Lessening Freckles or Facial Acne

This technique is popular with senior class portrait photographers who need to lessen or remove large areas of acne, pockmarks, or freckles from their subjects. This is especially useful when you have a lot of photos to retouch and don’t have the time to use the method shown previously, where you deal with each blemish individually.

Step One:

Open the photo that you need to retouch. Make a duplicate of the Background layer by going to the Layer menu, under New, and choosing Layer via Copy (or just pressing Ctrl-J [Mac: Command-J]). We’ll perform our retouch on this duplicate of the Background layer, named “Layer 1.”

©ISTOCKPHOTO/FLOYD WILLIS

Step Two:

Go under the Filter menu, under Blur, and choose Gaussian ...

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