Hi! This is Mama Shan with another video tutorial on glamour retouching. I got a few emails from some folks wanting to know if my powder action worked on different skin tones and colors. And so I am going to use this example to answer your question which is an authentic yes of course it does. And show you some other techniques and insights into using masks to use in your work flow for retouching.

So let us get started here. Here is an image and I am going to show you the before and the after. What I am going to focus on is the second action that I also include in my powder action, the powder with sharpen. We are going to run that and I am going to show you how you can use that in conjunction with the powder action to bring out even more skin detail and give you a more realistic look on the skin tones.

So let us get started here. I am going to minimize this and open up the original one, okay. And let me bring my layers pallet over here so we can see what is going on and then, I am going to get my actions pallet and bring this down over here. And expand the Mama’s Powder V3 and we skip the first state of course, that is just the copyright and instructions and if you have watched the tutorials, I think you have to handle on the instructions. And we are not going to do just powder. We are going to apply powder with ager sharpener. And I am going to click Play, and of course we are going to get some dialogue boxes here which I showed you in the last tutorial how to shut off. I am going to click continue here and when this comes up, I am going to dial this in so that I can see some sparkly areas in the eyes of course.

Now this one has gone up a little bit greater than three. Again as I said, this is image dependent. So the amount that you dial in here is according to your image. You do not want it to be glowy like this but you do want to see some fine lines appear so that the sharpening effect will give you some results. So I have gone up to a 7.5 on this particular image here and I am going to click OK. And then, it is telling you here to collapse the ager sharpener group set. Click on the mask thumbnails of the group to paint with white to reveal powder or sharpening respectively, and to uncheck the stop on the actions pallet to hide it in the future.

So when I click continue basically, the layers pallet is set up. And the only way I could get this to work for Photoshop 7 in CS, was with this anomaly where it would not collapse the set and it is easy enough to fix and it has just come up here and click this triangle and shut like that. And this is going to protect your sharpening layer. That is why I like to put things in what is now called layer groups because then you do not make that mistake of accidentally clicking on the layer rather than a mass that you have it.

So if you protect that inside of a set, it is going to work. So these are named, this is your sharpening layer and this is your powder layer. And I am calling them layers, their groups. Anyhow, this is how it is setup by default. Nothing is showing. So as if the image did not change at all which it has not at this point. Now if you want an overall sharpening, which I do in this case. I am just going to flip this ager sharpener mask to reveal all the sharpening and I am going to do that simply by pressing a keyboard shortcut to invert it. It is black right now. I want to invert it to its compliment or opposite and that is a Ctrl+I on a PC or Command I on a Macintosh.

And so, if you click that, that will quickly invert the mask and all of you should memorize at least that command because we use it so often or I do anyway in my workflow for working with mask. And you can see immediately how that sharpened everything up. I am going to turn it on and turn it off.

And then, I am going to come down here to the Mama’s powder group and click on that thumbnail and again, we want that to come in here and scroll down and find the airbrush soft round 200 to start out. We will just click on that state, click on your title bar to collapse the brush picker there.

And then, here is