How To Smooth Newborn Skin In Photoshop

This tutorial is going to teach you how to work with baby acne or any skin blemishes. How to go about removing them, as well as working with skin discoloration and creating smooth skin. You can use these same steps on any type of skin issues that you feel needs adjusting in photoshop by hand. If you need a quick and easy way to create beautiful smooth skin then I would recommend using my SKIN SMOOTHING PHOTOSHOP ACTION instead of doing it all by hand. Works in Photoshop & Elements!  

CURVES ADJUSTMENT

Making a curve adjustment will brighten the image. This will also help make the skin colors not as vibrant. 

COLOR ADJUSTMENT

Since there's a lot of yellow in the image I'm making a color adjustment to get the while balance right. 

YELLOW HUE ADJUSTMENT 

I made this yellow hue adjustment to remove some of the yellow in the eye whites. Newborns often have different skin and eye coloration, you can easily fix these by doing a hue adjustment for specific colors. 

REMOVE MAIN BLEMISHES WITH THE PATCH TOOL 

When you're working on this step, be sure to duplicate your layer. This way if you mess anything up you're not working on the main copy. (once we completed this step we can merge two two layers together).
You'll see I'm using the patch tool. The way this works is you draw a circle the spot you want to fix, and then you'll see an arrow that directs you to drag it to a clear spot. Photoshop will match the areas, remove the blemish and put the clear spot in its place.

Do this for all the little spots. Now keep in mind, you only need to do this for the actual blemishes. You can see there's a lot of redness around those areas, but those will be fixed another way so I won't worry about that yet.

Keep going until you got rid of all the blemishes.

Merge the layers. 

NEW LAYER PAINT SKIN TONE COLOR 10% OPACITY

Create a new layer, use a brush on 10% opacity and get a color sample (I hold down option) to get the natural color of the skin. Slowly paint over the red areas to help remove the different colors. 

Note - you'll need to get multiple skin color samples since it changes depending on where you are. 

NEW LAYER SMALL BRUSH 30% OPACITY

Make another blank layer. Make your brush just a little larger than one blemish. Change to opacity to 30% and take a color sample (I hold down option to do this). And once you have a natural skin tone you'll click right over the blemish the remove the discoloration and blend it nicely. You'll work around the image and do this to any spot that needs it. 

 I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and hopefully it will help some of you in your editing. If you're looking for a quick and easy way to get smooth skin in photoshop or elements than I highly recommend using my skin smoothing actions. (you can use these for any type of portraits)