In this tutorial you will learn how to enhance the skin and hair of a girl with some filter effects and blending modes. Finally we will add lighting effect to make the photo more beautiful.

Step 1:

Open your photo in Photoshop, I use the photo below:

Step 2:

Firstly, we will enhance her skin, go to Select>Color Range and click on the face to sample it.

then select the “Add to Sample” icon and click on other areas on her face to sample some more. Click OK when most of the areas on her face turned into white

You will get some selection areas like this:

Step 3:

Press Ctrl-J to duplicate the selection areas and change the blending mode of this layer to Overlay to make it more contrastive.

Step 4:

We should smooth her skin a little by going to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and set a small Radius value

Step 5:

Press Ctrl-Shift-Alt-E to merge all layers into a new layer, lying on the top. On this layer we will apply the Unsharp Mask to emphasize her face’s edges by going to Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask and use the default settings:

Step 5:

Press Ctrl-Shift-Alt-E to merge all layers into a new layer, lying on the top. On this layer we will apply the Unsharp Mask to emphasize her face’s edges by going to Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask and use the default settings:

Step 7:

Finally we will make a lighting effect by going to Filter>Render>Lighting Effects and adjust the light source on her face

Now our photo will look better!

In conclusion, we can use some filter effects to emphasize something we want. Remember to make its edges contrastive with the Unsharp Mask filter and make it soft again with the Soft Light blending mode.

Credit: 9tuts.com