Hey, this is Marty from Blue Lightning TV. I'm going to show you a super-quick method to
effectively smooth skin and remove blemishes while retaining its skin pores as well as the skin's
natural texture. For your convenience, I provided this photo that you can download. Its link is in
my video's description or project files. Before we begin, if you want to be notified as soon
as I upload new Photoshop tutorials, click that Subscribe button and welcome! The first step is to
make a copy of our photo by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + J. Invert the copy by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + I.
We'll convert it into a Smart Object so we can modify it non-destructively. To do this,
click the icon at the upper right of the Layers panel and click "Convert to Smart Object".
Change its Blend Mode to "Vivid Light". Go to Filter, Other, and High Pass. High Pass
is essentially an edge-detection filter. It works by filling the entire image with a flat,
neutral gray. It then looks for edges in the image and highlights them by making the light
side of the edge lighter and the dark side darker. Decreasing the radius decreases the effect while
increasing the radius increases it. We want to find a radius that blurs the skin just enough
to hide most of the skin imperfections. For this image, a radius of 40 pixels works well.
Go back to Filter, Blur, and Gaussian Blur. This blurs the high pass effect.
A low radius has more of an effect on the high pass filter,
while a higher radius has less of an effect. I'll use a blur radius of 5 pixels which
gives us just the right amount of skin texture without showing the blemishes.
Next, we'll restore back the eyes, hair, and any other areas that have sharp edges. Before
we do that, let's collapse the Smart Filters to save a little space in the Layers panel.
Ctrl or Option-click the Layer Mask icon which makes a black layer mask next to the active
layer. This hides or masks out the entire layer next to it. Next, we'll brush white inside the
layer mask which will reveal the smooth skin we created on top of the blemished photo. To do this,
open your Brush Tool and make sure your foreground color is white.
Open your Brush picker and pick a soft, round brush. We'll adjust the brush's size in a moment.
Its Hardness is 0% and the Opacity and Flow are both 100%. To make your brush smaller or bigger,
make sure the CapsLock key is off and press the left or right bracket key on your keyboard.
Brush over t he skin to reveal the smooth skin. Feel free to adjust the brush's opacity
in areas that you want to finesse. To do this, at the top, just slide the opacity to the left.
Lastly, we'll touch up the skin. Make a composite snapshot by pressing Ctrl
+Alt + Shift + E on Windows or Cmd + Option + Shift + E on a Mac. Open The Spot Healing Brush
and adjust its size to make it a bit larger than the blemish you want to remove.
To lessen the effect of bags or dark shadows under the eyes,
open the Patch Tool and draw around that area. Drag the tool to an area of the skin you want
to r place its texture with and release your mouse or pen.. Deselect it by pressing Ctrl
or Cmd + D. That's it! This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV. Thanks for watching!