Photoshop Tutorial: Easy Skin Retouching

This tutorial will give you a very basic and quick lesson on how to smooth out and retouch skin. There are many different methods to retouch, and some are more complicated. This tutorial is a very basic and quick way to retouch skin flaws. This is certainly not a professional way to retouch, but it gets the job done easily and quickly and is great for beginners. This is also best with Photoshop versions 7.0 and lower. The new Photoshop CS actually has a healing brush that works quite well. But for this technique we are going to use the blurring to create the effect. Follow along and see how to do it.

To begin with, open your picture into Photoshop by clicking on File, Open, and the browse to find your photo. Make sure your layer palette is open. To open it, go to Window (up top) and click the Layer tab.

Next we are going to remove any large blemishes or obvious imperfections by using the clone tool. Select the Clone Tool from your left tool bar and set the opacity level to somewhere between 10-30% (see picture: 1). Hold down the alt tab and move the mouse to a skin area near the blemish (be fairly close so that the colors stay the same) and click on an area of the surrounding skin. Then realease the alt button and use the clone tool to gently draw and dab out the blemish. Repeat this step for any other blemishes or imperfections that are large and/or obvious.

Now for the easy trick which will smooth out the skin. Duplicate the layer by going to Layer and Duplicate. Now we are going to blur this entire layer. Go to Filter, Blur, and choose Gaussian Blur. The amount you blur the photo really depends, but I generally blur 4-6 pixels (see picture: 2). Don't worry about the rest of the picture being really fuzzy, we are going to fix that.

We are going to mask this layer by going to the Layer tab up top and choosing Add Layer Mask, and then Hide All. The blurriness is still there but you won't be able to see it. Now select your Brush tool and make sure the color is set to white. Paint with the brush tool over the areas of skin that you want to smooth out. This essentially brings back the blur that we put in (see picture: 3). Make sure not to paint over areas like the eyes and mouth as we want to keep them nice and detailed and sharp.

When done, if you find that the skin looks a little too "plastic" reduce the opacity level of the layer. Go over to your layer palette and select Opacity and slide down the opacity bar until the picture looks just right. Once everything looks perfect we are going to merge all the layers into one. Go back to the Layer tab (up top) and choose Flatten Image.

Once this is done you can save your image. Be sure to give your photo a new name so that you don't lose the original in case you ever want to go back to it. Follow these techniques and you will have a nice and easy way to do quick skin retouching (see picture: 4).