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How shall I put this delicately? Over powerful flash and lenses that are too sharp combined with multi mega pixel cameras can often produce picture that are a bit “unforgiving”. Obviously it's not that the people you photograph need their skin softening - it's that you can enhance the image and make them just as beautiful as they look in real life.
Take a look at this picture of Suzy.
A nice enough snap but the detail on her face it just a little too much. I've used a ring flash and although that can give some nice lighting it's just a bit too direct for this picture. She need her skin softening a little - something more like this.
In this tutorial I'll be using Photoshop Elements. Everything here could of course be done in Photoshop (and slightly easier) but I wanted to show that you don't need the full package to do a little retouching. We're also going to be using layer masking so if you haven't read them yet, I suggest you read my two beginner's introductions to layer masking.
We're going to use the Gaussian blur filter to soften Suzy's skin, but we will then selectively mask it so the first step is to duplicate the layer. You can do this either by hitting Ctrl-J (Cmd-J - I'll put Mac shortcuts in brackets after the PC one), by going into the layer…Duplicate layer menu or by dragging the layer to the “new layer” button in the palette. Your layers palette should look like this (I've highlighted the “new layer” button with a red ring.
It's good practise to label the layers so I will double click on the words “Layer 1” and change them to “soften” and then hit enter.
Making sure you are working on the “soften” layer, go into the filters menu and select the Gaussian blur filter. Move the slider until the skin has a lovely soft look - it should be over softened. Don't worry about the rest of the picture. The number of pixels will depend on lots of things including image resolution but I set it to 30 pixels.
Hit OK and all your picture will look blurred.
Now go to the opacity slider in the layers palette and reduce the opacity until you get the look you like. Don't worry about eyes etc - just concentrate on the skin. In my case I set opacity to 70%. This is much more controllable than setting the Gaussian blur precisely and more importantly can be changed later if we decide it's too much or too little.
Now we need to mask off the bits of the picture we want to be sharp. In Photoshop this would be easy - just click “add layer mask”. However, we saved £500 by buying elements so we can use a couple of extra mouse clicks.
Click on the background layer and then add an adjustment layer (layer…adjustment layer). It doesn't really matter which one because we aren't going to make any changes so I selected levels. Make no changes to the levels and just hit enter. Now click on the soften layer and go into Layer…Group with Previous - or if you're feeling confident just hit Ctrl-G (Cmd-G).
Your layers palette should look like this.
We just saved £500 and created a layer mask.
Now it's easy. Using the skills we learnt in the layer masking tutorials, select the mask and paint in black over Suzy's eyes. Paint in all the areas you want to look sharp. I painted the eyes, nostrils and mouth. Then I decided that I liked her hair soft but not that soft. So I selected a mid gray colour and painted her hair with that.
Two minutes later I had a mask that looked like this.
Yes, it really was that crude. However, that gives me a picture that looks like this.
Then the hotspot on her forehead stated to bug me….
Here's how I fixed it. These steps should be pretty familiar to you by now.
- Duplicate the background layer (I clicked on the little eye to hide the soften layer so it was easier to see what was going on)
- Use the Spot healing tool all over the hot spot
- I also took the opportunity to touch in a couple of freckles with the spot healing tool.
- Create a layer mask
- Mask the bits of hair near the hotspot back because they had got blurred by the healing tool.
- Turn the soften layer back on and tweak the various opacities until I got an image I was happy with.
Here's how my palette looked at the end of all that.
All that was left was to flatten the image and add a “gallery mount” - but that's in the next tutorial.
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