Skin softening technique photoshop CS2/CS3

Skin softening technique photoshop CS2/CS3

Here's a technique for softening the skin tones in a portrait.

What you need to do first is duplicate your background layer in the layers pallette, by holding down the control key on your keyboard, and then pressing J (for the macintosh this would be command and J).
Next go up to filters/blur/gaussian blur, and set the radius slider of the gaussian blur to around 8. Then in the layers pallette, reduce the opacity of the duplicated layer to around 50-60% for hi-res raw files, for jpeg/tiffs around 30-40%.
Now you need to add a layer mask to this new layer, so you can paint back in some of the detail in the eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hair and chin line etc. To do this - click on the add new layer mask in the layers pallete, it's the small icon to the right of the tiny f.
Next you'll need a very soft-edged brush, and your foreground colour set to black, ( a good brush size would be just slightly larger than the eye). Now you need to set the opacity of the brush to around 30% by going upto photoshop's option bar at the top.
When that's done, using multiple brush strokes, you can then start to gradually paint back in some of the detail in the image, until you get the result you're after.
To see a before and after as you go along, click on the little eye icon next to the new layer.

Have fun.