How to Smooth Skin in Photoshop

March 31, 2012

Hi!! I’ve been wanting to do a post on skin smoothing since the beginning of this blog – I think it is one of the top questions that people want answered when they start processing their photos. There are several methods of smoothing skin in Photoshop, and my plan was to outline a few of them.

But I have to be honest, I feel completely incapable of putting this post together!! I am struggling!! Lol I don’t like talking about things that I have no personal experience with, and to be honest, since the beginning I have only used one skin-smoothing method – the Portraiture plugin by Imagenomic.

I’m an extremely frugal person, so I certainly don’t purchase every photography-related product promising to help me to produce better images. In fact, after buying Photoshop and Lightroom, I initially only purchased three other products… Portraiture, Noiseware (also by Imagenomic) and AutoLoader (which I’ll get to in another post!).

There were several pros whose work I admired who used the Portraiture plugin. Awesome skin adds that final polish to a photo. I had tried several different methods out there, and after using the trial version of Portraiture for the trial period, I was hooked.

The reason I love Portraiture is that it is quick and effective – just how I like things! It targets only the skintones, so just the skin is evened out and smoothed – no painting involved. Most methods in photoshop involve manually painting the ‘smoothed’ effect onto the skin using a layer mask. This method works just fine, it’s just that you have to take time on each and every image painting the skin. Portraiture saves me significant time since I don’t have to do that.

After removing skin blemishes, undereye circles, major skin discolorations, etc., I run Portraiture for that final polish on the skin. I always run it on its own layer so that I can reduce the opacity. Here is what the dialog window looks like (you can see the skin tone mask that will be created):

You can see there are many, many options to set. It’s a rare day when I need to mess with the default settings. The only thing I change is where it’s output to (a New Layer).

Here is my before image – I’m obviously zoomed in! :

Here is after Portraiture is run on full strength… slightly plastic-y! :

Since I ran it in a separate layer, I reduced the opacity. Here is my final:

These differences may be hard to tell here, but at a zoomed out level, evening the skintone can really make a difference to the overall feel of a photo. It just gives the image a more polished feel.

I’ve got 2 little kids and I stay home with them, so I’m always trying to find time to edit at night, naps/quiet time, and on the weekends. Time is invaluable to me. Portraiture has truly been worth its weight in gold to me because it is so quick to run, and it really finishes off a photo. I don’t have to spend time painting over the skin in each and every image to smooth it out, and it runs very quickly.

If you’re not at a place where you can buy yet another product, there are definitely methods you can use in Photoshop. I’m directing you to outside sources on these since I have no personal expertise using these methods, but here are the basics…

1. Gaussian Blur – for very basic smoothing

Duplicate your background layer
Go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur and move the slider until the skin is soft (you can over-soften because you will use masking)
Create a black mask on your blurred layer, and then paint in the soft skin effect over the skin with a white brush, smoothing the skin. Avoid smoothing hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows.
Google ‘gaussian blur to smooth skin’ – there are a gazillion tutorials

2. Inverted High Pass Filter

I did a post on using the High Pass Filter to Sharpen. Did you know you can also use the High Pass Filter to Soften??!!
Simply create your High Pass layer (Filter -> Other -> High Pass), then invert it (Ctrl/Cmd + I).
Still put the layer on Soft Light mode (as in the linked tutorial)
Create a black mask on your softened layer, and then paint in the soft skin effect over the skin with a white brush, smoothing the skin. Avoid smoothing hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows.
Google ‘inverted high pass filter to soften skin’ – another gazillion tutorials

3. Surface Blur

Duplicate your background layer
Go to Filter -> Blur -> Surface Blur. Your settings will largely depend on your file size, but a Radius of 5 and Threshold of 15 seemed to be a good starting point for me.
The nice thing about Surface Blur is that it preserves the edges better, so a lot of times you just need to reduce the opacity of this layer to taste.
Create a mask if there are any areas that got overly-softened (you can mask them out)
*** NOTE: If I was doing skin-softeneing manually, this is probably the method I’d use – it works best on my images at least! ***

You can achieve some stunning results combining one or a variety of these methods, along with sharpening details along the way so they don’t get lost in all the smoothing. Again, Google is your friend on this one!!

There are also some really nice actions for smoothing skin. If you have $$ to spare, Michelle Kane’s Flawless Face action works beautifully. It does require that you paint the effect on your photo.

If you are looking for something free to try, Rita at The Coffee Shop just released her free Perfect Portrait 3 action that has a skin smoothing layer (she has other actions that do this as well).

I would also encourage you to play with the trial version of Portraiture. Once you are processing loads of images (and being paid for it!), it really is a timesaver and does the job really well in my opinion.

I hope that this has been helpful even though I didn’t do individual tutorials on all the methods – I feel like I’m not qualified to put something useful together! Thanks for stopping by and reading.

Posted by Angie in Tutorials | Leave a Comment »

Workflow 101 – Part 3: Lightroom Work

March 8, 2012

Hi there! This is a continuation of my Workflow 101 Series.

In Part 1 of the series, I talked about the importance of getting images correct in camera. In Part 2, I talked about how I set up the bit-depth and color space to get consistent color throughout the editing process. In Part 3 here, I’m finally going to talk about what I do with the photos I’ve taken! I do shoot RAW, I should probably mention that!

