Smoothing skin in Photoshop doesn't have to be a long or complicated task.
Some methods give you excellent results,
like frequency separation,
but those methods can be complicated and time-consuming.
Not ideal for projects with tight deadlines or small budgets.
Let me show you a technique I developed recently
that will give you fantastic results with just a few clicks.
As you may know,
I recently started working as a finisher in the Hollywood industry.
I started to use this technique on my movie and TV poster clients,
and it helped me save a lot of time retouching.
And as they say, time is money.
Let me show you what this technique is all about.
This is the image that we're going to work with.
By the way, the link is in the description if you want to follow along with this
image, the goal is to soften and smoothen her skin.
To do so, I'll duplicate the original background layer
by pressing Ctrl J on Windows, that's command J on the Mac.
Then I'll go into Filter and Select Neural Filters.
The Neural Filters are a new workspace
inside of Photoshop that utilizes artificial intelligence, machine learning technology,
to dramatically reduce difficult workflows to just a few clicks.
In this case, we're going to use the
Skin Smoothing Neural Filter,
and you can enable it just by clicking on this icon.
And you can simply drag the Blur slider all the way to the right
and the Smoothness slider all the way to the right as well.
You can click on this icon if you want to see the before and after.
And I know what you're probably thinking. That I'm over smoothing her skin.
And yes, I'm actually doing that on purpose.
You may actually need to apply this filter twice in order to get the results that you
want, but I'm going to show you how to scale it back to get a realistic result.
Make sure that you output to the current layer, then press okay.
Photoshop will then apply the smoothing
effect to the image and you can see it here.
Now, we do have a couple of issues.
I'll tap on the Z key to enable the Zoom Tool
and I'll click to Zoom in.
Notice that when I enable the blur,
I start losing highlights and some details in the image.
And of course, that's because of the smoothing effect.
So, what I'm going to do now is blend these
layers together so that I can target the darker areas,
which include some of the Wrinkles and the blemishes, but keep the brighter
areas so that I don't lose texture or highlights.
And to do that, I'm going to use a Blending Mode.
From this drop-down, I can simply select the lighten Blending Mode.
And what the Lighten Blending Mode does
is it looks at both layers and it keeps the brightest Pixel.
So, if the layer on top has a Pixel that is
brighter than the layer below, that's the Pixel that it will keep.
In this case, you can see that this
Blending Mode just targets the blemishes on her skin.
If you think the smoothing effect was not
strong enough, you can reapply it by using a keyboard shortcut from the filter menu.
The first option is always the last filter that you applied,
but notice the keyboard shortcut
Its much easier to remember it and apply it with the shortcut.
So, I'll press Alt Ctrl and F on Windows.
That's Option Command F on the Mac to reapply that last filter.
And as you can see, I can keep reapplying the filter.
At some point the edges are going to get
too blurry and this will not look good enough.
So, I'm going to undo a couple of those blurs, but you can see the result.
So, this is before and after.
What I'm going to do now is selectively apply this effect to my image.
I don't want it applied to the entire face at the same intensity.
To do so, what you can do is hold Alt Time Windows option on the Mac
and click on the Layer Mask icon to create a black layer mask.
Remember, with a Layer Mask, black conceals and white reveals.
So, a black mask will hide all the contents of the layer.
I can then enable the brush tool
from the toolbar, make sure that white is my foreground color and I can simply paint
over the areas where I want to review the effects.
See this?
See how I'm just revealing this effect on the areas that I'm painting on and this
allows me to keep my effects a lot more realistic.
Obviously I'm going very quickly here, but do spend just a bit more time in your
projects to target the pixels that you really want to affect.
In some cases, you may also need to target the darker pixels in the image.
To do that, all you need to do is select
the layer that has the blurring effect applied to it and duplicate it by pressing
Ctrl J on Windows, Command J on the Mac.
And I'll delete the layer Mask so that we
can see how this will affect the rest of the image.
From the Blending Mode drop-down.
Instead of lighting, we can now select the darkened Blending Mode.
This will target the brighter pixels.
So, notice that once we do that, we lose the highlight on her nose and some
of the highlights on her lip don't look very good.
See that?
But that's okay.
So, I'll Select Darken and I'll create a black mask by holding Altan Windows
option on the Mac and clicking on the Layer Mask icon.
And I can now paint with white on this
layer mask with a brush tool to reveal that effect.
So, some of the highlights here that don't
look very good, I can simply paint on my mask with white to reveal the effect.
See that?
See how I'm just smoothing out that skin and things are looking much better.
This is before and after and I can put these two layers into a group.
I'll hold shift and click on both layers to select them and then press Ctrl G
on windows command G on the Mac to create a group.
This is my before and this is after.
At this point you can continue retouching
the portrait by adding a creative sharpening effect.
If you want to learn how to do that, then make sure you check out this video.
Thank you so much for watching.