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INTRO: When it comes to removing blemishes, acne, or any other skin imperfections, the goal is to maintain as much as possible of the original skin texture so the retouch doesn’t look pasty and obvious. Here’s a technique that works nicely [excerpted from Scott’s recently published Elements book, The Photoshop Elements 3 Book for Digital Photographers]:

STEP ONE: Press L to switch to the Lasso tool. Find a clean area (no blemishes, spots, etc.) near the blemish that you want to remove. In this clean area, use the Lasso tool to make a selection that’s slightly larger than the blemish. (Note: If you make a mistake and need to add to your selection, press-and-hold the Shift key while selecting with the Lasso tool; if you need to remove parts of your selection, press-and-hold the Alt key.)

STEP TWO: Once your selection is in place, go under the Select menu and choose Feather. In the Feather Selection dialog that appears, enter 2 pixels as your Feather Radius and click OK. Feathering blurs the edges of the selected area, which will help hide the traces of our retouch. Feathering (softening) the edges of a selection is a very important part of facial retouching, and you’ll do this quite a bit to “hide your tracks,” so to speak.

STEP THREE: Now that you’ve softened the edges of the selection, press-and-hold Alt-Control, and you’ll see your cursor change into two arrowheads: a white one with a black one overlapping it. This tells you that you’re about to copy the selected area. Click within your selection and drag this clean skin area over the blemish to completely cover it.

STEP FOUR: When the clean area covers the blemish, release the keys (and the mouse button, of course) to drop this selected area down onto your photo. Now, press Control-D to deselect. The blemish is gone. Best of all, because you dragged skin over from a nearby area, the full skin texture is perfectly intact, making your repair nearly impossible to detect.