Photoshop - Manipulation

Today we learnt how to manipulate a photograph by layer masking. In particular we learnt how to make skin look clearer and smoother. Before showing you my first trial at doing it myself, I'm going to go through the process.

Layer Masking

Step 1 - Start off by doing any editing you would do in the raw photoshop plug in before working on the soft and sharp layers

Step 2 - Boost the clarity on the image and open in photoshop as a smart object

Step 3 - Duplicate the layer and label them 'sharp' and 'soft'

Step 4 - Rasterize the first layer which is labelled sharp (this means you can not open again in raw editor)

Step 5 - Open the second layer in raw plug-in and decrease the clarity so that the skin or object looks clearer and then open again in photoshop

Step 6 - Now you need make sure the sharp layer is on top of the soft one. It's now time to use a layer mask. You go to the layer tab click on layer mask and then reveal all

Step 7 - You now need to click on the mask and use the eraser to block out any of the sharp layer you want to look smoother

To do a trial piece I used an image I took of a Big Issue seller in Plymouth (Top image). After following all of the steps I ended up with the piece at the bottom. As you can see, I've cleared his skin up a lot so that it now looks a lot clearer of blemishes and wrinkles. I am definitely going to be using this method in my own work from now on.