The next step is identical in mechanics to using a dodge/burn layer. Small brush, low opacity, painting incremental strokes of white into the mask, letting the curve begin to work on the red skin. Here is the mask that evolved, and the result it produced. You can see from the brush strokes that I used a wide variety of sizes and opacity settings (the result of keeping my pen in pressure sensitive mode).

The beauty of using a curve like this is that, rather than painting in a single color in color mode, you are applying a full color range. Even though I only entered values from a single sample in each region, the curves distribute the shift over the entire spectrum. Not only do all the regions lighten and shift color, but by painting more white into darker or redder regions those tones can easily be brought into balance with the surrounding pixels.

Acne and freckles respond quite well to this approach. It's also good for gross color shifts, such as lightening shadows. It avoids the saturation problems of dodging away at the shadow and finding out that it's basically a neutral color.

...AND THE KITCHEN SINK
When to use which technique? Seldom does a job allow you to separate out each step. There is a lot of overlap, areas where you could dodge a shadow or just as easily hit it with the healing brush. Then there are times when you're not sure if anything would be effective.

Image (A) shows a really harsh shadow. It needs to be softened, lightened, smoothed and the purple cast needs to be pulled more towards brown. This is a job that will take everything we can throw at it, including the kitchen sink. (Note: the clearly defined area also makes this a perfect candidate for the LAB modification mentioned in the previous section).

I first sampled a shadow that was a more pleasing color and used that as my match values for a curve modification. The mask that I painted is at (B) and the result at (C).

This is an improvement, certainly more compatible with the healing brush, which is what I hit it with next (D). I wasn't trying to wrap things up with this step, so I didn't worry much about being sloppy. I mostly wanted to smooth out the fine hairs, and blend the patch more with the adjacent skin.

Now it's time to dodge and burn. I sampled a highlight and shadow from the rest of the face. (E) shows the hard light layer with my dodge/burn strokes and (F) the result. Still irregular, but the overall tones are much more balanced than in (D). And the areas are small enough that a final hit with the healing brush gets us to (G), and the beginnings of a real patch of skin.

This example isn't perfect, and I'm not sure I'd have done everything this way in a full retouch of the face. But it shows that none of these techniques are isolated. And they're all focused on the same result: removing any anomaly that stands out from otherwise smooth, flawless skin. All the while retaining the illusion that this really is normal skin; skin with texture and pores and maybe even a stray line or two. It's just real skin that's infinitely more beautiful than yours.

In Part 2, we'll see these techniques in the context of an actual job, taking this lady from here . . .

to here.

And with this image, we will confront head-on an issue raised in a dGrin thread: "How far should we go?" In this case, the answer is "At least back to 1986", because we'll peel about twenty years away from his face.

Discuss these techniques on Dgrin in this thread.