Smooth Skin Enhancement in Photoshop

We all get older. Without notice, wrinkles, blemishes, and signs of aging are now apparently emerging on our face. And before you knew it, your looks seems so embarassing that you are having second thoughts of posting and sharing your photos to your friends. Is there a way to fix it? Yes, of course, there's a solution to that! With a little bit of knowledge of Photoshop, you can fix your photos without sweat. Following guides you through a 3-step instruction in achieving the expected outcome. Preview

Step 1 Open your photo and make a duplicate out of it. To do this you can either right click the background layer (your photo thumbnail) and select 'Duplicate layer', or, drag and drop to the 'Create a new layer' icon located below the layers palette.

Step 2 With the duplicate layer active, go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur... Set the blur to about 2-3 pixels depending on the image size you're working with. Drag the slider to the right until you get the appropriate blur close to the one below.

Step 3 Now that we're done blurring the duplicate copy of our image, we are now with the interesting step in effecting a smooth and clear skin. To do this, first, Alt-click the layer mask icon located below your layers palette then, second, switch your FG/BG color to white. Ok, now, pick a soft brush with low opacity (about 10-20%) and carefully brush the face except the eyes, lips, nose outlines, and the jaws. With a low opacity brush in place, you can get rid of unwanted over-brushed portions and added editing to do. Details is important here as we are dealing with our subject in itself (i.e., skin softening). Here's how it looks:

Final Image As we have expected, here is the outcome:

As you can see, the wrinkles are still there but the smooth skin give the big difference. We can extend the smoothening process and removing the wrinkles totally, but that would defeat our purpose of enhancing the photo. Sure, we can make your photo 10 years younger but then that would certainly look horribly unnatural.