Smoothen Your Skin Using Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

Virtually, you can be very beautiful in Adobe Photoshop. If you want to fool your online friends in social networking sites, use Adobe Photoshop to do some major surgery in your face. And now, I am teaching you how to do some of it, smoothen your skin using Adobe Photoshop tutorial.

What you need:

1. Adobe Photoshop CS+
2. Your sexiest photo (High-resolution pictures are recommended)
3. And some patience

Here’s one of the photos from my cousin’s debut party last April. Her name is Camille Polintan, and she’s been my model for my eXperiment photo series with my sister, Keith Anne.

Before | Skin Smoothing Using Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

Face Inset Before | Skin Smoothing Using Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

You’ll notice in our photo, our face are not really looking good because of the grainy photo quality and of course, the effect of heavy make-ups on our faces.

Let’s get it on.

First step is to clean your face. Remove the unwanted spots or blemishes in your face. You can read my “Remove Pimples in Your Photos Using Adobe Photoshop Tutorial” for this.

Duplicate Layer | Skin Smoothing Using Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

Next is to make a duplicate of the Background Layer or the original layer. You can do this by hitting the Ctrl+J on your keyboard.

Surface Blur | Skin Smoothing Using Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

Then, Go to Filter > Blur > Surface Blur. This is the most important step in this Photoshop tutorial because it’s the virtual beauty product that will smoothen your face.

Surface Blur Window | Skin Smoothing Using Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

A pop-up window will show and this is the Surface Blur window, where you’ll adjust the Radius and Threshold things. The higher the number, the greater the density of skin smoothing.

Note: Do not overuse it. If you want a smooth face, fine. But you don’t want to be like a porcelain doll or a mannequin, right? Don’t over use it.

After hitting the “OK” button, you’ll see the changes. You’re face and the entire photo looks so smooth (literally) which is not that good at all. Why? Because it is overused. The next step is how to apply the Surface Blur thing only on your face.

Add a mask | Skin Smoothing Using Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

What you need to do now is to click the Layer 1 on the Layers pallet or the duplicate copy of the original photo. Then, hit the “Add a mask” button below the Layers pallet (shown above).

Note: If you can’t find where the Layers pallet is, you can show it up by going to Window > Layers, or just hit the F7 key on your keyboard.

Masked Layer | Skin Smoothing Using Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

At the photo shown above, you’ll see that there’s a white box positioned next to the Layer 1 photo thumbnail. That white thing is the mask that we recently added to the Layer 1. That didn’t changed the whole image at all, but the next step will do.

From white to black mask box | Skin Smoothing Using Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

The next step is to blacken the mask box. We can do this by using the Paint Bucket Tool which can be found on the Tool Dock. Or just hit the “G” key on your keyboard.

Tip: Sometimes, when you hit the “G” key, the Gradient Tool will show up instead of Paint Bucket Tool. What you need to do is hold the “Shift” key and press the “G” key so you can select either Gradient Tool or Paint Bucket Tool.

To blacken the mask, make sure your foreground color is set to black (can be found in the lower section of Tool Dock) and just click the photo in the work panel. Please make sure that before you do this, the mask on Layer 1 or the duplicate layer was selected.

What will happen if we blacken the mask? That will revert the “Surface Blur” that we applied in the duplicate layer in the whole photo.

Then, the next step is to smoothen only your face and not the whole photo. We can do this by using the Brush Tool which can be found on the Tool Dock or just hit the “B” key. Next, make sure the “black mask” on duplicate layer is selected (click on it to select). And please make sure, too, that the foreground color that you are using is white and the opacity is set to 60% (or lower to not overuse the Surface Blur).

Apply the brush tool on your face. As you do this, you’ll notice that your face is smoothing instantly.

Tip: Do not apply the brush on your face’s edges, eyes, eyebrows and lips to make it more realistic.

And that’s it. Your are now a virtual dermatologist. BTW, here’s my finished work:

Face Inset After | Skin Smoothing Using Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

You can see that the grainy look were gone and our faces were more glowing than the first one. I hope you find this tutorial helpful with your profile pic dilemma. More virtual beauty Photoshop tutorial, soon.

After | Skin Smoothing Using Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop virtual beauty tutorial