Professional Skin Retouching using Adobe Photoshop

This is a tutorial on professional skin retouching with adobe photoshop . Aren’t you amazed by how beautiful and soft the skin of the model’s in magazine’s? By the time you’re done reading this tutorial, you will have similar results with the professionals that created those magazine cover’s , in just 5 easy steps and simple step. This will only take around 4-6 minutes of your time.


We will go over the process 1 step at a time so you can do it using your own pics.

Sample Output: Before and After


Lets begin

Step 1

Open the picture of your choice and duplicate the layer by left clicking in background layer or pressing Ctrl + J (Layer by Copy)

Step 2

Select the duplicate layer and add “Gaussian Blur” by going to filter > blur > Gaussian blur. Adjust the slider until you see a blurry version of your picture , You need not worry at the moment as the picture will return to normal in the next steps. If at the end of the entire process you are still unsatisfied with the outcome you can always go back to this step to add more blur.

Here is an example of how blurred it should be.

Step 3

Adjust the layer’s opacity value to 50%. You can vary the opacity value from 30% to 60% depending on how soft you want the output to be.

Step 4

So far we have done is to adjust the softness of the skin however , all the details such as eyes lips and nose still looks rather blurry so we have to Add a layer mask to the original layer’s copy.
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Then select brush tool and choose a soft brush and set the Color Black and brush over the details that you want sharpened such as the eyes , lips , hair , nose , I recommend using a brush with at least 50 % opacity for a more gentle sharpening.

Step 5

The last step would be to modify the curves to add some light to the texture layer.
Go to image>adjust>Curves

I added some light to the upper part of the face because I wanted to keep the low light feeling , but you can try experiment with this until you are satisfied with the outcome.

Your Final work should look something similar to this one.