THE POWER OF FREQUENCY SEPARATION: Photoshop Tutorial

all right so sorry about the slightly lighter start there just a few minutes out when it comes to the countdown normally try to get it run at 5 - but as usual best laid plans and all that just running a little bit behind time but it should be ok should be ok now for some strange reason my computer did a an update without me even knowing it was gonna do an update and I couldn't even stop it so I've been dealing with that for the last half an hour or so if you could let me know in the chat room that you can hear me that would be great just I'll look out for that in the chat at the moment don't give it Brian don't forget everyone to give this a thumbs up do you know we actually did have a thumbs down again I'm sure it's gonna be the same person as before but hey I think he can hear me then Stewart yeah you're dead right a Windows Update couldn't stop it he said it was happening and no matter what I did I couldn't stop it Brian thanks for that mate John thank you Cheers alright so hopefully the audio is good then bowl accounts and yeah if only got was it 2 minutes 45 seconds then we'll crack on tonight we're gonna go through frequency separation I'm definitely not going to be going through the every single intricacy of what you can do with it I've got two thumbs down did I all right okay but I wanted the purpose of tonight is to kind of run through frequency separation for those of you who don't know it or those of you kind of familiar with it but to perfect to basically give you some food for thought so that you can go on and have a go with it yourself and see what you think richard johnson who puts a thumbs down every long episode they need to be named and shot Richard I wish they would but unfortunately YouTube we've got this thing where you don't have a clue who's doing it at the moment at the moment anyway but there you go right folks something to carry on just get myself all prepped here I'll turn the audio off but as usual when it gets to 30 seconds you'll start to hear the music getting on slightly louder will play an advert and then will crack on so I shall catch you in a mo you folks I'm just watching on another screen here not connected to the screen stringing software and it says that the live stream health is Amber as opposed to green just give me the thumbs up or just me shout out that everything is okay you can still see everything okay and you can still hear it that'd be great you [Music] hi I'm Glenn Jewess and I want to let you know about my brand new book the Photoshop toolbox now Photoshop is a huge piece of software that has constantly been updated given the user seemingly endless creative possibilities but being such an incredible piece of software can also make it seem confusing and difficult to master now the book is made up of six chapters where we start off going through the basics to fully understand layers and then we move on to layer masks brushes blend modes the suit bonus content and then a full tutorial bringing everything together in a complete loop touch of an image from start to finish you see I believe that no matter how much bigger Photoshop becomes at the heart of Photoshop are three things layer masks brushes and blend modes if we can learn to understand these three areas of Photoshop the sky really is the limit so that's the Photoshop toolbox available now [Music] all right so thanks for those of you who in the chatroom let me know that the audio is okay just give me a shout out in the chatroom as well if you can just to let me know that the the video side of things is okay as well you won't have to look at me too long we're gonna dive over to my screen in a short while but listen folks it's Thursday night certainly in the Europe anyway it's nighttime in America or whatever you are else around the world it could be the middle of the day but thank you so much for sparing your time for tonight for this live broadcast we're going to be going through frequency separation and like I said to folks in the chatroom there we're not going to go through everything when it comes to frequency separation because it is a massive massive subject but what I'm gonna go through all this stuff here is basically so to give you some food for thought you might be using frequency separation already you might be well-versed with it and know everything about it and that's great but there is some people out there that have kind of heard of it it sounds difficult and what the hell is it and I want to just show you how I use it I'm not a beauty retouch or anything like that at all so I'll be using it on the kind of pictures that I do but I want to give you some food for thought so that you can go on then and think well how could you use it in your pictures you'll find when we're using it as well sometimes you're thinking we'll the results in the end don't look any better that's not necessarily the thing behind frequency separation it's how you get there it makes life a lot easier when you use it you'll see that a moment but before we crack on it's just a couple of things I want to mention first of all on my blog this week so far I've done a post where I put photography as a gift so give it and that is a poster I've gone through talking about recently photographing my uncle now I'm going to show you a picture now on my screen which I actually think is my best portrait I have ever taken and I took that picture this weekend I think it's my best portrait and I've not shown it anywhere and the reason I've not shown it is because this portrait is going to be a picture I saw at present for somebody not the person who's had the picture taken he's going to be giving this picture just to him to give to somebody so let me just dive over to my screen I'll show you what I'm let's just go to here all right so let's go fullscreen so