3 Uncommon Ways To Clean In Photoshop + Free Frequency Separation Action

in today's episode we'll be covering three uncommon extremely useful ways to clean your photos in Photoshop my name is max bridge I'm a still-life photographer from London the three techniques we'll be learning today are using dust and scratches painting directly onto an adjustment layer and finally using frequency separation now frequency separation you might be aware of in portrait retouching but it's also hugely beneficial for still live photos let's head into Photoshop and I'll show you just what I'm talking about now we're inside Photoshop that's just running through these three tiny quickly each one is good in different ways and for different things as is always the case in Photoshop there's never one tool that works perfectly for everything so the first one is dust and scratches what I want you to do is create a new layer so control-shift-n if you're on a PC or command option shift end if you're on a Mac and then hit ctrl alt shift E or command option shift e to create a stamp visible there so this is on you there you can name it whatever you want but for the moment we just got a filter noise filter and dust and scratches there we go now with the number here don't worry about threshold we're not going to use that in this case for the number here I just want to take it up and - what you see disappears so you see if I have it at 1 down there and then I take this up you'll see these scratches starts disappear the heavy one pick a bit longer and in this instance I'd say probably something around 5 does the job just fine so if we then add a mask on to that liking the little mask option down here and then hit ctrl command I to invert that mask now hit B for the brush tool and then I like to use a relatively low opacity probably around kind of 60-ish oh it's not that low really and then in this instance we're going to use a pretty soft brush and then you can just paint it on wherever those dust you paint it on you see and this just works perfectly it's super easy as you can see unbelievably easy the only places it's not going to work is if you are this one might be okay but next two edges oh yeah there you go you see I think that would have been okay exceeding have to go in that far but you see it just kills the edge it doesn't differentiate between what is dust and what is the edge of something if something's really close the edge of something here then some emphasis should be okay and some you won't it won't work that well on edges here you see it destroy those edges and let's say like these kind of bits again it just kind of kind of caused a bit of a blur not going to work that well but on big open spaces but actually really small space but on big like pieces of metal that sort of thing this technique will work perfectly and it's really quick and really easy however if there is any detail on your surface let's say for instance this image it will not work because it can't differentiate between what is the dust and what is detail you actually want to retain it's just going to get rid of everything so I'll show you quickly through dustman scratches here I mean you can see already it is going to completely ruin this but I'll do it just so you can see and then I paint them get rid of that and that you see it just blurs everything horrible no point okay so that's our first one that dust and scratches now the next one we're going to cover is painting so we'll go back to the original image here now painting you might say how can I clean things up by painting and how can I really paint on a surface that doesn't really make much sense but let's say here so in this area here which dust and scratches would have had difficulty with and which you know you could do with the clone stamp tool but for this demonstration purposes I'm just going to show you by painting so what you do create a new layer create two new layers and on the top one I want you to hit shift and backspace and I want to fill that layer with 50% gray so we do that and then we change the blend mode to soft light and by holding alt or option we clip that to the layer below okay and now just so that we can see what we're doing I want to paint just a little random bit so we can get the noise level correct but there we go we'll paint patch just there but as you can see our image has some noise in it whereas our painted little area does not so it doesn't real but all you have to do is go onto our clips layer and go to filter noise and add noise now this image you know it was shot I believe is Oh 50 and there's barely any noise in it so you don't want to go too far you want to match whatever your images I'd say in this instance probably around 0.85 matches the size of the noise and then what we can do is then blur that so if you go filter blur and Gaussian blur you can take it to a level until you go too far it just gets rid of it I probably say point-three works and i probably lower the opacity to something like 70% so now if we just get rid of that now we can paint wherever we want so long as it's a surface with no texture on it you're not going to be able to paint on say for instance the edge of this watch this brushed metal edge if I try to paint here I mean I guess you could if she went in really really close and then painted in a very very precise way but that's not what we're trying to do here what we want to do is speed up your editing because nobody this is the most boring part of still life photography spending an hour or two hours cleaning your products