I've seen this come up in this forum before, but i don't quite understand completely how it works. If i want to do skin retouching and smoothing and all that jazz in say just the red channel...can anyone give me the process for this?? I've been copying the channel that I want into a new layer...doing my editing, but then I'm not sure what to do.

Any help on this process??
thanks a bunch, michael

Well I am not quite sure what you are after but to work on a specific channel you open the channels palette and select the channel you want to work on and then work on it like using levels or blur or whatever.

Welcome to RetouchPRO!
Typically when you want to do smoothing, cloning, sharpening, blurring, on an image, you typically want to affect the entire image. That usually means working on all channels simultaneously (the composite image). It is possibel to work on a channel at a time but you must remember that any changes to the pixel levels in that channel will affect the color of the entire image because every color in the image is made up of the values of the same pixel in all three channels. Perhaps if you care to post an example of what you are try to accomplish with a sample image, you will get the specific technique you are looking for.
Regards,
Murray

ok maybe i was just getting confused...
This link is what got me started thinking about this. (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?p=124250#post124250)
Snook talks about tweaking the red channel, but for some reason i thought he was doing his skin retouching in the red channel. But I'm guessing he did his retouching on all channels then went and tweaked the red channel's curves and levels and whatnot.

Sorry bout the confusion...

Love this forum...keeps me thinking :)