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Creating a 'soft look' ?

Richard Allen
I've searched through these forums and can't find what I'm looking for (probably used the wrong search terms) so here I am...

How can I best create a soft look for a person's face?

You can have too much detail sometimes in that I don't always want to see every pore of a person's skin; I'd like to (sometimes) achieve a soft, yet still natural, look to a persons face.

Any help would be very gratefully received... 😊
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Comments

4 comments

Date Votes
  • Ian Wilson
    Moderator
    Top Commenter
    You can soften skin tones quite well with a local adjustment and negative clarity. So draw a mask to cover the parts of the face you want to soften (with M pressed so the the mask shows, then press M again to hide it when done). (You might want to mask the whole face, and then erase the mask again over just the eyes so that they retain a good sharp appearance. And you might want to use quite a soft edged brush.) Then pull the clarity slider on the local adjustments tab to the left. You can sometimes go too far so that it looks a bit too airbrushed, in which case just back off a bit on the slider again.

    Ian
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  • Richard Allen
    Thank you Ian, that was the information I needed.

    I knew there was an easy way to do it and once you know it's so obvious.

    Thanks again... 😉
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  • Ian Wilson
    Moderator
    Top Commenter
    Thinking about this some more, it occurred to me to say something else. You might want a greater degree of "softening" on some parts of the face than others. In that case you can get more control by doing it like this. Create the layer as before, but don't paint a mask yet. Set the clarity to some suitable negative amount - probably quite a lot. The use a brush and set it to full opacity, but low flow. Don't press M to see the mask but gradually paint over parts of the face as required. The more you go over a part the more the effect will be applied, and you can carry on until you like the effect. (Flow of say 10% with opacity of 100% means that the effect will be applied at 10% strength with just one pass of the brush, and a further 10% with each pass over the same place, up to the maximum of 100%. Or up to a maximum of say 80% if you had set the opacity to that.) If you go too far you can use an erase brush instead. It would help to check the box to link the brush and the eraser settings - that way you get the same size, hardness, opacity etc for the eraser and the brush. You can obviously also change the overall strength of the effect with the clarity slider.

    Ian
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  • SFA
    In addition to the negative clarity you can smooth skin tones (or any colour range come to that) in a controllable way (i.e. avoiding the "plastic look" effect) using the Skin Tone adjustments in the colour editor.

    It's a different approach but the two adjustments together can be more convincing than using just one of them in many circumstances.

    There are some recent videos, etc, that cover the ground for that.

    HTH.


    Grant
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