Another tutorial for you today, this time it’s a quick and dirty method for blemish removal that can be done in a matter of minutes and ensures clear, healthy looking skin.

This tutorial uses Adobe Photoshop CS3, and requires the use of layers and layer masks.

Hit the jump for the rest:

Now, there are 7 main steps plus an 8th step if you’re going to use this technique quite often, making it into an easy to use action in PS.

Step 1:

The first step is to load your image into Photoshop, quite easy:

Step 2:

The next step is to create a duplicate layer of the image by either right clicking on the layer and going to ‘duplicate layer’ to make a copy of the image above your original, or by going to Layers>Duplicate Layer:

Step 3:

Now, you want to apply a median filter to the top layer, this is done by going to Filters>Noise>Median:

Now use a setting of roughly 10px, maybe more maybe less depending on the size of your image, I find 10 works roughly well for most images.

The important thing is that you want it to blur out the blemishes and anything else you want to remove from your image. This also works with light wrinkles and funny colouration such as small bruises, stains, crumbs etc.

Step 4:

Now, we don’t want our skin to look too smooth, there’s no skin out there that doesn’t have pores etc.

So, we’re going to apply some noise to our median layer by going to Filter>Noise>Add Noise:

and you want to use Gaussian distribution and tick the box that says Monochromatic. A setting of about 1.3% usually works quite well. You want just enough to be able to see the noise, looking like pores, but not too much so it doesn’t just look grainy:

Step 5:

Now, you need to apply a mask to your image. At the bottom of the layers panel you’ll find this button:

Click it. Your median layer now has a mask. Now press Ctrl + I to invert the mask, making sure the mask is selected. This turns the mask black, letting the bottom layer show through:

Step 6:

Again, making sure that the mask is selected, you now need a to select the brush tool:

and select a brush size suitable for your picture, and a low hardness value:

Press D and then X to set your brush to a white value, then proceed to paint over the areas in the mask that correspond to areas of skin that need clearing.

Step 7:

Now, you should end up with something like this:

As you can see, I’ve only done the boy’s face, but you could just as easily do the girl’s as well. Merge your layers, get on with any other corrections, save your image and presto! You have a portrait with nice clean skin in under 2 minutes.

Before:

and After:

As a bonus, you can record all of this in an action, I have mine set up to F5 so that when I’m editing, it literally takes a few moments to do an entire image:

Bonus Step 8:

I hope you enjoyed the tutorial! Please link to this page on forums etc if you like it, and leave a comment if you used this method.

Filed under: Manticorp, Portrait, Studio, Tutorials, White Background by Manticorp