Good Morning everyone! I hope that you had a fantastic weekend! I spent some time with my family, took a much needed break from the computer and just got to RELAX! That doesn’t happen very often, but it sure was nice to have my mama fuss over me a little and make me some great meals and we even got to work in the garden a little!

Of course, relaxing a little let me think about a fun tutorial to bring to you today and it is one that I use on almost every portrait I shoot.  Smoothing or softening skin turns your photos from snapshots to truly beautiful portraits. I use this method a lot on my fair skinned girlies because they tend to have blotchy skin in the Texas heat, but it is great for smoothing those wrinkles and helping with acne!

 I’ll be working with this image of my beautiful daughter Rachael. She has been a subject of many of my tutorials, mainly because she lets me take her photo more than the others do! This spring, I took her out on a warm day to take her birthday pictures and she, of course, got a little splotchy on her cheeks and nose.  The picture is OK on its own, but smoothing her skin will make it look even better!

Before

Open the image that you want to adjust and duplicate the image by hitting CTRL+J on your keyboard. It  is VERY important that you duplicate the image and NOT work on the original…just in case you make a mistake! By working on a duplicate, if you make a mistake, you can trash it and start all over. The same can’t be said if you make a mistake on the original. Always…ALWAYS… duplicate the background layer!It is a good habit to get into!

Select the duplicated layer (Layer 1 or Background copy) in the Layers palette and locate the layer blend mode option in the top left corner of the Layers palette (under the word Layers). The drop-down box is currently set to “Normal” as its default mode. Click on the arrow to the right of the word “Normal” to bring up the different layer blend modes.

Select Overlay from the list

Once you change the blending mode to Overlay, you’ll see an increase in both the contrast and color in your image. Don’t worry if the color looks off, we will fix that in a minute!

Select the top layer (Layer 1 or Background copy) then go to Filter>Other>High Pass.

Once you select High Pass, the High Pass dialog box, will open. The High Pass filter looks for details in an image and then sharpens only the edges in the photo while leaving the rest of the photo untouched! However, I want to use it to my advantage in this instance, and do the exact OPPOSITE with this filter! In order to do that, however, I need to begin by setting my Radius value in the dialogue box to between 6-10 pixels, depending on my resolution. The higher the resolution of my picture, the higher the radius value in my box. Since my resolution on my photo is 300, I am going to set my radius to about 10 pixels.

Click OK  to accept changes and exit out of the dialogue box.