Frequency Separation Photoshop CC 20 tutorial

hey guys how's it going in this video I'm gonna show you how I use frequency separation the idea for this video was put forward by Liam so thank you very much anybody that is not following me on instagram make do that now my instagram handle is showing somewhere around there and as promised go and check out Liam's behance profile the cue card will be popping up they're gone check the amount thank you very much okay so frequency separation is a technique I don't even know why I'm using that frequency separation is a technique in which we separate the color information from the texture information on an image file the majority of the time it is used in beauty retouching and fashion images the process itself isn't particularly difficult once you get the hang of it if for any reason you still feel at a loose end at the end of this video you don't quite know how to do it yourself you will find a link to a download of a Photoshop action I've created for you guys so all you have to do is go follow that link download the action and literally once you download it double click it and it will install itself into Photoshop you will find it as the Fed photography frequency separation in your actions but okay so let's move into Photoshop okay so I have my image open the first step we need to do is to duplicate this layer twice so I'm gonna use come out ctrl or command J we're gonna do that twice we're gonna double click the text rename this as low freq low frequency if my spelling is wrong I apologize and then we're going to rename the top one as high frequency second thing we're gonna do is turn off the high frequency layer select the low frequency layer go to filter blur and Gaussian blur now this is already set for me from where the previous time I did it to create the action the radius that you will select depends on the image that you have in front of you obviously if there's less of your subject visible less skin texture visible it will take a smaller radius to blur that out if left over away from the camera for example if however your subject is a lot closer to the camera a lot a lot like the image we're working on right now then you would require a slightly higher radius as you can see on the screen the higher our go the more the skin starts to blur now I can go to 9 and there's still a little bit of texture showing up so I'm probably gonna go 11 that looks ok so we're gonna click OK now we're gonna turn the high frequency layer back on make sure that it's selected and we're gonna go image and apply image mine's already set by default but there are two different ways of doing this and this will depend on the bit rate of your image or the bit depth sorry of your image if you can see the top left of my screen here I have a 16 that means my bit depth is 16 bits so too if you have a I will show you an example of how to set this up for an 8 bit image after we complete this so the first thing we're gonna do is we are going to select the low frequency layer we then select invert we'll change the blending mode to add and scale will be set to and ensure that offset is set to zero once you have all of that done you can then click OK once you've done that you can change your blending mode from normal to linear light now if we group the low frequency and high frequency together by holding down shift and selecting the low frequency and then pressing ctrl or command G we have our group containing our high frequency and low frequency layers now if I turn them on and off you will notice that the image doesn't change this is because we haven't made any changes to the image we just separated the color information from that of the texture so that means if we turn it on we are seeing the exact same image as we started with now very quickly all I'm gonna do is just rename the group by double clicking on the text and I will call that frequency separation so now I'm going to show you how to do it if it's an 8-bit image okay so the process for an 8-bit image is exactly the same so we'll do all of the steps that we did up until turning high frequency back on and selecting it we go over to image apply image and here what we do is ensure that we have low frequency selected we won't need invert switched on we're gonna go to subtract and here we change the scale to two and the offset to 128 we select okay and we change our blending mode to linear light once we've done that we hold down shift and we press command G to group rename our group and we are done so you'll see if I turn that on enough we have absolutely no difference between the two now if we go to retouching and how we go about blending the skin so we select the low-frequency layer because that's where our color information is and what we're actually trying to do is smooth the transition of colors from one to another so these areas here where we have a transition from one color to another are the areas we're going to work with there are several ways of doing this you could use the paintbrush tool and use samples of different colors you can use a mixer brush and I think there's a couple of other ways that I've seen in various tutorials I like using a lasso tool because it's really quick and easy and we can be a little bit rougher with it and select larger areas so I've selected the lassoo tour now what we need to do is we need to select an area where we have a transition so I what I might do is select this area around here so I'm just drawing a circle around it the shape doesn't matter obviously you would want to avoid things like eyelashes and hair you don't particularly want to blend those two colors together now if I hit Q I get a quick mask yours may look slightly different to mine as I have already set the feather for my image and the amount of feather will depend again on the image that you are retouching turning the quick mask off I will make a new selection turn a quick mask back on I could probably get away with that 20 for boy if you want a nice soft transition in your selection you can see here how it blends so if I come out that again I probably want I was quite happy with stick with 30 I'll just show you see you can see a really nice soft transition from one to another so we'll come out quick mask and then we can start retouching the color of the skin so to zoom in and out I apologize to zoom in and out I've been using ctrl or command plus or minus or if you want to zoom in to 100% you can press command or control and the number one you will zoom in to 100% if you want to zoom back out you press command or control 0 so now I have this selection here I want to blend these two colors so I'm going to go filter I'm gonna go back to blur Gaussian blur I'm just gonna play around with the slider with the effect ok so we can also do here now some of you might be wondering if I would remove the moles I used to are used to completely obliterate and take out any imperfections whatsoever now I've kind of realized that less is often more and I like to keep elements that are features of the face so for Helen you know these moles are part of her appearance I wouldn't want to offend Helen by removing them suggesting that they were unsightly because they're not so I would leave them that if however Helen had a few pimples on a forehead of a big red spot that was gonna disappear over the next couple of days then I would retouch that so I think my new ethos tends to be remove the things that are going to remove themselves leave the things that will always be so if I just speed through some of these selections anyone that is familiar with the channel will recognize Helen as the model from the finding inspiration series and the behind the scenes that I recently published if you haven't seen that I recommend that you go and check that out if you haven't subscribed to the channel it would be absolutely fantastic if you would so hit that little red button at the bottom of the video and whilst your mouse is down there why not hit the thumbs up icon as well because that would really be doing me a massive favour okay so if you turn that on and off you can now see the effect of the smoothing on the skin okay so again you can see the effect of the smoothness of the transitions in color so now we want to take out any blemishes and I have to say Helen skin is actually pretty good there's maybe some bits of foundation visible that I might remove don't let's say I would let's take this out because the it looks a little bit like a pimple I would leave this model here this mole this one here so to show you how to retouch skin make sure that you have your high-frequency layer selected and then I would use the stamp tool so the keyboard shortcut for the sample is s there you go there's the tool what we need to make sure that we have is that we have the sample layer selected to current layer if we don't it will pick up the colors and stick them over the top of the the neutral grade that we use in in the high-frequency layer and apply it with a linear light and it would look awful so we have to make sure that it's selected on the current layer and then we can hold down alt to sample and just paint away any blemishes there we go let's take that away so as you can see having skin is actually pretty good and doesn't really require a lot of work okay that's if I just to give you an example let's remove Helens mark just to show you the effect and then I can I can undo it so we sample from a skin texture that's pretty close we can just paint away and there you go so you can see how we can very quickly remove any blemishes this is frequency separations so it's actually really quite simple once you understand the little processes again if you don't get it I have included a link in the video description and that will be popping up above as well for you to go and download when you are doing this for yourselves obviously take and you know a lot more time and care in the retouching than I have done in this video I hope you've enjoyed it thank you very much for joining me and let me know what kind of content you would like to see in the future because I will definitely take it on board and you may see your video idea translated into the You Tube channel thanks for watching guys take

Channel: Fez Photography

Views: 15,507

Keywords: Adobe, Photoshop, 2020, Frequency Separation, Portrait, retouching, retouch, advanced technique, High quality, Easy, Adobe CC, creative cloud, Tutorial

Id: mImdbqEwsZg

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 14 2020