- Histograms make muddy pictures history
- Fixing color casts
- Banish Red-eye
- The magic of cropping
- Straightening perspective fixes
- Fixing Blemishes
- Bringing out detail in shadows and highlights
- Quick and soft selections
- Reuse a selection
- Whiter teeth
- Smoother skin
- Facelifts without surgery
- Quick Layer fixes
- Non-permanent fixes
- Depth of field effect
- More interesting skies
Smoother skin
While you're fixing a person's teeth, why not even out skin tones
and give them a more flattering appearance? To do this, make a rough selection
around the area you want to fix—and I mean a rough selection—by
grabbing the Lasso tool and dragging a quick freehand shape around the face.
Choose LayerNew
Layer Via Copy to make a duplicate of the
selected area on a new layer. Apply a Gaussian blur to this new layer to soften
the image. Do this by choosing Filter
Blur
Gaussian Blur to blur
it quite strongly—you'll find that around four to five pixels works
well. Set the blend mode of this layer to Lighten to see the more even tones in
the skin. To finish, bring back some of the detail around the eyes and mouth by
selecting a brush and set its Hardness to a low value to create a brush with
soft edges that will blend better. Use the Eraser tool to erase the blurred
layer over the subject's eyes, eyebrows, and mouth.