thank you for your help,
I am using cs4 I don't have lightroom and as the ladies are often not wearing much I need to do more than just the face which makes it a long job the way I am work at the moment
In CS4, open your image in the raw converter, Adobe Camera Raw or ACR as it is widely known. If you shoot in raw format this is what should open first when you open up a raw image.
Now, this is just for the skin softening, any exposure stuff and levels you may have to do afterwards and it may or may not affect the skin.
Set all the sliders to the default setting. Move the clarity slider to -75 and click open, once in PS save the image as whateverdifferentname.jpg/tif or which ever format you choose.
Now go to open the original file again, this time when it opens up in ACR set the sliders to default and move the clarity back to 0. Open the image.
You should have 2 open images in PS, click on the 1st image, go to select all, with the move too selected, drag the image onto the other one whilst holding the shift key, this will make sure they are aligned exactly on top of each other.
Close the 2nd image, stops any confusion on which image you are working on. You should now have one image with 2 layers on it. It should all look very soft because the top layer is the 1st image that has -75 clarity on it.
Make sure the top layer is highlighted, now add a mask, now paint on the areas in the mask with a soft brush where you do not want any softening to be applied and you should see the original image coming back through, this should be applied to eyes, lips and hair etc so that theses are not soft.
It sounds tricky and hard but once you have done it a couple of times it is really easy, it is not destructive because of the masks and if you make a mistake on the mask just switch the white/black around to repaint the original/edit depending what you mistake is. With the mask you can also set the opacity of the brush so you get as little or as much applied to the image as you want.
You can also switch the layers around before you add the mask so that you may have the blurred copy beneath and then when you apply the mask you are going to paint in the softness to the skin, it all depends on how you work and how neat you are.
Hope this helps, you can usually do a good sized image in a minute with this method and feels a lot better doing it yourself than having a plug in do it for you, plus you are learning about masks and layers too.
for me.
