Here you have the
before and after effect. I went just a bit more on the softening that I wanted
to but I wanted to show the effect so I pushed it a little further.
The first step is
to create a duplicate layer. Never work on your original background layer,
you can always trash a layer if you are not satisfied with it and build again
on top of the background layer that you preserve. An easy way to create a
new layer is by using CRTL+ALT+SHIFT+N+E , I know this sounds like alot of
keys to press all at once but trust me, you'll get use to it. This command
creates a layer with all of the layer adjustments already in places of the
underlying layers, there's more to it but just trust me, use this method and
your good to go. The next step is to choose your healing tool (looks like
a band-aid) and get rid of the skin imperfections, like wrinkles, moles, pimples,
acne, all that good stuff, make sure you don't overdo it. Some can tell when
you've used the healing tool a little to much.
Once you've finished with the healing tool, create another layer
by holding down CRTL+ALT+SHIFT+N+E
, then, go to FILTERS/NOISE/DUST AND SCRATCHES.
In this next step
is where you'll use most of your judgment. This part take a little bit of
practice but you'll be an expert in no time. When the Dust and Scratches dialog
window pops up, you'll notice you can adjust Radius and Threshold. First,
bring both sliders down to minimum. Then, begin bringing the Raduis slider
up until the skin gets the soft, gaussian blur look to it. What your doing
is trying to give the skin a nice smooth appearance, don't worry if you blurred
out the skin details, you'll bring it back in the next step. Once the skin
looks nice and soft, begin to bring up the threshold 1 pixel at a time until
you begin to see the skin pores and the skin texture, at this point you'll
want to back off about 1 pixel. For example, if you pushed the Threshold up
to 5 and that's when you started seeing skin texture, bring it down one pixel
to 4. For this image I used a Raduis of 3 and a Threshold of 2.
Ok, next you'll want
to create a layer mask by holding down your ALT key and clicking on the layer
mask button circled in red. This will create a mask and the effect will not
show through at this point. Since the mask is black you'll want to paint in
white to make the effect show through so change to your brush tool. Select
the color white, next, change your hardness of your brush to 50% and the opacity
of your brush to around 30-40%. Now you can begin to paint on the effect on
the skin where you want it to be smooth. You generally want to make the brush
size as big as possible to cover the most skin area, for the smaller areas
around the eyes, go to a smaller diameter. Keep painting until you get he
desired effect. Now, and this part is important. Because the hardness of the
brush was set as 50% , your going to get some bleed into the critical sharp
areas like the eyes, lips, nostrils, and the edges of the face, what you need
to do is change to color black, set your brush hardness to 95% and opacity
to 100%, now paint in the areas that need to stay sharp. Use just a big enough
brush size to stay within the areas that you are sharpening.
A neat thing to do
is check the work that you've done by holding down your ALT key and clicking
on the layer mask icon. This will show you what you have painted in the layer
mask. You can actually continue to paint on the layer mask itself if you find
that you've obviously missed a few spots, it's alot easier to see in the mask
than working on the skin itself so it's a good way to check your work. To
get back to the original image just ALT and click the layer mask icon and
your back to normal.
At this point when
you are done painting the effect, you can adjust the opacity of this layer
to give your final result. If it looks overdone, just bring down the opacity
until your happy. Once your done, you can create one more layer by the above
method that I showed you, change this layer blend mode to Luminosity, go to
FILTER/UNSHARP mask, and sharpen to your liking.
That's about it. I
hope you enjoyed this tutorial as much as I enjoyed creating it. If you have
any questions, please feel free to email me at : ferradas2003(at)yahoo(dot)com