while it's completely necessary and is a really obvious sign between a professional and amatuer it's not fun so you don't want to be doing it for a long time if I try and paint here it's you know it's not going to look very good it's just nasty no point so get rid of that but if you're up on an area like this which doesn't have any texture then you can easily if you wanted to you could paint this whole area so let's just do that I'll grab a sample of color so you hit ultimate option to sample a color and then I use always use a relatively low so something like 10 if you hit shift and then a number you see this up here changes you can change it to a number that you want so I hit shift and 10 to give me a flow of 10 and then I sample and to start painting and you see you have a dust is just disappearing now this would work with dust and scratches so there's no real need me to do it with paint but I'm just giving a little demonstration now what wouldn't have work with dust and scratches is this area over here that would have just blurred the whole thing so if we wanted to make this perfect I'd lower my opacity even further hit shift and 0-5 to give me a 5 percent opacity and then just sample and start to paint here and now you might say Oh max you're going over the edge ooze it doesn't look very good why are you doing it like that or I will show you in a second the edges buy something at the edge here if you wanted that go really wrong and then do something like that you could add a layer mask so you add a mask tip B for brush tool and an X to invert this down here so we're painting the black turn our opacity up and I'll probably turn my hardness up a little bit as well and then I can just paint that away so you add a mask and if you make any mistakes you can easily remove that so again you know that's not perfect but it's a very quick change which makes this area much much cleaner now painting gets me out of loads of trouble there's not that many examples in this particular image but some areas the conventional tools so I'm talking the clone stamp tool the Healing Brush tool they don't work not added dust and scratches neither does the next technique I'm going to show you and painting is the only thing that works so it's a really really useful technique but just make sure you get this noise level correct if you have it correct then you can paint anywhere and you won't be at it out it will be a bit harder here because this is a really subtle gradient but if I paint here [Music] this is very obvious because of the gradient but you can't tell hell that this shouldn't be there in terms of its noise if i zoom in just kind of like a smudge on the surface but you can see the noise levels are about correct so long as you have that right it will be realistic in your images okay so the next technique I'm going to show you is my favorite by far I absolutely love doing this it's called frequency separation I'm sure you're aware of it in terms of portrait but for still life it's also great I'll just quickly show you something else actually as well so I imagine you're aware of the clone stamp tool and the healing brush I'm not going to go through them now because that's not what this video is about but just very quickly the Spot Healing Brush that's kind of like a and paint it and walk away kind of things you can just paint anywhere painting this little black color and then Photoshop figures out what you actually want to replace with that it's come along leaps and bounds in recent years and as you can see it's really really easy without paint and it works perfectly most of the time it wouldn't work on let's say this area here on an edge I'd be quite surprised that it got that ah see then do a bad job you can see it's kind of it's not done perfectly well with that there it's closer to the kink in it but that's how powerful this tool has become it used to be terrible and now is a lot lot better then moving on from that you have the Healing Brush this is kind of like a a mix almost between the clone stamp and the Healing Brush because you can sample an area so you can sample an area and then it starts to paint you see you can do that now the reason I'm showing you this see it doesn't like edges you see that if I sample here in paint they're too close to that edge it starts to not forget it the reason I'm showing you this is because the technique I'm about to show you is almost like taking the best qualities of the clone stamp and the best qualities of the healing brush and using them to clean so what I do is I use frequency separation I have actions set up here I'm not going to take you through how to set up frequency separation because that to be honest there's tons of videos on it it's boring I always forget it it's image apply image type in a bunch of numbers and it doesn't matter because I just create actions and I'm going to give you those acts anyway so there's a different action for 16-bit or 8-bit the 8-bit has 8-bit next to it and the frequency separation 16-bit has nothing next to it so if we click the 8-bit because that's what I'm currently working on it has little stops to show you what to do as you're going along as you can see here it starts you on your radius so what I advise if you take it down to zero you can see that nothing is really being applied as you move up the radius you'll start to see those little flecks of dust disappear let me just zoom in over here a little bit so you can see a bit better as you take it up to start to see the effects of dust disappear now this is a bit of a