In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going to learn an easy way to soften and smooth someone's skin in a photo without blurring out important image details, such as the person's eyes and mouth. The technique we'll be looking at is actually a slight variation on a method normally used for advanced image sharpening, which serves as a great example of why it's much more important to understand what you're doing rather than simply memorizing a bunch of steps or "recipes". The more you understand what you're doing in Photoshop and why, the more your mind will open to new ideas and new possibilities.

Here's the image I'll be working with in this tutorial. Since this is a tutorial on skin softening and smoothing, I've cropped away most of the image so we can focus on the young woman's face:

It's a nice photo on its own, but it would probably look even better if we softened her skin a little. Here's what she'll look like when we're done:

Let's get started!

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Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer

With my image newly opened in Photoshop, I can see in my Layers palette that I currently have one layer, the Background layer, which contains my original image:

I know I say this in every tutorial, but it can't be stressed enough how important it is to leave the original image information untouched. If we lose it and we make a mistake, we have nothing to fall back on. That's why the first thing we should always do before doing anything else is make a copy of the Background layer. To do that, either go up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen, choose New, and then choose Layer via Copy, or simply use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). Either way tells Photoshop to make a copy of the Background layer, and if I look again in my Layers palette, I can see that I now have the copy, which Photoshop has automatically named "Layer 1", above the original Background layer:

Step 2: Change The Blend Mode Of "Layer 1" to "Overlay"

With "Layer 1" selected in the Layers palette (the currently selected layer is highlighted in blue), go up to the layer blend mode option in the top left corner of the Layers palette. It's the drop-down box that's currently set to "Normal". Click on the small down-pointing arrow to the right of the word "Normal", which brings up a list of all the different layer blend modes we have to choose from, and select Overlay from the list:

As soon as you change the blend mode to Overlay, you'll see a big increase in contrast and color saturation in your image:

This increased contrast and color saturation can make for an interesting effect on its own, depending on the image you're using, but it's not the effect we're going for here. The only reason we've changed the blend mode to Overlay is so we can see what we're doing in the next step.

Step 3: Apply The "High Pass" Filter To "Layer 1"

To smooth and soften the woman's skin, we're going to use Photoshop's High Pass filter. If you're familiar with the High Pass filter, it's most likely because you've used it before as an advanced way of sharpening images. I say "advanced" not because it's somehow difficult or complicated to use but because it usually gives you better sharpening results than you'd get by using Photoshop's classic Unsharp Mask filter. Check out our Sharpen Images With The High Pass Filter tutorial for more information.

One of the reasons why learning Photoshop can seem nearly impossible sometimes is because we tend to get stuck on the names of things rather than focusing on what they do. For example, if you had never used the High Pass filter before and someone asked you what it does, what would you tell them? "Well, it's a filter that passes high over the image." That may sound technically impressive (sort of, I think), but what does it mean? I sure wouldn't know.

So rather than worry about the name Adobe has given to something, let's look at what it does, which is all that really matters. Before we do that though, let's bring the filter up on the screen. To access the High Pass filter, make sure you still have "Layer 1" selected, then go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Other down near the bottom of the list, and then select High Pass:

This brings up the High Pass filter's dialog box, which is made up of a large preview area and a single option, Radius, down at the bottom. The High Pass filter looks for details in an image, such as the edges around people, objects, and so on. The reason why it's so effective at image sharpening is because it allows us to sharpen only the edges in an image while leaving everything else untouched. If my goal was to sharpen the image I'm using in this tutorial, the High Pass filter would do a great job of sharpening the woman's eyes, mouth, hair, etc., without sharpening her skin. What I want, though, is sort of the opposite of what I just described. I want to use the filter to find the edges not so I can sharpen them, but so I can smooth and soften everything except the edges.

To do that, begin dragging the slider at the bottom of the dialog box to the right until you have your Radius value set to somewhere around 6 pixels. If you're using a high resolution image, try a higher setting somewhere around 9-10 pixels. As you drag the slider towards the right, if you keep an eye on the preview area in the dialog box, you'll see more and more areas of the image become affected by the filter, starting with only the finest details and then gradually expanding to include more and more of the photo. If we were sharpening the image, we would want to stick to a very low Radius value to target only the edges themselves, but for our softening effect, we need to go a bit higher:

Click OK when you're done to exit out of the dialog box. If I look at my image now in the document window, it looks like I've gone way too far with my image sharpening:

You may be wondering why the image in the preview window of the High Pass filter's dialog box looked gray while the image in the document window didn't (and still doesn't). The reason is because in Step 2, we changed the blend mode of "Layer 1" to Overlay, and in Overlay mode, any part of the layer that is 50% gray (meaning the shade of gray you get half-way between pure black and pure white) is hidden from view. Areas that are either lighter or darker than 50% gray are blended in with the layer(s) below the layer we're working on, affecting the contrast and color saturation of the image. That may sound complicated, but don't worry if you don't fully understand how the Overlay blend mode works. We have an entire tutorial coming up on blend modes in Photoshop, so for now, all we need to know is that we changed the blend mode to Overlay in Step 2 so that we could see what we were doing with the High Pass filter in Step 3.

Our image isn't looking all that great after applying the High Pass filter, but we're going to fix that in the next couple of steps.

Label: Photoshop Tutorial