Level: Intermediate

I picked up this workflow from a Photoshop book I've read about a year ago. Since then, I've been modifying and incorporating this workflow for most portraits that are only intended for web use or smaller prints. It's not as meticulous as pixel-level editing, but should suffice for most folks to use on a regular basis.

Before anyone comments about the subject selection, I didn't want to feature close-up blemishes of a friend or family member's face so I had to sacrifice my dignity to come up with this tutorial.

If you've noticed the models you see on the cover of glamour magazines, you'll notice that most are young models under the age of 25. Young people have tighter skin, a more healthy glow, and much smaller pores than most grown-ups, which makes them ideal subjects for make-up and beauty close-up shots.

While a good make-up artist can do wonders to any subject, in reality, we probably won't have a great make-up artist at our disposal on our day-to-day photos, so Photoshop to the rescue!

Let's take a look at our original photo.

As you can see, the pores, pimples, and other skin blemishes are quite visible even with a small image. Open your selected photograph (preferably a head/face close-up or head/shoulder portrait) in Photoshop and let's get started.

1) Create a new blank layer. We'll use this layer to remove the larger blemishes such as pimples and scars.

2) Select the Spot Healing Brush tool and use a soft-edge brush. Make sure that the "Sample All Layer" option is marked in the options palette. Now heal the larger blemishes by brushing over the spots.

Spot Healing Brush Tool

Spot Healing Brush Options

Spot Healing

After some spot healing, we now have this, with most of the blemishes and scars gone.

3) Now we'll lighten the dark shadows and fine lines around the face using a dodge/burn layer. Create a new blank layer and make sure you select the blending mode as "soft light" and fill the layer with 50% gray.

Set your foreground color to white and select a soft brush set at an opacity of about 10%. Using the white brush, paint over the grey layer where the dark shadows are. Adjust your brush size as the areas you're painting gets larger or smaller.

5) Apply a Gaussian Blur on this dodge/burn layer to soften the transition between your dodged areas and the original.

This is what we have after the two layers.

6) Next, we will remove some smaller pores and reduce the size of the larger pores on the skin. We'll be using the High Pass filter for this step.

Combine all the existing layer to create a new merged layer by pressing CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E. This creates a new layer containing all the changes we've made. Change this layer to Soft Light.

7) Apply a High-Pass filter to this layer. The amount will depend on how much blemishes the skin has and how large the original file is. In most cases, the less correction needed, the lower the amount required. For this example, I've used a High-Pass setting of 7.

You'll notice that the image became sharper and the pores more evident. We solve this problem by inverting the layer by pressing CTRL+I. You'll now have a relatively blurry/soft image.

8 ) Create a Hide All mask for this layer and paint the areas of the skin with a white brush set at 100%, avoiding the eyes, eyebrows, hair, clothes, and mouth as much as possible.

9) Again, blur the mask for a more seamless blend. We now have this result, the skin soft while the other features are still sharp.

This is how the skin looks:

10) Lastly, we'll sharpen the eyes, hair, eyebrows, and lips a tad using the High Pass filter again. Repeat step 6 by creating a new merged layer by pressing CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E and changing the blending mode to Overlay.

Then applying a High Pass filter on this layer.

11) Create another Hide All layer mask on this new layer and paint over the eyes, mouth, hair, and clothes using a soft white brush set at 100%.

Flatten and save, that's all there is to it.

Here's our before and after result:

Hope you liked it.

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