Kyle Pero on Mar 25th 2008 with 140 comments
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In this tutorial, I will show you how to repair some image noise from a low-quality
shot, and I will show you an extremely quick and easy way to smooth out a person’s
face. The woman in this shot is not a model, and she has a lot of character so we don’t
want to overdo it with the smoothing. We will make it look real and natural.

Step 1
If you look at the blue channel, you will notice that it doesn’t look so good. There are
a lot of JPG artifacts that you don’t really see when looking at the RGB composite,
but it’s good to fix it for a variety of reasons. Importantly, it will reduce the color
noise in the image and give us more flexibility when making corrections later down
the line.
Duplicate the Background layer. On the new layer go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian
Blur. Enter 10 for the radius. Hit OK. Set the layer’s blending mode to color. Double-
click on the layer to the right of the name to open the blending options. Under
Advanced Blending, uncheck the R and the G. This makes the layer only affect the
blue channel no matter what we do to it. Now go back and check out the blue channel.
Looks better.

Step 2
Now I will use Curves to balance the color in the image. I suggest using Curves over
Levels for everything. Curves just gives you much more control.
Download my curve preset to your hard drive.
Create a new Curves Adjustment layer at the top of the layers palette, then click the
little button to the right of the Preset control, and select Load Preset