hope you can see this picture here now like I said I actually think my own opinion is this is my favorite of all pictures now you're the first people to see this apart from my wife and my uncle and obviously this is my other brother I've got a brother called Greg and this is Greg who is serving in the British military I wanted to take his picture and I am so super proud of this really really simple techniques those of you who watched last week when you saw the editing that we did with in Monroe when he was dressed as a brigadier exactly the same kind of retouching process on that this picture as it was on that picture but this one here I'm letting you see it but I'm not going to show anybody else until after Christmas because I'm gonna get this one framed it's coming from Loxley in fact I got a sample print through here you can see it here and this you can see it's not shiny this is a fine art paper now I use Loxley and this is their museum rag fine art paper and it is absolutely stunning now let's try and focus on it there but I'm really really pleased to this now this is something I normally do I'm gonna be getting a big sized print of this but generally what I will do when I go through the soft proofing of which I've done a video on I'll always send off for a small print first just to make sure that everything is really bang on before I commit to getting the big print done so that's some kind of advice that I'll always give so Vernon thanks very much for that it says it's a beautiful picture I am absolutely super super happy with it I can't stop looking at it so she'll really say that about your own pictures should you brits me brother so an engraving so there you go right okay so that was a world exclusive just there right then okay so let's dive over to my desktop and let's have a quick look then at what this frequency separation is we'll try and go through it fairly quickly obviously you can look at this afterwards you can stop start and I will be sending some actions out to those of you who are on my email group as well after this but let's have a quick look I start over as don't get rid of mayor's there you go that's my screen there let's get rid of Lightroom let's just minimize that there and let's go to my screen here so what is free separation it's basically a retouching technique that allows us to work on different parts of the picture and by that I mean when we have a picture it's in layman's terms it is made up of two things the color and the detail okay so what if we could possibly separate our pictures to give us the color and the detail it means then we can work on one without affecting the other I'm sure there are those of you out there that when you've been using things like the healing brush and then you've gone to kind of get rid of something in a picture that's very close to something else you've ended up with that smudging and it looks just awful that's because it's pulling in the color when it's healing if we can separate the picture into color on one layer the detail on the other that's never gonna happen again you're gonna have be able to do it much quicker and not get all that smudging that's one of the benefits but here we go so here's a picture of a girl called Sophie photograph Sophie this is the unretouched picture but as i zoom in hopefully on your screen you can see that that there is blurred and out of focus so although we know that Sophie really because there's no sharpness to it we're just gonna consider that this here is a collection of color okay that's all this is is color because there's no real sharp detail in it so that what we would have on one layer on the other layer we're gonna have this this is the detail and texture like exactly the same picture of Sophie but when i zoom in can you see now how we see the detail of the hair her eyebrows her eyes or eyelashes and also we can see the skin pores now this is what it would look like on the layer that we have only the detail so we can work on all these little bits here that you can see without affecting the color and on the flip side we can work on all the color here to help the colors blend in to match the rest of the skin tones without affecting the detail all right now this is always I appreciate this my start styling a bit confusing but when we actually go and do something like I'm gonna do now hopefully it all become a little bit clearer alright let's just open up this picture here then of Sophie so this is the one that you'd have just seen that I had those two separate parts to it the blur part and the detail part so how can we now then how can we separate our picture so that we do have these two parts to it the color and the detail well all we're gonna do is this and we'll go through this a few times and this is the action that I'm going to send out to you we've got our background layer here I'm gonna create two copies of it so I'm gonna hold down the ctrl key or command key and press J twice to give me two copies okay so now then the first one here this layer one I'm gonna rename this to blur whoops BL you are or color because it's the same thing we're gonna blur it to only be left with the color the one above it I'm going to call detail or otherwise it can be called the texture as you saw on that thing just a short while ago alright let's just turn off that detail layer now this picture here appreciate your not gonna have to see that too clearly because you know it's it's only watching this on YouTube here but in the bottom left hand corner the screen here gives me the dimensions of what my actual picture is this is a high ridge picture it's been taken with Sony a7r 242 megabyte megapixels so generally was something like that and by the way this isn't something I've come up with I've learned all of this from last week's podcast guest lisa carney so she although a new frequency