Simple retouching: Smooth skin feature

One effective retouching feature in Elements is the Smooth Skin feature (no guesses for what this does). It's one of those (quite) complex processes that have been simplified by the Adobe software designers to the point where it's dead easy to use—and yet still produces great results.

Here's how easy it is to add a significant improvement to your portraits. Open an image, apply the feature (Enhance>Smooth Skin), and make an adjustment in the (smallish) window that appears onscreen (see inset panel above). Smooth Skin works very well, provided that the artificial intelligence driving this feature can first identify a face in the picture. It doesn't work so well for profiles or shots where the subject isn't looking more or less directly at the camera. It does work, however, with pictures that feature multiple faces. The blue circle is the "active" face—in photos with...