Adobe Photoshop Online Tutorial: Airbrushing Skin

This Adobe Photoshop Online Tutorial looks at the contentious issue of airbrushing skin - contentious because some magazines take make their airbrushing so exteme that their models become unrealistic and plastic-looking. I prefer to be a bit more subtle and let skin retain as much of its texture as possible.

 

Now there are a variety of Photoshop techniques that will smooth skin, but the one I am going to use here is based on a gaussian blur effect. The advantage of this technique is that it is very quick and easy. I have also created an Adobe Photoshop Action download which will let you achieve this effect over and over again with a single click.

 

If you click on the first image opposite to enlarge it, you will see that our model is pretty damn gorgeous, but like everyone has the odd imperfection.

 

 

The second image is after running my skin blur action, which has done the following:

• Duplicated the original layer
• Applied a Gaussian Blur filter (radius 6 pixels)
• Created a layer mask based on a high pass filter effect to bring back a lot of the sharpness to hair, eyes, lingerie etc.

 

There are a number of things you can do to improve the picture further. I wasn't happy with the sharpness in the eyes - the layer mask has let some of the blurring effect come through, so in the third image I have just painted out the eyes in the layer mask using a small black brush. I did the same thing to the lips to make them appear more glossy. This simple step makes the photograph appear sharp and in focus even though we have blurred most of the picture.

 

If you think the blurring effect is too much, you can adjust the opacity of the Blur layer to 'dial out' the effect.

 

The beauty of Photoshop Actions is that you can modify them yourselves, so feel free to experiment (start by trying other radius sizes for the gaussian blur layer).

 

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