Skin is one of the hardest parts of the body to fix or correct. Sometimes you can go too far and the skin looks fake. Or you leave it alone and you see the aging of the picture, scratches stains or.
When cleaning up skin you do have to be careful not to change the person's looks completly.
Below there is a couple of links to help you.
How to Make a Professional Human Face Retouch in Photoshop
http://www.ourtuts.com/how-to-make-a-professional-human-face-retouch-in-photoshop/
How to Change Skin Tone in Photoshop
http://psd.tu-torial.com/photoshop-tutorials/how-to-change-skin-tone-in-photoshop/
If you try either link, I would love to see the original and the edited picture.
Let us know how it worked for you.
I tend to go as easy on skin-edits as I can, as I'm usually going for a more realistic, rather than glamour, look (aaand "plastic" poreless skin drives me crazy lol) - using clone stamp and spot healing brushes mostly. My sister and her friends are allllways sending me bad cell phone pictures that they'd like cleaned up for posting online! (I recently had to remove some creepy guy standing behind them, lol.) I came across this tutorial recently, and it touched on a lot of the things I normally do, as well as a few new tricks:
Realistic Portrait Retouching With Photoshop
http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/photo-effects-tutorials/realistic-portrait-retouching/
My other favorite trick is on eyes, I don't recall where I found it, but the gist of it is:
1) Select the area around the eyes (it can be pretty rough), I usually make this a new layer. 2) Use one of the Sharpen filters. 3) Erase the skin areas, leaving just the eye and lashes. 4) Play with some combination of dodge/burn tools, or levels, or whatever floats your boat, to whiten the whites of the eyes and darken the contrast of the lashes. 5) Grab the saturate tool and up the color level of the eyes. (If needed, I sometimes color over the iris area on a new layer with my best guess at the "correct" eye color, then use the Color or Hue blending mode.)
On this one, I wanted a little more "pop" than usual since it was for my shop, but, I like my freckles, darnit.
Most of this was just lighting/color tweaks, but I went in and lightened the dark areas around my eyes, removed some acne, sharpened the eye, dodged the highlights pretty much everywhere:
Thanks Melissa,
A nice tutorial, it really explains how to fix facial skin without changing the subjects looks. I have seen too many that go to far and the face just does not appear natural.
It makes sense to do all of the adjustments on one layer and than merge the first layer with the edited layer. It brings life to the subject.
Melissa, thanks so much for the link... I used to be very good at retouching pictures and faces especially but then I went several years without using the skills and now I find that I've pretty much forgotten them all, so this will help tremendously, so thank you.
I found a skin effect where you can download the Photoshop action.
Soften skin effect
http://www.turningturnip.co.uk/photoshop/photoshop-actions/soften-skin-actions.php
If you try the effect I would love to hear how it worked for you.