Smoothing/Softening Sims or Images in PS

This tutorial is for those in Photoshop who want to soften or smooth their image without having to use the smudge tool. This is a pretty easy tutorial and you can apply this to all sorts of different things!

1. Firstly you need to bring up your image on Photoshop; you can make the necessary editing that you want to make either before softening or after. Your choice, but here is my LBB headshot of Audrey, as you can see (maybe not too clearly) her skin is sort of picky and ruff, so we are going to change that up!

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2. Right click on your layer and select ‘Duplicate Layer’. Name it Duplicate (or what ever you wish)

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3. Right Click on your new layer and select ‘Blending Options’. This should bring up a menu, in that menu I want you to go to ‘Blend Mode’ and select ‘Overlay’

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It should then look something like this, but don’t get freaked out about it, trust me it will work

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4. Go to ‘Filters’ and under ‘Other’ select ‘High Pass’

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Choose a radius that suits you, mine is at 5.7 because I don’t want my picture softened too much, but this is not a big issue, you will see why in a minute.

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After using the filter your image should look something like this, but don’t worry ,you will see it soften!

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5. Now go to ‘Image’, ‘Adjustments’ and select ‘Invert’. You will see your picture very softened! (don’t worry we will easily fix that!)

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6. Lower the opacity to your liking, you can do that by right clicking on your image and selecting ‘blending options’ and then changing your opacity there like so. Mine is at 47%


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7. You should notice that ALL of your image has softened, now this is not good because although you might like the look of it, you need to preserve details like the eyes and maybe your background, so what you do is you create a ‘mask’. You can do this by selecting ‘layer’, ‘layer mask’ and then ‘reveal all’.

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It should then look something like this.

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8. Select the layer mask (not the layer itself!)

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9. With your brush tool, select the black color and paint over the details you don’t want softened (you can use a big brush for the background). It should then look something like this.

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10. Last but not least select the layer, not the mask and then go to 'filters', 'Blur', 'Gaussian Blur' and use a small number like 0.6 as i did

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Done!

Now looking at both before and after pictures you can really see the subtle difference (be aware I did skin shading prior to this) You can try it on your pictures, let me know how they look! I know some people will go into picnik and do the soften option but i like doing everything in one place, so these easy steps helped me edit my images the way i wanted to!

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