High-End Skin Retouching WITHOUT PHOTOSHOP!

[Music] hey team today i'm going to share with you my techniques for high-end portrait retouching which is easier quicker and probably better than photoshop oh there's a statement and it doesn't involve a monthly subscription feed to adobe so here's how play tape so anyone who uses photoshop knows that a monthly subscription fee of 10 pounds a month can be pretty expensive over a number of years sure you get lightroom as well but there is an alternative and a good one affinity photo is a photo editor with the same capabilities as photoshop and in some cases more to offer and when it comes to high-end retouching it's my go-to software it's a one-off lifetime payment of 49 pounds as of the filming of this video and it comes with a raw editor as well so let's get into it so welcome to the wonderful world of affinity photo and if you're familiar with photoshop then this is going to be very straightforward for you so we have all the standard tools on the left hand panel some of the tools have slightly different names for instance the spot healing brush tool in photoshop is called the in painting brush tool in affinity photo so over here on the right hand side you've got the layers panel and all of the adjustment layers you could ever need and your familiar blending options another great feature of affinity photo is that you can see a live preview of the blending options as you hover over them and down here your layer masks and effects and this is your history slider which i'll show you more of later in the tutorial so high-end retouching so we have the beautiful actress and model indiana who i photographed last year for her portfolio and this is the unedited image which we're going to professionally retouch and retouching in affinity photo couldn't be easier firstly i'll create a copy of the background layer with ctrl or command j and the fabulous technicians at affinity photo have included a frequency separation action which is super fast and easy to understand and again this is something you don't get as standard in photoshop you have to create the action yourself which can be quite intimidating if you don't know what you're doing high frequency information is over here on the left the fine detail and the low frequencies carry information in the shadows tones and colors so the aim here is to adjust the radius slider until the fine detail disappears this is an arbitrary process depending on the resolution of the image but in this instance around 6 pixels looks about right then we can use this handy window slide to check the frequencies are separated correctly then simply apply the action then head into the adjustment panel and choose the black and white option and all i'm going to do is drag the red slider to around negative 75 which helps to reveal the blemishes much more we're going to start on the low frequency layer and we only need to use one tool for this frequency separation process which is the healing brush tool i'll set the hardness to zero and then simply sample a clean area of skin with the alt key and begin smoothing out those tones affinity photo has a live preview on the fly as you move the brush around a very good feature as it shows you what you're going to get as you do it and when sampling you want to be as close to the area that you're going to heal [Music] so the area underneath the eyes or the eye bags as they're otherwise known need a gradual process so i'll reduce the opacity to around 50 percent as we don't want to remove the shadows altogether because you can make someone look very plasticky eyebags are a facial feature after all [Music] i'm going to just preview my progress so far and this is where the history slider comes in handy it acts like a time machine as you drag the position back and forth [Music] so the low frequency is looking pretty good now but i may come back to this later but for now it's time for the high frequency and the skin detail so i'll choose that layer but this time increase the brush edge hardness to 100 then simply follow the same principles as before replacing blemishes with the clean skin now this part can take a little practice choosing the correct sample of skin i'll just do one more pass on the low frequency layer [Music] do one more pass on the low frequency layer [Music] i don't need the black and white layer anymore so i'll just delete that and now i'm going to stamp down the frequency layers to a single layer with ctrl alt shift and e and i'll just dump them too and here's a before and after to see our progress next i'm going to choose the in painting brush tool to tidy up some of the fine spots and stray hairs [Music] i'll also tidy up the flex in the whites of the eyes still concentrating in this area i'm going to bring out some of the browns in her eyes i'll create a new layer and press b on the keyboard to choose the brush tool i'll set the tool to white and make sure it's a soft edge and just paint a small section in both eyes then simply change the blending option to overlay and i think i'll reduce the opacity to around 50 percent and that's just turned on the lights nicely now for the whites in the eyes i'll create a curves adjustment layer and drag up the curve then create an inverted layer mask by holding the alt key and pressing the mask icon then select the mask and with the brush tool set to white and flow at a hundred percent i'll just reveal the adjustments from beneath the mask and with affinity photo you're able to adjust the size of the brush while you're painting using the bracket keys on your keyboard [Music] and that's a nice subtle change now for some dodge and burn create another curves adjustment layer and drag down the curve [Music] but this time change the blending option to luminosity this makes sure the colors don't get oversaturated when we drag down that curve again i'll create an inverted layer mask by holding the alt key select the mask and with a soft edge white brush and importantly choose the flow at five percent so we can gradually enhance the shadows just begin feathering those cheekbones no shadow and i think the neck and jawline too a quick before and after is nice and subtle but effective now the same process for the highlights a new curves adjustment layer but drag up the curve an inverted layer mask as it looks a little flat from when we did the frequency separation before we do one final step i'll just dodge and burn some texture into her hair [Music] and maybe i'll do a change and increase those lovely brands in her eyes up to 75 percent let's group those layers together with control or command g so we can see the entire retouch process that's looking very nice one final global adjustment i'm going to make is adding a black and white layer drag the red slider down once again and change the blending option to overlay reduce the opacity to around 25 percent [Music] and i'll just mask out the effect from her eyes [Music] and now for the big reveal so there you have it high-end portrait retouching boom thanks friends for watching if you're new to this channel have a rummage around my other videos ooh rummage is good word please subscribe and i'll see you next week you

Channel: Mark McGee Photos

Views: 32,938

Keywords: skin retouching, dodging and burning, high-end skin retouching, skin softening, adobe, photoshop, tutorial, portrait retouching, skin smoothing, contouring, skin sculpting, advanced retouching

Id: JZIr6LQ2gy0

Length: 11min 2sec (662 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020