Smoothing skin on Photoshop.

In the media, nearly every photo has been manipulated in some way. For example, pictures of models have been edited so that they appear more beautiful than they are in reality. The cause of this manipulation gives teenage girls the idea that there are people out there that really look like that, which leads to them having low self esteem.

For this piece of work, I had to remove blemishes and make it look like this girl had a smooth complexion. This is commonly used within magazines and advertising. 

< The original picture

< Edited picture

To achieve this look on the lower picture, I had to select the "spot healing brush tool" and click on all of the freckles and spots that she had. After that, I had to decrease the brush diameter so that it fitted over each spot. To get rid of each spot, you only need to click on it once, repeat this until all of the spots are done. After I had done this, I clicked on "Layer" and then onto "duplicate layer". Once I did this, a dialog box appeared, I left the default settings and clicked ok. After this, I clicked on "Filter" -> "Blur" -> "smart blur" from the menu and left the settings as they were. Once that was done, I selected the top layer and clicked on "Add Layer Mask" from the layers palette. Then from the toolbox, I selected the brush tool, changed the colour to black and went over the background, her hair, clothes, eyes, eyebrows, mouth and also the edge of her nose to give it a sharper look.