This tutorial assumes a basic knowledge of Photoshop. If you aren’t sure what a healing tool is (for example) then take a look at our previous Photoshop lessons to familiarise yourself with the very basic techniques which we use in this tutorial.

Yup, it’s possible! With patience and care you can turn your photos into images worthy of a fashion magazine.
This tutorial should also give a good wake up call to everyone who fell for that ‘great skin cream advert’ (packed with lots of scientific terms) that claimed to do miracles for you in a matter of weeks (complete with before and after photos of the lucky girl who has sampled it on your behalf!)

You will notice that there are no step by step screen shots for this tutorial - that’s because we have done something different this time around - you can watch the whole video tutorial on Youtube and see each step as it happens! Click Here to see the video!

Here we go!
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We have started with an image where the model wears only eyeliner and mascara. No base or eye shadow or lipstick etc.

Open your image in photoshop.

Using your spot healing tool with a very small brush size, zoom right into your image and remove all of the obvious blemishes by clicking once on each of them - the spot healing tool with automatically fix it for you. (don’t stress about the smaller or less visable blemishes yet).

Then select your patch healing tool and draw a selection around any larges ‘problem areas’ like dark under eye rings or well defined wrinkles.
–Hold your the mouse over the selection you’ve drawn, click down and drag the selection to a patch of skin that you would like to use to replace the shadow or wrinkle (a smooth, even patch of skin) and when you let go of the selection Photoshop will automatically shade the wrinkle or dark patch out. If it doesn’t look right - click Ctrl+Z (undo) and try a different patch of skin as a filler.

Work through your image until all of your blemishes or ‘imperfections’ are fixed up.

Make some gentle adjustments to your brightness and contrast. Push your brightness up a little to brighten the image (which already starts to add a smoother effect to the skin)

Now duplicate your background layer by right clicking the layer and selecting “duplicate layer”.

Click on your new layer.
Select (from the top menu) Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. With a preview of 100% blur the image until the texture of the skin is not visible at all. (as high as 50 pixels, maybe more depending on your image)
Now add a layer mask to your upper layer. (by clicking the little black box with the white circle in it at the bottom of your layers menu)

Click on the white square that has appeared next to your image on the top layer.

Select your paint brush tool and click ‘D’ to set your colours to default black and white.
Using black - paint onto your main image (your are actually painting onto the layer mask, not the image - so all that is going to happen is you are going to be ‘hiding’ pieces of your top layer to reveal the layer underneath it that has not been blurred)

You are going to paint over the eyes, edges of the nose, lips, ears, jaw line, hair and background using your black paint.
On the little white square you will start to see the shape of the face appearing in black and white. You can paint ‘roughly’ at first. Then when you have the basic shape you are going to zoom right into the image and paint with a much smaller paintbrush to define the edges. Black will hide the effect of the layer mask (which in this case is a blurr effect) and white will ‘reveal’ the effect of the layer mask.

Be very careful when painting around the eyelashes and eyebrows or hairline. Be as neat as you can be.

Now you can set that layers opacity to a lower amount to make the effect a little less obvious. (the amount you reduce your opacity by is up to you)

Now click on the lower layer again and select your burn tool (dodge and burn).

With a very small brush set to about a 3% hardness and a 3 - 5% exposure - zoom into your eyes and paint around the eyes to darken the eyelashes / eyeliner.

You can also choose to shade the lips with the same tool (creating more shadow / deeper colour)
Be careful as the dodge tool saturates the colour too.

Now you can merge your two layers (select the bottom layer - right click - merge visible)

Maybe you want to pump up the lips a little too or refine a jaw line? Click Filter > Liquify.

With the bloat tool set to a low pressure click (short sharp clicks as the effect can distort very quickly) over the lips to puff them out a little.

Use the very top tool in the left side menu bar to push a jaw line into a different shape.

Click ok when you are happy.

Now as a final touch - zoom into your eyes - with your freehand marquee select tool draw a selection around the iris only. Hold Shift and draw another selection around the other iris.

Click selection in the top menu > refine selection > feather your selection by a few notches (not too much - just to blur the very edge slightly)

Click ok. Then click Image > Adjustments > Hue & Saturation. Push your saturation up a little (keep it natural looking) and adjust your Hue to whatever eye colour you want (keep it natural too)

click apply.
Click Ctrl+D to deselect.

And there you have it!

Don’t forget to check out our step by step video on YouTube! Click Here to see the video!