How to Easily Do Skin Retouching in Photoshop: A Step-by-Step Tutorial

In this Photoshop skin retouching tutorial, you will learn step by step how to remove blackheads, acne and smooth skin in Photoshop.

This walkthrough will take you through the steps to of using the remove tool, before using frequency separation in photoshop to further airbrush the skin - resulting in high end skin retouching.

The purpose of using frequency separation is to help maintain the skin texture in photoshop.

While this is an advanced technique, it is actually very easy to do and by following this process, you will learn now to retouch skin quickly.

Let's get into it:

To get started, we want to create a black and white adjustment layer above our image.

With that created, we then want to reduce the reds like I am doing here. Doing this will highlight the acne and blemishes - making it easier to see them to paint.

With that created, we then want to reduce the reds like I am doing here. Doing this will highlight the acne and blemishes - making it easier to see them to paint.

Once that is done, we then want to create a new layer that sits in between the black and white adjustment layer, and the image. This is where our next adjustments will live.

So, with our new layer selected - we then need to select the remove tool.

Now, because we have a blank layer selected, we need to check the “sample all layers” box - to make sure the adjustments we make are made to our image.

If you need to adjust the size of your brush, you can do so by changing the value in this box here, or by pressing the brackets keys on your keyboard to increase or decrease the size.

With that all set, it’s time to paint! Using the remove tool, we can simply airbrush the skin around each spot or blemish. You don’t need to paint the whole thing, a simple outline will do the job.

I do recommend doing this spot by spot, because if you do a large outline, it will make your retouching look unnatural.

Keep going around your image, removing as much as you possibly can. The more you do now, the easier the next part will be.

Once you are happy with the removal, you can go ahead and disable the black and white adjustment layer - this will show your image in colour with the adjustments made so far.

Next, we are going to refine the retouching further through a prcess called frequency separation. Simply put, this is the process of separating the high frequencies (skin and pores) from the low frequencies (colour).

Before we do this, we need to combine everything we have done so far into a singular layer. To do this, create a new layer - then with that new layer selected press Cmd+Opt+Shift+E. You will see your project so far appear in this new layer. 

With that done, we then want to copy this layer.

The reason for this is one layer is going to be our high frequency layer and the other is going to be our low frequency layer. I’m going to label mine high frequency (texture) and low frequency (colour).

For right now, we are going to hide the texture layer and focus on the colour layer.

We are now going to add a blur to this layer. So, with the colour layer selected - we need to go up to filter, blur, gaussian blur.

This box will appear. Now it’s important to not ramp this up too high as you won’t have as much control in the next stage. However, the purpose if this, is to bring the levels up to a point of which the texture of the skin is smoothed out.

This is going to be different for everyone, as your images will feature different skin textures.

You will see that by applying this blur, we have lost all of our details.This is where our high frequency texture layer comes in. Next, we want to enable this layer again.

With the high frequency layer selected, head up to image > apply image.

In the Apply image menu, we want to select the colour layer from the layer dropdown. Make sure the channel is RGB and set the blending to subtract (as we want to subtract the details). Leave the opacity as 100%. 

Scale determines the amount of subtraction it will do. 2 is the maximum and 1 is the minimum. So for this purpose, we are going to set it to the maximum of 2.

We want to change the offset to 128. The value of neutral grey is R128, G128 and B128 and neutral grey is important for when we change the blend mode in the next step.

Choose ok with all of that configured.

Next, head straight to the blend mode.

We want to change this to linear light. This will remove anything that is 50% grey, which is why we needed neutral grey in the previous step.

Once that’s done, we are going to create a new layer that sits in between our high frequency and low frequency layers.

We are going to disable the high frequency layer and we are also going to re-enable the black and white adjustment layer we used earlier.

We need to select our new retouch layer we just created.

Next we are going to select our tools for brushing. Firstly, we need to choose the eye dropper tool.

Make sure it is set to 3 by 3 average and make sure the sample is current & below. This part is really important, as we don’t want it to sample this black and white adjustment layer above.

We’re now going to select the brush tool

I typically set the brush size anywhere between 50 and 100, with the hardness set to 0. You can change the brush size to fit your projects needs. I use an opacity of 100%, flow of 2% and smoothing of 10%.

It’s time to start painting! We are going to start by taking a sample of the area by pressing the option or alt key.

Next we’re simply going to brush to smooth out the area. By taking the sample, it will make sure we are painting in similar colours to that area.

Keep following this process on your image until everything is smoothed out to how you want it to be. It's important to make sure you are painting in the direction of the skin, to make it look as natural as possible.

Once you are done, you can turn the high frequency layer back on and turn off the black and white adjustment layer to see your retouched photo!

If you want to see a before and after, you can do this by disabling and enabling the middle layer we created in between our high and low frequency layers.

And that’s all there is to it!

Need help? Watch the video tutorial: