Portrait Retouching in Photoshop: Smooth Skin While Keeping Natural Texture

Smooth skin and natural texture are not opposites — achieving both at once is the mark of a professional retouch. This workflow covers blemish removal, flyaway hair cleanup, dark under-eye correction, and eye brightening, all while keeping the skin looking like skin.

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Practical Tips

These key points from the tutorial will help you get cleaner results and avoid common mistakes during the retouching process.

• When setting the Gaussian Blur radius on the High Pass layer, aim for just enough blur to suppress blemishes without flattening pores — a small value like 1.9 pixels is often sufficient.
• Use a black layer mask to hide the retouch layer by default, then paint white only over skin areas, avoiding sharp edges like eyes, lips, and eyebrows to prevent unwanted softening.
• Create a composite snapshot before using the Remove tool so you work on a merged, clean layer rather than stacking corrections on top of an already complex layer structure.
• When removing flyaway hairs with the Remove tool, enable "Remove after each stroke" so you can undo individual strokes if the result is not clean.
• Use the Dodge tool set to Midtones at full exposure to brighten irises — keep the brush within the iris boundary to avoid lightening surrounding areas.

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