places so I reduced the opacity a little too. See the before and after to see the difference. Subtle but effective, and if done correctly you will only know it’s been done, if you can see the before image.

Of course this is only the basics, there is much more you could do to improve on this but those are for another article in the near future where I will cover other aspects of retouching like reducing bags and lines, enhancing eyes, lips, hair, and how to use dodge and burn to flatter facial features without any physical reconstruction.

Matthew Bridge Wilkinson

www.warwickshirephotographer.com

www.bridgewilkinson.com

Twitter : @MattBW