Skill Level: Beginner
This tutorial will teach you how to smooth skin and even skin tones, for a clean natural look, ideal for stock photos and snapshots.
Open up your photo in Photoshop.
First duplicate your photo by dragging it's layer onto the 'new layer' button at the bottom of the layers panel.
Do this twice - call the middle layer 'blur' and the top layer 'high pass'.
Hide the 'high pass' layer by clicking on the eye next to it's thumbnail, then select the 'blur' layer by clicking on it.
Go to Filter>Blur> Surface Blur.
You'll want to smooth the skin without blurring hard edges around areas like the nose and lips.
The settings shown above should work fine for most photos.
Next go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur, and set the Radius to around 1 pixel.
Next click on the 'high pass' layer and change it's blending mode to Linear Light using the drop down list.
Then give it a layer mask by clicking on the 'layer mask' button at the bottom of the layers panel.
With the layer mask thumbnail selected, go to Image>Apply Image, and choose your original photo layer from the Layer list.
Now click back on your image thumbnail.
Go to Filter>Other>Hight Pass and take the Radius to about 1 pixel.
This will bring back smaller details like skin pores.
You're finished, but the effect has been applied to the entire image.
Next we need to work on confining the effect to just the skin.
Group your 'blur' and 'high pass' layer's by selecting them both and dragging them to the 'new group' button at the bottom of the layers panel.
Select the group and give it a layer mask, then go to Edit>Fill and fill it with black.
This will have masked out both layers leaving only your original layer visible.
Still with the group's layer mask selected, take the eraser tool with the Hardness at 0%.
You can now use the eraser to bring back the effect to all the areas where it's needed, i.e. the skin.
Leave out areas like the hair, eyes, eyebrows and lips.
And that's it.
