Professional Retouching

This is a visual tutorial for professional skin retouching . Isn’t it just beautiful the soft texture of models’ skins in magazines and yet the definition it has ? When you have finished reading this tutorial you will have pretty similar results , in 5 easy steps !! You will need Photoshop for this one and one edition takes over 4 minutes

It will go step by step over the process so you can do it with your own pics 

I will use Monica’s Portrait of Partytime at SXC


Download this practice's PSD file (0.7MB) 

 











Lets get started 

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>> Step 1

Open the Monica portrait image and duplicate the layer ( layer/duplicate layer ) or left click in background layer 





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>> Step 2

Select the duplicated layer (background copy ) and add “Gaussian Blur”(filter / blur / Gaussian blur ) It hast to look rather blurry , don’t worry in the next step the image will be back to normal , and if you don’t feel satisfied in the next steps , you can add more blur at any moment of the process 












Example of how blur it gets compared to the original 






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>> Step 3

Set the layer’s opacity value to 50%. (layers / layer style / blending options ) or double click the layer in the layer palette 

The opacity value can go from 30% to 60% it will determine how soften the pic will be 















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>> Step 4

So far we have achieved to get the softness of the skin however , all the details such as eyes lips and nose look bury so we have to : 

Add a mask in the layer we have been working into (background copy) 

Then select the soft brush tool select Color Black In case it is not the color of the brush already and brush the details you want to sharpen such as eyes , lips , hair , nose , I recomend the brush with at least 50 % of opacity to have a more gentle sharpening 






















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>> Step 5

The last step but not least is , is to modify the curves , when we add some light to the texture layer the results are magic so lets end this .

Go to (image / adjust / Curves )












I add some light to the upper face I want to keep the low light feeling , but you can add as much as necessary 




This is it !! it should look like this : 


Final Work 












Before & After 


















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I hope you have found this tutorial useful , this technique has been of great use to me and I hope it is for you 


Please let me know if you find some misuses of the language ! 


Miguel Ugalde Ugaldew