Photoshop Friday!

Welcome to another installment of Photoshop Friday! Last week I showed you how to add a double matte frame. This week, in the mail, I received my first of two free copies of Photoshop User in the mail and in the latest edition they had a little blurb on how to create a skin softening action and that is what I am going to cover today. It is pretty simple, but very effective.

What you want to do is start off with an image that could use a little bit of softening. I chose this image:



1. Create a new action and call it "Skin Softening"
2. Hit record and begin
3. Control-j (PC) or Command-j (mac) to create a duplicate layer of the image
4. Go to Filter-Blur-Surface Blur. Now, I chose a threshold of 10 and a radius of 15 for a higher res image you can set the numbers higher.
5. Now, the whole image is blurred so you will want to create a mask layer.
6. Set the opacity of the blur layer to 50%
7. Hit stop to stop recording the action.
8. With the paintbrush tool selected, the color set to black, and the mask layer selected you can now paint to reveal the sharp layer under the blurred copy. So, now the skin is softer but the rest of the image is sharp.

Here are the results:



If you are not familiar with how to create actions and mask layers you can get more info at the Adobe support center and knowledge base.

That is it for todays installment of Photoshop Fridays!
(Sorry Kristel, I just don't like the PH friday :) )