So my quest for a good technique for nice natural looking skin retouching goes on. I think this one looks pretty natural, nice smooth skin but with realistic texture. Not too polished and plastic looking.

I hope they don’t mind me using this photo here. Pics from nights out in town are the only untouched photos i have. I’m not going to show the origonal here cause it would be showing flaws that i thought i should cover up and i think that one side effect of photo retouching is exageratting even the most minor blemish in someones skin. Anyway here’s the layers pallet at the end of what i did.

The levels adjustment layer at the top was so i could see the edges more clearly when i was making a mask to blur the background.

curve adjustments for brightness and one for a small amount of contrast

The hue/saturation layers were for adding a small boost to the eyes.

I used the bokeh plugin for that cause it gives more realistic results that photoshop’s built in lens blur filter.

And i have a layer with all the skin retouches on a transparency mask.

by the way, that’s a 340kb jpg saved as a 10.3kb png file, the save for web and devices option is your friend.