It's time for another newdarkroom.com video tutorial. This week I am going to show you how to smooth out skin tone in your digital images. So here we have a model. This is from NewDarkRoom member Pichunter. It's a great shot, beautiful image. It's obviously taken on a very nice camera because you can see a lot of detail in this image. So much you can see the models pores and very precise detail of the model.
Sometimes you might not want all that detail in your model. So I am going to show you how to smooth up a skin tone, give it a much easier, smoother look. It will blend all these colors here and give it a little bit more of a glamour look to it. So what we are going to do, is we are going to go up here to the Layer palette, and we are going to duplicate this Background layer and we are going to do this twice by right clicking on the layer and then go to Duplicate Layer. Give it any name you wish here.
This top layer, we are going to changing the Blending Mode to Darken and then this middle layer here we are going to change the Blending Mode to Lighten. Since we are on the middle one, we are going to go up to Filter, Blur and then Gaussian Blur. We are going to want to give this layer about a 65 pixel radius here. You will see it's going to blur out here. In this top layer, we are going to want to give this basically the same thing, Blur, Gaussian Blur. But we are going want to give this around to 45.
Now you will see we have a very blurry image, it's not quite what we want. So what we are going to do is we are going to create a new layer. It could layer on top here, New and then layer. You want to make sure that this layer is on top of your two duplicate layers here. So what we are going to do is, we are going to take these two layers and merge them onto this top layer. Easy way to do that is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E.
Now you will see that we have these two layers merged onto this top layer. So we are going to hide these two layers here, but now we can't really see our image. So we are going just lower the opacity of this top layer here, just the little bit. So we can see a little more detail of this background image down here blending in. Now you are going to want to go down here to add Vector Mask or add your layer mask. And it's going to give you a nice little white layer mask.
You are going to want to make sure over here, down here it is you have your foreground color is black because what we are going to do is select a nice soft airbrush and we are going to paint black onto this mask all the parts that are not in the skin tone itself. Things such as the eyes here and we are going to want to do the eyebrows as well. This will bring the detail back into the image. We are going to want to do the mouth and the lips here. Let's see, there we are and we are going to want to bring some detail back into the hairs, so I am going just up my brush diameter here and paint over here.
Also going to want to get areas such as the ear because that will bring detail back into the background here and you are just going to want to go around all the skin tone itself. You want to make sure that you get the clothing because during the blurring of these two layers, it takes and pulls the color out of those layers and will end up bleeding over to other colors you don't want it to.
So, we are going to do the same over here. Alright, there we go, couple other areas you might want to pay little attention to, that it gets overlooked a lot is right around the nose, there is always shading at the nose here. You also might want to bring out some of the net role contours, little bit the lines here and now you have a much smoother skin tone, but it still isn't quite what you want. So, what we are going to do is going to go up here to our opacity of this top layer and you want bring it down to about the 40 range, anywhere between the 40 and 50, because that will blend with this background layer that we have visible down at the bottom, the original layer and it will give you a very nice smooth skin tone. This is the original and now this is the smoother skin. There we go.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services