Photoshop CS5 - Skin smoothing - How to smooth a models skin.

In this tutorial I will show you how to achieve that magazine-finish skin every time, in a few simple steps.

Here is the picture I am working with

Step 1 is to crop the image to the correct size, as I've done below.

Step 2: Create a new layer and label it "Skin"

Step 3: Using your EyeDrop tool found in the colour palette, select a colour from the models skin

Once you've done this you'll need to draw on a very crude mask of the particular colour. I KNOW it looks dodgy at this stage, but bear with me. 

THE NEXT STEP:

Is add a Noise filter of about 12 radius, I don't have a screenshot but the filter can be found here. 

Filters > Noise > Add noise

No we need to blur our skin by going to Filter > Blur > Guassian Blur

Blur this from between 20 and 25 pixels.

Once you've done that all you need to do, is to bring the opacity of this layer down to around 20 %

Here's the before and after!!

All I did here was a basic crop, a basic skin smooth, and a few levels and curves tweaks!