Guide to Frequency Separation in Photoshop

hi guys it's me Martina happy to be back quickly after our live stream and I had an idea I got an idea on the live stream some of you asked me about frequency separation and I believe it might be quite messy in the live stream so I wanted to create separate lesson right now about frequency separation to show you what should you avoid why frequency separation might be harming for your image why sometimes you should avoid this and if you don't want to avoid how to work with frequency separation there's a lot of tutorials on youtube and forget them because they are wrong they teach you bad habits they show you how to distract is the image you want to work non-destructively so i will try to show you as much as I can how to work without harming your image for those who don't know frequency separation is the process when we split the image for two different layers many people say we split for color and texture it's not necessarily true because we not split for color and texture because on that I said texture there's still some color existing so it's not 100% true but we can say like this we split for color and texture just to remember this easily so what we need to do we need to duplicate our background layer and one layer I'm going to call low as a low frequency another layer I'm going to call as a high frequency so let's start with the low layer as I said it will be so cold colors so I need to blur out the details of the image I don't want to see all of the small hair and this mode as spot so I'm going to blow this to the level it will sort of disappear so I'm going to filter blur and Gaussian rule remember that the value will be always different depends on the imagery work my image has quite big size so the radius will be somewhere between the 15 or 20 as it's really high this case I would go with 18 maybe so I blurt out some of the details I don't but if you have smaller size of the image of course it will be maybe around 8 around 10 et cetera so I'm hitting okay and my low layer is sorted so I don't see the details and now I'm going into high layer and I will want to work with the details to work with high layer I'm going to image and then apply image and it depends on the image you work with I work with the 16-bit image which is always better if you work with raw export this into a tiff file you will have 16-bit emitted has more information so for the layer I want to set low because it's somehow getting the information from the low layer to exclude them in the high layer and the blending for 16-bit image always will be ad scale to offset 0 and then this invert box selected if you work with 8-bit image you would go with subtract scale 1.8 and this would be not selected okay I'm working on 16-bit so I will have these values and as many people said that top layer is the texture and lower layers colors and how to prove it's not necessarily the true as you can see looking at this layer we can actually distinguish some color I can see some color on her lips on her nose and on the eyes so this is the first proof that actually the common saying that we split for color and texture it's just a lie it's not true but here it doesn't matter very much because it's all about the final results so this high layer we need to change it all let me find linear light and now I'm going to put this into the group and I'm going to call the group F as as frequency separation to put this into the group I'm just selecting both using command and then I'm pressing command or ctrl + G and then it's landing into the group okay you can see when I'm D selecting and selecting the layer the colors are exactly the same and the reason why because we split this image into two separate layers and the two separate layers contains exactly the same information as our background layer and he will be all of the fun how to work with how to work with frequency separation in non-destructive way first of all you want to avoid working on the low frequency and more likely all of the job you will do in high frequency layer so the top you're going to do you're going to work with clone stamp and to remove all of the spots you better work with hard-headed brush and exactly the same as I would work on empty layer out work change you into current layer because you work on the current layer and all of the spots I need to remove I'm just removing using hard-headed Cranston so give me two seconds for doing this remember that the frequency separation then we soak all of the process and after that you have to do - and very so that's how I work hard edged brush and I'm removing a despots and the second step in this process would be criticized by many but I don't care about many people opinions and I do what works for me and you should do the same don't listen when someone say you because I know retouchers who use frequency separation I know who doesn't use I personally don't use frequency separation in my workflow but I know how to use I used to use this let someone tell you or it just do horrible work you cannot use frequency separation from countries and then the final results are important and this is just because thinking they stole over all of the minds I know even professional researchers talking the same this way and it is not very nice way of saying the community had to be quite childish frequency separation is super powerful for sorting out the fur as here you don't have to really pay much attention to what you do you just paint over the hair and the result will be great and it's much easier to do this and working on the empty layer as you can see it would be better for me to do this with soft edged brush on the hair so if you work with the hair just use synthetic brush I just don't want to spend too much time on this lesson don't want to make you bored so okay let me do some more cleaning and then what's powerful about this we can really sort out nicely the hair so with the empty layer over here for example I would have to what I would have to do I would have to use empty layer soft edit and constant and just even out the skin texture over here but as you can see with frequency separation it's going quite easily so the thing I mentioned that I would be criticized by many is I like to change the harnessing the soft one and when I have very rough skin texture this image doesn't have and the rough skin texture I don't have image which could represent this but look we have some of this army hair over here let go of this soft edge brush and like really softly try to even this out and yet you could say the same as many would say all you cannot do this because you destroy the natural skin texture but my answer is well I need to do this a little bit because this err are too much I see them too much I don't want to see them that much that's what I'm doing this if you don't want to have that harsh skin texture that that's the reason why you can use this technique of course I would have to go over here article to remove this hell and as you can see that put nicely email this out software toothbrush so this is the the one way I like frequency separation is this when I really need to even out the skin texture it happens and I can guarantee you I have the images that I use this and no one would say I used a frequency separation because there's many other things you do you can recover texture you are the noise at the end all of these things are leading to being the lack of texture not visible okay as you can see over here out even out this her a little so it's super powerful and the second option that I don't like and I think you should avoid this as much as you can is working on the low frequency but I will show you if you have to I know like not all of you is professional retouchers you don't need to work two hours but some of these photographers and just want to save some time and get fairly good results so let's go into low layer if you have to work with this or duplicate low layer and this duplicated I press ctrl and hit on this and I will convert this to smart object I'm converting this to smart object because thanks to this I will have full control on the blur adjustments I'm going to applying to this layer so the blur will be too strong I can change this any time so once I have this smart object and with the filter blur and Gaussian blur and let me zoom this into the face what I want to achieve with Gaussian blur the perfect angle will be when I will be looking at the face and I will see the tones evened out a little bit but with some control like I'm going up a little bit you see the tones are given out the smooth amount but I don't want to go over here because it's absolutely blown out so I would go around 30 which is quite soft a little just some smooth heat okay and of course I don't want this all layer looked like this so what I do I hit a small icon on the bottom to create layer mask and remember layer mask everything what's white is visible if you invert this into black for example is in command or control and I it becomes invisible white visible black invisible so we want to bring visibility just on the certain areas for this we will be using just a brush regular brush flarm it to put at 100 and we will be painting on this layer mask with white color just in the areas that we want to smooth out where we want to smooth out the tongue so here I had some irregular items I would go of course near here the tones are quite irregular which I don't like so I would paint with the white color just around this areas remember to be really careful not to go too close edges because you going to blown out the shadows which going to destroy perspective of the image you don't want to destroy the perspective you want the image to have still 3d perspective you don't want to flatten this so ya short work before after we have to really zoom in I will show you this before after that's how you should work with frequency separation I believe I showed you most effective way as quick as I could possible what the right way of working with frequency separation what you should be aware of why you should be careful to not ruin your image thank you for watching I hope I will be coming soon with new tutorials and new live streams probably take me a while because I'm grateful holiday on Friday and so I'll see you soon after that let me know why do you think about this tutorial and stay in touch thank you

Channel: Photoshop Retouching

Views: 192,818

Keywords: frequency separation, photoshop skin retouching, photoshop, adobe photoshop, fs photoshop, photoshop course, best photoshop, photoshop retouching

Id: -Vp1VuR4LyY

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2017