Today, I will post a very basic skin softening technique, that can be applied on faces of female subjects to give their skin a more smooth look and a touch of glamorous shine. These kind of softening techniques are widely used in the creative industry where you see models with soft and perfect skins in movie posters, advertisements, etc…

For example, I will apply this simple Photoshop technique on the Sony Alpha model below.

Step 1: Open the photo in Photoshop and duplicate a layer. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and select around 4 to 6 pixels of blur. Select “Lighten” mode in the layer platette to ensure a more even tone.

Step 2: Now that the photo looks entirely blur. All you need to do now is just “erase off the top layer” to be sharp again! Choose the eraser tool and a soft edged brush.

Step 3: Just brush across the area of the subject where you feel that should be sharp instead of the blur you had created just now.  Example of the effect can be seen in the zoom in photo below:

Additional Tips: Remember you need to sharpen certain portions of the photo, if not the photo will look out of focus instead of giving the subject a softer skin look. For a typical subject like the photo above, the areas that need to be sharpen are typically:

• The hair
• The eyebrows
• The eyes
• The lips
• Any lines like shoulder, face outline, pattern of shirt, accessories

There are other more advanced techniques that can achieve similar kind of results. I will post that when I feel that the post is ready.