Mr. Vaughan's Non-Specific Computer Technology, Educational, IT Security, and Photography Blog

Gaussian Blur for skin touch ups – Part 2/3

This post is part of a 3 part series on how to use the Gaussian Blur filter in Photoshop to perform various photo touch-ups. In this post you will learn how to touch up skin imperfections to give your subjects baby smooth skin.

All three parts will be available at the following links:
Part 1 – Creating the Soft Blur Effect
Part 2 –  Silky smooth skin in photoshop
Part 3 – Increasing the background blur in macro photography

This image dosen’t really have any major imperfections but I’ll show you how you can improve the look of the skin. Here is the original image.

 

 

First thing I always do in photoshop is duplicate the original layer so I can preserve the original image for comparison later (or if I mess up). Do this by right clicking on the background layer and clicking duplicate layer. I’m going to name this layer skin touch ups.

 

On the skin touch ups layer I’m going to use the spot healing tool to remove any freckles or pimples. Try to avoid touching up around any natural lines that make up the composition of the subjects face. Select the spot healing tool and set it up with a soft brush just slightly larger then the size of whatever you want to remove (pimples, freckles, scars, etc.). Make sure the hardness is set really low (0 is ok).

For major touch ups you can also use the patch healing tool but I’m not going to go into that here. The spot healing brush essentially takes an average of all the pixels around it and blends it together. To touch up a pimple or freckle simply dab the brush with the pimple in the center of the brush. Here you can see the result of some small touch ups see if you can pick out the differences.

 

At this point I am going to duplicate the touch up layer. Name the new layer blur mask. At this point you should have 3 layers: The original background layer; the touch-ups layer; and the blur mask.

With the blur mask layer selected go to filter -> blur-> Gaussian Blur. Now like in the last tutorial the amount of blur that you will actually apply to the layer depends on the resolution of your image. You may have to play around with it a bit but probably somewhere between 2-10 pixels of radius will do. You want to blur the skin/ face without loosing too much of the image detail.

At this point we are going to use a layer mask to only allow the blur effect to be visible in certain area’s i.e. the skin. I tell my students to think of this like a window your are going to paint black and only chip off the pain the area’s you want to see through.

To add a layer mask select the blur layer and click on the create new layer mask icon.

With the paint bucket tool paint the mask portion of the blur layer black. Be extra careful not to paint on the actual blurred layer. The image should go back to its original resolution without the blur and the mask on the blur layer should go from white to black. Essentially you have just painted the window completely black on the blur layer so you can’t see any of the blur effects.

Now we are going to paint in white on the layer mask the areas where we want the skin to be blurred. Grab a big fuzzy brush with white as the foreground color. Be sure that the mask is selected and not the blurred image layer. Now paint anywhere there is skin that you want to make smoother. You can grab a smaller brush to reach some of the more detailed areas and if you make a mistake you can just paint over it in black and try again.

 

Sometimes if the blur effect was too strong you can regain some of the detail of the image by adjusting the opacity of the blur layer.

An interesting view of what the mask you have just created can be viewed by hiding the other layers.

 

Finally here we have the finished product.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Thank you to Mr. Medd for volunteering to be in this tutorial.