Frequency Separation Also Known As Skin Retouching
So who's up for learning something new in editing today ? This is my first tutorial video ever!! and yeah I guess it came out pretty well most of it at least you'll notice a bit of glitch but thats only because I fast forwarded the boring parts of the tutorial, Any how let's get to it.
What is Frequency Separation ? Well it basically means is that we take the textures from an image and keep them in one layer and the tones, colours, shadows, etc of the image are separated in another layer. So when your retouching your image you can either work on the textures or work on the stuff underneath your textures.
It's a simple and efficient method to get rid of things like blotchiness, skin redness etc on the layer underneath the textures layer and use the textures layer to get rid of fines lines, wrinkles and things like that.
In the video I've used one of my test shots from an old shoot of mine with Shama to demonstrate Frequency Separation
Given below are the step by step guide of what's show in the video above which includes Keyboard Shortcuts for specific tools used in this precess.
- The first thing your going to do is load your image into Adobe Photoshop.
- Next you'll need to create 2 more copies of the background layer and you can do that by hitting
Command + J
on MAC OrCTRL + J
on Windows.
- Now for your reference i've labeled one layer as
Details
and the other asBlur
.
- Now make the
Details
layer invisible and select youBlur
layer. To this Blur layer you'll will now apply aGaussian Blur
.
- You'll need to apply just enough blur to get rid of whatever you want to keep which is in our case the skin textures. So you'll need to make sure to give it just the right amount of blur so that the skin textures aren't visible.
- Now that you've applied a
Gaussian Blur
on theBlur
layer you can make theDetails
layer visible again and we will apply a filter to this layer that takes the information out from this layer and subtract out the information on theBlur
layer and leave out the difference.
- To do the make sure the
Details
layer is selected then go toImage
option on the top and selectApply Image
from the drop down menu.
- Next in Layers option you'll need to select the
Blur
layer and in the Blending option you'll need to selectSubtract
. Scale and Offset will be 2 and 128 by default.
- What you get now is the difference of both the layers and to add the texture back you'll need to change the Blending mode to
Linear Light
- Well now this is where the actual work happens, Select the
Blur
layer and the then select your Lasso Tool by clickingL
It remains same for MAC as well as WINDOWS.
- Make a selection on an area of the skin so as to remove any blotchiness, skin redness etc and on the top you'll see something called Feather you'll set this to around let say 25 to give a nice feathered edge to your selection (I've forgotten to set my feather option so this isn't exactly shown in the video)
- Now to this selection you will apply a Gaussian Blur and this time of a select a higher value so as to make the blotchiness, skin redness etc on the skin disappear.
- You'll need to repeat the last 2 steps all over the skin to make the blotchiness, skin redness etc on the skin disappear. (This repetition has been fast forwarded in the video)
- To see the changes you've make select the
Details
andBlur
layer and Group them together by clicking onCommand + G
on MAC OrCTRL + G
on Windows. Toggle the Group on and off to notice the final changes made.
- Now even hough we smoothened out her skin you can notice that all of her skin textures are still intact which is freaking amazing.
- So lets say you want to take care of the texture on the skin like getting rid of fine lines, wrinkles and things like that.
- Select the
Details
layer and then select the Spot Healing Tool by clickingJ
It remains same for MAC as well as WINDOWS
- Now just paint over the fine lines, wrinkles etc to get rid of them (This repetition has been fast forwarded in the video)
Well that's pretty much it not complicated at all LOL dont go downvoting my post I have a terrible sense of humour SIGH
Also if you guys end up following through and decide to use this technique and maybe decide to post it on HIVE please do tag me as well .
Have an amazing day folk's!!
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Fantastic tutorial! I had not heard of the frequency separation before. I have always done it in other ways, but the way you show makes more sense. I like that you included the shortcuts, which I have memorized by heart (not everyone does) because I’ve been using Photoshop for 10+ years, my goodness I can’t believe that.
Glad to see you are also team Apple!