How can I make a skin-tone mask for skin smoothing in Photoshop?

Question

I’m using a skin-smoothing workflow with high pass, surface blur, invert, and Linear Light blending. Normally I add a black layer mask and paint in the effect manually with a white brush.

Is there a way to automatically create a mask based on skin tones instead? I tried using the High Pass filter to make a mask, but it doesn’t seem to work. What’s the proper way to generate a skin-tone mask in Photoshop for this kind of retouching?

user34468 · Accepted Answer

The high pass filter is not something that can generate a mask of the skin tones within an image, hence why you wouldn't see much success trying to use it for this purpose.

One possible solution would be to use PhotoShops Select → Color Range... option.

I think in CS6 onwards there's an option in the Select drop-down box of "Skin Tones"

Screen shot of Color Range Dialogue in PhotoShop

This can be used to generate a selection of the skin tones, then you could use that selection as the mask for your skin soften effect.

In my example image it did a reasonable job of selecting skin tones:

enter image description here

The mask would probably still require cleaning up a bit by hand, as the Color Range function is naturally going to pick up some areas of similar colour that are not actually skin.

How can I make a skin-tone mask for skin smoothing in Photoshop?

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