Airbrushing People

Tina,

Maybe your’e after "Soft Focus". There are various ways to accomplish this, but essentially Soft Focus is a sharp AND a blurred version of the same photo layered on top of each other with one having 50% transparency.

Back in the early seventies I experimented with this as I discovered that a piece cut out of a nylon stocking covering the lens did exectly that in one exposure. Otherwise I had to double exposure (one in, one out focus), or buy a filter.
In that days anything was possible, except buying something.

My sister refused to lend me one of her’s, so I had to buy a pair. Picture the scene at the store? OK, Now we have Photoshop: Take an image, a portrait, preferably shot with a 135 mm lens. Adjust anything to your liking, then copy the image to a new layer. Set transparency of this layer to 50 %. (nothing changes visually) Now blur this layer (gaussian, 20 pxls) and see the Soft focus effect.

Experiment a bit with transparency and blur etc.

This one I made in sept 1989 with a filter (NikonF, 50mm at F1,4 Kodak Tmax 400)

<http://home.planet.nl/~keijz198/softfocus.jpg>

It is not very good, but the SF should be obvious.

Rob

Hi Tina!

There is a thread in the Photo section of PhotoshopTechniques (free membership required) devoted to different techniques of smoothing in Photoshop: < http://www.photoshoptechniques.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&a mp;threadid=2018>

The basic idea is to make a selection of the area that you want to soften, jump it to its own layer (CTRL+J), then apply a softening filter (Blur/Gaussian Blur, Noise/Median, or even Stylize/Diffuse, using the Anisotropic setting) enjoy!

There are many ways to smooth skin and it takes a lot of experimentation to know which method is the best for a given subject. Here is one:
<http://www.shanzcan.com/photoshopmama/psm_tutorial1.html>

Also I suggest that Photoshop Restoration & Retouching by Katrin Eismann is an excellent resource.