Ok, you will have to click on the image and view it larger to actually see the difference. You might not even notice most of the changes between these two images because most of them are rather small. A friend asked once about retouching faces to clean up skin tones, fix blemishes and basically give anyone the skin of a model. So thought I would finally answer his question, sorry it took so long Justin. Well, in my limited experience, when you look really close even model’s are human too. They don’t always have perfect skin. Sorry to disappoint!
When you look at the cover of a magazine or makeup ad you are usually seeing an altered perception of what that person’s skin actually looks like. The good news (if you feel like you need to fit into the stereotypical mold of what some people think is beautiful) is that you can have skin like that too. Maybe not in real life, but at least in your digital images, you too can be a supermodel! It can also be nice to know some of these tricks if all you want to do is make a little more flattering image of your mother-in-law, significant other, person giving you money to make them look good in pictures, etc…
The purpose of this post is not to give you step-by-step instructions, I don’t have the time to write all the steps, post screenshots and all that good stuff. What I am going to do is give you a nice tidy little list of links to tutorials and websites with tons of helpful tips. Aside from my previously mentioned laziness excuse, I think this will be better for a different reason. I find that when I am working on a photo, I don’t just use one method, I bounce back and forth from one tool or technique to another. Read on for all the tutorial goodness…
Many of these examples cover some of the same material, there is a lot of overlap. It’s just about like anything you do in Photoshop, there’s always seven different ways of doing the same thing. So hopefully this will help you find the way that you are most comfortable with and works best for you.
In no particular order…
- Grafpedia – Simple Facial Photo Retouching
- ToxicLab – Artificial Smooth Skin
- Yanik’s Photo School – Soften Skin with Surface Blur
- Lunacore – Smooth Skin *excellent tutorial
- You Suck at Photoshop – Patch Tools & Levels *Parental Guidance Recommended
- Photoshop Mama – Setting Skin Tones
- nampersands – Airbrushing Skin
- NewDarkroom.com – Advanced Skin Smoothing
- Photoshop Tutorials – Airbrushing: Natural Smooth
- Eyes on Tutorials – Glamour Model
If you don’t have the patience to go through the effort of learning and applying everything from the tutorials above you can also find programs out there that do all the grunt work for you. For example, Portraiture by Imagenomic takes a lot of the sweat out of the process. (If you ask me though, I think some of their examples are almost scary!)
One last little tidbit, just because I think it is entertaining.
