This is the first of many tutorials on basic techniques to improve your wedding photography. Today we will start with a simple post production effect to improve the skin tine and texture of your bride using photoshop.

Photoshop is the editing software i would recommend for full control and limitless post production. I am going to assume that you already understand the basics of photoshop and where most of the controls are, however if you get stuck drop me a comment and i will be happy to help.

The image we are going to start with is a simple bridal portrait of a bride with normal skin.

Stage 1. Open your image in Photoshop and duplicate the background layer using the cmd-j for mac users or cntl-j for PC users *( this is to make sure you always have the original image to refer to). Zoom right in to 100% and you will notice that unless your bride is very very lucky or only 15 years old she will have varies and very natural blemishes and marks on her skin. Select the “Clone  Stamp Tool” or the “spot healing brush tool”  and remove any major spots or marks. Sometimes i will then zoom out a little and  set the “Clone  Stamp Tool” to 30% opacity using the tools menu i will then  select a large brush size and again do a pass over and clear marks or blemishes. The result here will still be uneven and often a little odd looking as you can see below.

Stage 2. Create  3 more duplicate layers using the cmb-j key.

Stage 3. Select the first new layer and add a median blur (go to Filter – Blur – Median). Set the blur so you can still make out the details in the face but so that everything is very soft and distorted. I tend to stick to a median blur of around 30 for most of my bridal portraits.

Stage 4. Select the second new layer and add a “High Pass” Filter with a radius of about 6 (go to Filter – Other – HighPass). This is a very important stage as it will stop the skin looking fake and insure that there is still natural texture.

Stage 5. Select the third new layer and add a layer mask. Now select the “brush tool” and insure your pallet is set to black. Carefully draw around the area of skin that you want to smooth avoiding the eyes, mouth and other features of the face.

Stage 6. Set your high pass layer to to a blending mode of overlay. This will give you a very smooth skin tone. You then need to experiment with the opacity levels of both the high pass layer and the median blur layer until you get the effect you are looking for.I find that setting both layers at around 50% opasicty often works great for a natural looking skin but this will vary depending on the brides age, skin type and desired effect.

Stage 7. Merge the 3 new layers.

Stage 7. Zoom in again to 100% and use the clone tool set to 30% opacity to even out the skin tones or remove any remaining blemishes.

This should result in  perfect blemish free skin for your bride.The skin may also  have a natural looking glow depending on the level of blur/high pass you used