Reduce Beard Stubble In Photoshop

Reducing 5 O'Clock Shadow And Beard Stubble In Photoshop

Learn Photoshop with Photo Editing Tutorials at Photoshop Essentials.com

Written by Steve Patterson, Photoshop Essentials.com

In this Photoshop photo editing tutorial, we're going to learn how to reduce the appearance of 5 o'clock shadow and beard stubble in a photo. Of course, if the photo is of a guy out in the rugged outdoors and he's dressed like he's off to wrestle with a mountain lion, you may not want to remove the stubble. But in other types of photos, it may just make him look like he could use a rest, or maybe he's been resting a little too much, in which case you'll want to remove it, or at least reduce it. We're going to see how to do that here.

Here's the image I'll be using for this tutorial:

The original image

And here's how he'll look when we're done:

The final result

Let's get started.

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Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer

The first thing I always do is duplicate my Background layer so that I don't run the risk of losing my original image information. Right now all I have in my Layers palette is my Background layer:

Photoshop's Layers palette
Photoshop's Layers palette showing the Background layer.

I'm going to quickly duplicate the Background layer using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac), and now I have two layers - the original Background layer on the bottom and the copy above it:

Photoshop's Layers palette now showing the copy of the Background layer as well.
Press "Ctrl+J" (Win) / "Command+J" (Mac) to duplicate the Background layer.

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