Today's tip is something that you will find in alot and I mean ALOT of fashion and magazine ad's.Ever look at a photo and ask " how did they get such amazing looking skin?" Well the answer is pretty simply it's just alot of steps ( alot is the word of the day)


1.So the first step is basic clean up, you can "google" vast amounts of tutorials on how to do basic clean up with the Healing brush tool and the patch tool. Once you have the skin looking clean ( or at least not full of pimples, ache, ect) now comes step two.

2. Now that you have your face clean you need to make a " Stamp visible layer" on top of all your other layers, what a stamp visible layer is, is just a new layer with a image of what you have already done. It's like flattening your whole image down but without accurately doing it.  

3. Once you have done that we need to make this new layer ( the stamp visible layer) into a highpass image. To do that first you want to desaturated/turn your image black and white. There are a few ways to do this the one that I find the quickest is to press Command/CRTL-U on your keyboard and the "hue and saturation" box with pop up. Slide the saturation slider all the way to the left until your image is fully black and white, hit okay.

3.1 Now for the Highpass effect go to Filter-Other-Highpass. Here you want to choose an amount that just barely shows your image, there is no "perfect" number so you will have to judge it. then hit okay. You will see that your image is now mostly grey set the blending mode to "Overlay" if it looks like your image is sharper then you are doing great.

Now the hard part, which is what this tip is all about. Underneath the highpass layer you want to make a new blank layer, this is going to be used to paint on a new face.. sounds a bit scary but really isn't with some practice.


4. Grab a round soft brush out of the brushes panel and set the "flow" down to around 10% and then begin on the blank layer to paint on the skin of your subject, Make sure that you are sampling the skin colors as you go along ( you can do that by holding down Alt with your brush tool)


Once the skin is painted ( you will not get it right the first try, it takes getting the hang of it) then you will see that the skin has been smoothed and yet has texture. This is because of the Highpass layer.. by making that layer on the top we have kept the skin texture of the original photo.


From here you can dodge and burn and do a whole host of other things..


So it is

1. clean up the skin
2. make a visible stamp layer
3. create a highpass layer
4. Paint on the new face


Something that looks very cool in the magazines, is also something very easy to do inside of photoshop!


More to come..


I would love to see if any use this tip to see how your image turns out and as always if you have a question or if you need it explained more I am always here to help.