Now that you can see your full-color image again, you're going to load your layer mask as a selection. When you're done (don't forget her neck and shoulders), Option-click directly on the layer mask thumbnail again to return to your normal image. Here, you can see I missed a bunch of areas on her forehead and by her nose, and a few tiny areas here and there. These missed areas are really easy to fixâ”just take your Brush tool and paint right over them (you're painting right on the mask itself, so you'll be able to see perfectly as you paint). This displays just the mask by itself, and any areas on her face that appear in black aren't getting the effect, so you'll see instantly whether you missed any areas or not. To make sure you haven't missed any areas, in the Layers panel, Option-click (PC: Alt-click) directly on the layer mask thumbnail (as shown here). Now, paint over her skin, but be careful to avoid all the detail areas, like her eyes, hair, clothing, eyebrows, nostrils, lips, etc. Press D to set your Foreground color to white, get the Brush tool (B), and choose a medium-sized, soft-edged brush from the Options Bar. This adds a black layer mask to your blurry layer (seen here to the right of the top layer), which hides the blurry layer, so all you're seeing now is the original, unblurred Background layer. Press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and click once on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. We just want it on her skin, so we're going to have to mask it. Although it looks a lot better at this point (and the skin looks pretty decent), the rest of the image also has the effect applied. Now, go to the Layers panel and lower the Opacity of this Surface Blur layer to 50% (as shown here). Go ahead and click OK to apply this filter to your image (it's doing a lot of math to make some parts blurry while the edges maintain detail, so don't be surprised if a progress bar appears onscreen, as this one usually takes a few extra seconds to apply). This gives a blocky, almost posterized look to your subject's skin at this point. I set the Radius (which controls the amount of blur) to around 39, and I make sure the Threshold slider (which controls the tonal values that get blurred) doesn't get higher than the Radius amount (here, I have set it to 31, and I usually have it between 5 and 10 lower than the Radius setting). There are big advantages to using this filter over Gaussian Blur, and one is that it does a better job of preserving edges (rather than Gaussian Blur, which just blurs everything equally).
Go under the Filter menu, under Blur, and choose Surface Blur.
Start by pressing Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to duplicate the Background layer, as shown here. Here, I removed them already, so we can just focus on softening the skin. It uses the Surface Blur filter at one stage, but don't worry, the whole idea of this technique is to have loads of texture, so don't freak out when you see the Surface Blur filter.Īs always, before you do any skin softening, remove all the major blemishes using the Healing Brush (see page 86). Also, at one point it does have a teeny, tiny bit of blur in it, but not enough to hurt anybody. In fact, it's simple, so don't let the number of steps throw you. This one takes a few steps, but it's not hard at all.
PORTRAIT RETOUCHING SKIN TECHNIQUES PROFESSIONAL
Excerpt from Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques for Photographers Using Photoshop
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