How to Remove Skin Blemishes and Fix Skin Tones in Camera Raw

How to Remove Skin Blemishes and Fix Skin Tones in Camera Raw

Two recent additions to Camera Raw make skin retouching significantly faster: an automatic blemish removal tool with separate controls for moles and freckles, and a vectorscope-based skin tone indicator for correcting off-color skin. Both features work non-destructively inside a smart object workflow, so no pixel data is permanently altered.

Watch the Video

Video by Zenzdesign. Any links or downloads mentioned by the creator are available only on YouTube

Practical Tips

Here are the key techniques covered in the video, each directly applicable to portrait retouching workflows.

  • Convert your layer to a smart object before opening Camera Raw — this keeps all edits non-destructive and reversible.
  • Use the Blemishes sliders separately: the blemish slider targets temporary skin issues, while the moles and freckles slider handles permanent features you may want to preserve.
  • Switch to the Refine view inside the Blemishes panel to restore or remove individual spots one by one, giving precise control over the automatic result.
  • Enable the vectorscope by right-clicking the histogram in Camera Raw, then turn on the skin tone indicator to see exactly where your subject's skin color sits relative to the ideal range.
  • Create a skin-only mask using the People option in Masking — select facial skin, body skin, eyebrows, and lips — before adjusting color, so corrections apply only to skin and not the whole image. Point Color offers the most targeted hue adjustment for skin tones.

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