My mom took this photo of her friend. I was playing around with it in PS and was wondering if there's a way to do something in PS with her skin tone to make it look less blotchy.
A good way to do this is with the original image - when you convert to B&W use the red channel, or more of the red channel than you've used. This will give a smoother look as the blue channel often has all the blotchyness and skin detail in it.
Another take on making the most of what you've got...
- Adjust the curves (bring in white point, slight contrast increase)
- Optional: apply shadow/highlight tool (CS only) or dodge hair to bring up detail
- Duplicate the layer
- On the top layer, gaussian blur, 4 px
- Adjust opacity of top layer to 40%
- Add a layer mask to the top layer
- On the layer mask, paint with a black, soft brush over the eyes, hair and other areas where more detail is desired.
- When satisfied, save as jpg.
Take this with a grain of salt because I don't use ps. It looks like you have quite a bit of artifacting in the picture. Is the original a jpeg? And did you save that jpeg several times while you were editing? The artifacts themselves are a major contributor to the lumpiness of the picture, imo. If you work with tiff or psd(native ps file?), you shouldn't have a problem with this issue.
As far as smoothing skin. Duplicate the layer, add a gausian blur to your satisfaction and erase the eyes on that layer. Basically what kirbic said but I don't use masks very often.
