- 1. Take Care When Working on a White Background
- 2. Use Your Quick Select Tool Intelligently
- 3. Refine Edge to Finish Off a Selection
- 4. White May Not Necessarily Be White in High Key
- 5. Reuse Adjustment Layer Masks
- 6. Add Some Detail to Your RAW file
- 7. Add Some Texture to Clothing
- 8. Dodge and Burn on a Grey Layer
- 9. Soften Up Skin with Pore Detail
- 10. Add a Little Bit of Vibrance to Your Colors
- Final Thoughts
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9. Soften Up Skin with Pore Detail
This is a trick that I picked up from Scott Kelby in his Portrait Retouching Techniques book for softening up the skin and leaving some pore detail.
Create a duplicate layer of the image, and perform a high pass as we did in the texture section. In this case, make the high pass something extreme, like a value of 9 (see Figure 13).
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Once your high pass is complete, press Command-I (PC: Ctrl-I) and invert the layer. With the layer inverted, run a Gaussian blur on the image with a value of 3.
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Once your layer has been inverted and blurred, switch the blend mode of the image to Soft Light. You can also hide all of the contents behind a layer mask, painting back in the effect only in the areas that you want to see it (i.e., the skin); see Figure 15. You can further control how this looks by adjusting the opacity of the image.
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