Professional Skin Smoothing

Article Index
Professional Skin Smoothing
Applying the High Pass filter
Applying the low pass with the Surface Blur filter.
Finished Results
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Learn the ultimate technique industry professionals use to retouch skin. This skin smoothing technique makes skin appear smooth without losing the texture. You'll find this technique used in many magazines, ads, and other publications.

This tutorial is written for Photoshop CS3 but there are alternative instructions for Photoshop CS2 or older. If you are using Photoshop CS2 or older, please follow the instructions listed for Photoshop CS2 or older. If you haven't tried out Photoshop CS3 yet, we recommend downloading the trial and following this tutorial with it because you'll learn how to use Smart Filters.

Professional Skin Smoothing Photoshop Tutorial

Before you start, make sure that you do all the cloning and healing on the image first. This tutorial only makes skin look smooth; removal of skin imperfections need to be manually done with the Healing Brush or Clone tool before using this effect.

To begin this Photoshop tutorial, open a high resolution portrait that you would like to apply skin smoothing to.

Once you have the image opened, zoom into 100% so that you can see the full details of the skin while editing.

Photoshop CS2 or older: Duplicate the layer twice to create three layers. To duplicate a layer, press Ctrl+J or choose Layer > Duplicate. Skip the rest of this step.

To use smart filters, we'll need to convert this to a smart object. In the Layers palette, right mouse click on the layer and select Convert to Smart Object.

You should now see a small icon on the bottom right of the layer thumbnail. This indicates that the layer is a smart object and smart filters can be applied.