If you’ve wondered, “I’ve taken some pictures… now what?!” I am going to address that here in Part 3. Again, this is my personal workflow, and there is no right or wrong way to do things. But if you’re still trying to establish your own workflow, perhaps this will help!

In this segment, I’m going to talk about my Lightroom workflow. I use Lightroom for two things: 1) To organize my photos, and 2) To make adjustments to the RAW files.

Organizing My Photos

I have my personal photos organized separately from my client photos. My client photos are further organized by Year. Then each client session is in a separate folder labeled with the date and the client name. So for instance, a recent session for Joe Smith will be in the folder Client Photos -> 2012 -> 2012-02-25 Joe Smith.

Since sessions are broken down by year, organizing this way helps me find things quickly and easily.

Importing My Photos

Now that I know where on my hard drive I’m going to put my photos, I import them into Lightroom. I import them as DNG files (digital negative), which saves a little space over my Canon’s CRW files (camera raw). This process usually takes a bit to run, so I set it all up to import and then go do something else.

Flagging My Picks

After all my images are imported, the next step is to flag my ‘Picks.’ In other words, I’m choosing the best images from the session to edit. This process used to take me forever, but I’ve gotten better! I usually do 3 passes to weed out images and choose the keepers:

1. First pass: I go through the images one by one and flag anything that looks like it might be a keeper by pressing the ‘P’ for ‘Pick’ – this will put a little Flag on the image so you can see it’s been chosen.

2. After my first pass, I Filter by ‘Flagged’ so I can see everything that I’ve chosen so far. Out of a session of 300, I might have 50 potential keepers at this point. I do a second pass of my keepers and zoom in at 100% on each of them. If I come across any that are out of focus or otherwise unworthy of keeping, I hit my ‘U’ key for ‘Unflag’ to remove them from my batch of keepers.

3. I go through a 3rd and (hopefully!) final time, choosing the best 25-30 images from the bunch. If there are several from the same series, I choose the best one. I refine my Picks until I am down to the best of the bunch.

Editing the RAW files

Now that I have my top 25 or so images that I want to edit, I do any necessary Lightroom edits. I may do all or none of the below edits, depending on the image:

Cropping – It is much simpler to crop and rotate an image in Lightroom than in Photoshop, so if either of these are necessary, now is the time to do it. If I have an image with any horizontal or vertical lines, I typically like to make sure these are straight (the back of a couch, a tree, a door or window frame, etc.). If there would be a more pleasing crop, I do it now as well.
Adjusting White Balance – If the white balance is off, I use the sliders to tweak it until it is correct.
Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks - I don’t typically have to mess with these too much unless I’ve shot in a tricky lighting situation (extreme side-lighting, for example). But again, if these settings need to be tweaked, now is the time.
Noise Reduction (Lightroom 3 or 4 beta) - I’m still using Lightroom 2, where the noise-reduction capabilities are not fantastic. So if I have noise that needs to be removed in a photo, I wait until I bring the images into Photoshop and use Noiseware. But if you’re using LR 3 or 4 beta, the noise reduction capabilities are much better. If I had an image where I needed to reduce the noise and was using 3 or 4, I would adjust it now.

Exporting the images as JPEGs

At this point, I have my top images selected, and they all have my desired crop, white balance, and tone. Now I export them as JPEGs so I can work on them in Photoshop. I select all my Flagged images (Ctrl/Cmd + A) and go to the File -> Export dialog. Below are the settings I use:

Export Location – I export the images to my Desktop, into a subfolder with the client’s last name
File Settings – Format = JPEG, Color Space = sRGB, Quality = 100
Image Sizing – Resolution = 300 pixels per inch

I don’t do any output sharpening because I am going to do further edits in Photoshop.

I have these settings saved as a Preset so I don’t have to set them manually every time. It makes things fast and easy. And that’s all for my Lightroom work! One quick note… when I look at the computer too long, my eyes start popping out of my head! So after my photos are in Lightroom, I usually spend one work session choosing my Picks, and then at another work session I do any necessary tweaking to the individual images. If I try to do it all at once, it’s usually too much, and I start getting antsy!

It took me a really long time to figure out a process and get in my groove. But this seems to work well for me. If your needs are different or you just want more in-depth info on how Lightroom works in your workflow, I would highly recommend Scott Kelby’s Lightroom books. I finally felt like I had some good direction after I read it (I read The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers, but he has an updated one for LR 3 as well).

I hope this has helped someone a bit. In Part 4, I’ll be talking about Photoshop work!

Posted by Angie in Workflow 101 | Leave a Comment »

Workflow 101 – Part 2: Setting Up Your Color Space and Bit Depth

February 27, 2012

Hello!! If you haven’t read Part 1 of Workflow 101, you can do so here.

In this next part of the Workflow 101 Series, I want to talk about setting up your color space and bit-depth in Photoshop and Lightroom so you don’t experience any unwanted color shifts while you’re editing. Here is what I mean by a color shift:

Nothing is more frustrating than editing an image, and upon saving it in the final format, having the colors shift. The good news is that once you set up Lightroom and Photoshop, you don’t have to worry about this happening!

Instructions for setting up LR and PS are over on my guest post, “Color Space Confusion – Simplified!” at Rock the Shot.

If you have questions, please let me know!