How to Airbrush a Photo in Photoshop

Have you ever seen the tabloid photos of celebrities running to the grocery store or picking up the kids from soccer practice. They don't look nearly as stunning as they do when they are on the cover of a magazine do they. Obviously being in a photographers studio for those cover shots doesn't hurt. But neither does having a professional photoshop artist touch up your photos before they are printed. Don't kid yourself. Almost all photos of models and actors that make it to print have been enhanced in some way in photoshop. If you have photoshop and are wondering how you can 'airbrush' your photos to soften your skin, bring out fine details, or hide any blemishes, heres how:

- Open your file in photoshop.

- The first thing you'll want to do is remove any blemishes on your subject. Using the Heal Brush or the clone tool, get rid of any obvious marks. The Heal brush is the easier tool to use, simply select a small brush size and color on your blemish. The Heal tool pulls color from around the blemish to 'blend' it in.

- Next, copy the working layer and apply the Dust and Scratches filter by going to Filter > Noise > Dust & Scratches. Use a small radius and an even smaller threshold (often 0). Your subject should look almost 'creamy' like it's been airbrushed way too much.

- Next apply a Gaussion Blur to the layer that you applied the Dust and Scratches Filter to. This removes any blotching spots or 'banding' in the photo. Again, a small blur (a pixel radius of 2 or 3 should work great).

- Now, add a bit of noise by selecting Filter > Noise > Add Noise. You just want to add a tiny bit of texture to your subject so a small setting, about 1% and Monochromatic should be enough.

Remember all these settings for the filters are just guides. Play with the sliders on your own to achieve your desired effect. File resolution plays a big part in how much or how little you apply each filter. Ok, back to it.

- Add a layer mask above the layer you filtered and fill it with solid black. It will look like all your filtering work has been deleted but that's not the case. The layer mask layer is merely hiding (or 'masking' as the name implies) the image and the original image layer below that is being revealed.

Here is where you get to 'airbrush' your subject by painting on to the layer mask to reveal the filtered layer below.

- Select the brush tool with a good size brush while making sure the foreground color is white and begin to paint on areas you would like smooth, like skin, while keeping the detail of things that need it, like hair, lips, eyes, etc. If you make a mistake, simply select the eraser tool and and erase what you just painted over.

After this you should have pretty much a finished photo, but you can make further minor adjustments by doing the following.

- If the skin color is a little off in the photo ( like sunburn or too white) you can create a new Adjustment Layer to adjust the overall Hue of the photo. Select Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation. Adjust the Hue slider to correct any color imbalance in your photo.

- You can create another new Adjustment Layer by selecting Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Photo Filter. Choose a Sepia tone of around 40% to dull down the brighter colors in your photo a bit.

- To change or enhance your model's eye color you can create a new layer and follow the steps at the tutorial here: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/293010/how_to_change_eye_color_in_a_photgraph.html

- You can sharpen your original layer by selecting that layer and going to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask and use a low setting for the Radius and Threshold and play around with the Amount slider. The key here is to enhance the detailed areas just a touch and not too much so that the photo looks unbalanced.

It's now ready for a magazine cover.