Have you ever tried to do a photo shoot using some of your friends? Have you found that even though the pics looked good, there was something lacking in your makeup. The skin didn't quite seem to look as good as in the picture of a famous model. Well, that's because of professional make up done before the actual photo, making the skin look soft and toned - and blended perfectly with the light.

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But don't be too disappointed. With some good photography skills and a little digital editing, you can create great looking pictures on your own. In this tutorial we'll look at how you can fix your make up after the pictures are taken. This is called airbrushing in the digital editing world. We’ll start with a picture of a girl, note that her face has some blemishes that we'll need to fix to make her skin smooth and silky.

Open the picture that you wish to edit in Photoshop. Create a duplicate layer start working with that. Photoshop has a very useful tool which is called "spot healing tool" to remove spots from skin. Use it to remove any obvious spots. Dont' worry if you couldn't remove all of them, we'll get to them a bit further down in this tutorial. To achieve a soft skin look, we will use the filter Noise -> Dust & Scratches, keep the radius just enough - making the skin look soft and graded, don't care about the eyes.

Now we will do further removal by bluring the image. Use the Filter Blur -> Gaussian Blur with a radius around 3 depending on the size your image. Tweak to find the right value.

Also, make sure to add a natural look. To do this we'll put a uniform noise to the picture. This is achieved using Filter -> Add Noise, use the settings below:

Our skin is ready, now we need to graft it on the picture. Make sure you're on the skin layer. Add a layer mask to it. Fill the mask with black color using the paint bucket. This will hide your skin layer and the original picture will appear. Select the brush tool and start painting over the skin with white color. Your new smoother skin will start appearing as you paint. Paint only the skin part leaving the eyes and the lips intact. To check out what you have painted, change the blend mode of your masked layer to 'difference' and the opacity to 75%. You can now clearly see what part has been painted and what haven't.

Once you are finished with painting the skin. Turn back the blend mode to normal and the opacity to 100%. Here's the results that you should see at this point:

The skin has improved drastically without losing any detail on the places which matter - like eyes and lips. Here's the before and after picture, take a closer look at the details:

Using this technique you can improve your pictures without spending on expensive make up products. It's reasonably easy to implement and looks great! Hope you enjoyed it.

Here's another airbrush technique.

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