Adobe Photoshop CS6 Top 100 Simplified Tips and Tricks by Lynette Kent

SOFTEN THE SKIN naturally
Even after repairing spots and blemishes, blending
the tones, and reducing wrinkles, you may still need
to soften skin to make your subjects look their best.
Digital cameras are very good at capturing all the
details, including rough skin. In theory, skin softening
with Photoshop involves a simple blurring of a
duplicate layer with a Gaussian Blur filter or a noise
reduction filter, and the use of a layer mask so the
effect can be brushed on the face where needed.
Other techniques start with selections of the face
avoiding the eyes, nose, and mouth. The selection is
placed on a separate layer and blurred, and the
blurred layer blended into the main photo using layer
blend modes.
Too often, the resulting image looks badly retouched,
showing blurry skin with sharp sections for the eyes,
nose, and mouth.
You can create a custom skin-softening filter using
two separate layers with different filter strengths and
different opacity settings, and then brush the filter
over the skin with much more control. The steps are
more involved, but the results are far more natural.
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Note: Photograph copyright
© Photospin.com.
1 Remove the spots and most wrinkles
as in the previous tasks. Press
Ô+Option+Shift+E (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E)
to combine all the layers onto a new
layer.
2 Click and drag the Combined Layer
over the New Layer button on the
Layers panel.
3 Repeat step 2.
Two Combined Layer copies are
placed above the Combined Layer in
the Layers panel.
4 With the top layer selected, click Filter.
5 Click Blur.
6 Click Gaussian Blur.
The Gaussian Blur dialog box appears.
7 Click and drag the Radius slider until
the image is blurred but you can still
see the edges in the image.
8 Click OK.
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