balancing act you'll have to figure out what's the correct kind of level to use for each of your photos and but you don't want to go too high because then you can see colors start to merge here and you have trouble doing that area and so it's not quite like portraits where you might be using a higher number I tend to use a slightly lower number so in this instance say we use like a radius of nine I click that there we go it runs you through everything all those boring steps that always forget and then it leaves you a little note at the end which just reminds you of what you have to do some of this is more designed towards portrait retouching you don't necessarily have to use a hard-edge that's up to you but yep it's there anyway in case you forget stuff so on our top player on the high layer which is pretty much the only one we're going to be using for cleaning we take a clone stamp we get the clone stamp tool set to current layer not current and below which is the standard one on current layer and then all we do is just like the healing brush we sample an area and we paint and it doesn't matter whether we sample a bright area and paint in a dark area or a dark area and paint in a light area all it's doing is it's taking the texture so within this instance a piece of smooth metal there is no texture so I can highlight in the right I can select the right area and paint except for getting image I can select the right area and paint in a dark area and it doesn't matter because there's no texture there so see it's absolutely perfect and now you might be thinking well max here that's fine but so was using the Healing Brush so why would I do this FairPoint let me show you exactly why you do this so on this image let's run the same action again but though and that select I should really be zoomed in for this but our kale assuming there we go thing there we go sounds even more precise so I don't want to get rid of a lot of the texture I want to retain a lot of this detail in the background I'll show you what that is I'm going to be around four or five pixels there we go run-through add a little guide perfect so this image is this wooden table and I really wanted to see that wooden table as the highlights behind this bottle I didn't want it to be some kind of fake highlight where you just have a piece of paper behind it and then you can't really see a table so there we go now if I paint on this layer if I use the clone stamp tool rather on current layer and I select let's say I select this light bit here and I paint over this dark area of wood you see how it's not actually taking away the dark part of that wood that's still there you know I can be really lazy with it that's what I love about this technique I hate cleaning and I love the fact that I can be very lazy you see here that texture is all mostly the same but what I don't want is I really don't want those tones to be affected because I want it to still look like the table behind it so you see I'm being really lazy I'm sampling an area up here which I wouldn't usually do and I paint all over here and that dark tone is not really being affected it is a little bit but nowhere near as much as if I was to use the clone stamp tool obviously all the time times all the healing brush tool so you see how lazy I can be this is a great thing about this you can be so so lazy you know ideally you don't want to be I would still if I was actually doing this for real I would be very careful with who I'm picking like I am now but you don't have to be which is the great thing because if you make a mistake and you know I move really quickly when I'm cleaning something when I'm editing I don't want to be sat there for hours and hours and hours so I move very very quickly around and make all of my edits very quickly and anything that can help me do that in a smoother more efficient more attractive way I love and that's all this does so let's to show you that toggle that on and off for a second you see it barely affected the tones underneath now let me show you the difference if I create a new layer ctrl alt shift n command option shift and on a Mac and I try the Healing Brush let me show you that one so we get the Healing Brush and we saw and pull here and I try and paint there you see it takes away that color if we do the same thing you know I'm just as lazy it completely takes away the dark color behind it you have to be so much more precise you have to actually sample the dark if you don't want to lose that dark color you have to sample it you have to tell Photoshop this is what I want you to sample I don't want you to sample everything else but if you're if you select the wrong part if I select this highlight here and paint over there it paints the highlight over there frequency separation does not do that and that is what is really really great about it the ability to be lazy which is exactly what I love thanks for watching guys I hope you found this episode useful and then you can implement some of what you've learned in your future edits if you got any questions chuckling the comments below and don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss anything in the future alright I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Square Mountain

Views: 18,564

Keywords: Still life photography, product photography, dust and scratches, frequency separation, paint, remove dust, photoshop tutorial, retouching tutorial, frequency separation action, frequency separation tutorial

Id: YeTIcm4vQIw

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 11 2017