separation i've learned much more from her by watching her creative life classes over the last few days as well so with an image that is from a DSLR some like a sony a7r to the Canon 5d Mark fours and so on something like that when you're gonna have roughly 40 to 50 megapixels you want to be going for blurring here it's going up to filter blur Gaussian blur and we're gonna go for around about 5 okay so that be anyway of 5 to 7 something like that if you're thinking of using some of these like Hasselblad's and all these kind of amazingly expensive cameras then you're going to go a little bit higher so you could go sever and a maybe even up to 10 but for something like regular folks you can be using the a7 Artoo's the threes the canons and Nikon's go for radius around about 5 you can see now that's blurred it so it's taken the edge off it's just the color there so now let's turn on the detail and texture layer in fact on the blue layer here let's just create a copy of it because we always want to make sure we have a copy we don't work on the original one here so let's just put on the end of this one here I'm gonna call as this as well original alright so I'm gonna keep that one nice and safe and I'll work on this one above just in case if something goes wrong so the detail texture layer how do we get the detail and the texture well there's actually two ways of doing this depending on whether you're working on an image that is 16-bit or 8-bit and I'm kind of guessing in sweeping statements I'm reckoning that pretty much most of you if you're using shooting in RAW and you're bringing your images in and you're working on them from raw you're going to be working at 16-bit alright so here's how we create the detail layer we've got an image we go through a ply image all right so the top here says source us to name the father you got opened layer here now where it says merged what we're going to do is choose here blur color and original alright so we're gonna choose the one that's the color if you haven't created two copies of it just choose the one that you know is the blurred or the color one alright next we're going to do is go to the blending here berry Mon this is purely for 16-bit images we're gonna change that to add and then we're gonna go to put little tick where it says in verse and now we get this grain you can see when i zoom in now we are getting in cons room in there but you can hopefully just saves a little bit of detail now there's two little numbers in the bottom right hand corner here scale of two offset of zero I'm not a mathematician I'm not not a clever person all I know is that when you're using 16-bit images and you're doing this on keep the scalar two and the offset at zero if you are working on an 8-bit image which you may every now and again what you're going to do there in this apply mitch bucks is you're not going to take invert and instead of using the blending mode of AD you're going to use subtract alright so we'll go to subtract and then your numbers would be two in the scale and 128 in the offset alright but we're going to be using right click okay so now then there is my texture detail layer obviously it's moment it's gray we need to be able to see the color of the picture beneath us so I'm going to go over to the blending mode now in the layers here and I go from normal and let's just move my camera out of the way I'm gonna go to linear light alright and what I will do then is create a copy of it so that we don't ruin the original one but when I do that you probably notice you see gets a little bit too more contrasty and detailed there so what I need to do is change the blend mode of that one to normal so it goes back to this and just tell this layer here use the blend mode of the one below because if I have to blend modes in linear light it's gonna be really sharp and contrasting horrible if I turn this top layer to normal so now we see the gray and then I create one of those clipping masks I'm basically telling this uppermost layer have the same blend mode as the one below and that's why now we can see that picture there let's put all of these into a group so we have it called FS don't worry about keeping up with the minute we are gonna go through this again so now in here we have our frequency separation separation layers all set up and you should notice that when we turn that on and off all those layers on and off there nothing should change if you see anything different you've done something wrong it's as simple as that alright so how we get on so far let's have a quick look in the chat room make sure everyone's ok ok looks like everything's ok Brian I haven't got my no I have got my phone with me just in case you need to message me and say something's going wrong alright ok so then let's have a look so now that we've got these separate things set up let's show you how we can use this I'm going to click on the uppermost light the gray layer here which is the detail let's have a look us from the detail now first this kind of port right here some other things I might want to do on this would be to remove some of these stray hairs and this is those instances where I said that you might use something like the Healing Brush but then you're gonna get that that kind of smudging sometimes because the hair is very close to other tones and other hair within the top of the image here so might drag some and make it look a little bit blurry and smudgy and horrible and in fact let me just show you I'm just a new let's just turn all of these off just for a second I'll show you what it would look like if we use something like The Healing Brush si wanted to get rid of this hair here pretend we're not doing frequency separation I'm gonna get my healing brush and we got text you can see in the skin here so if I just go Spot Healing Brush just to get rid of it like so and it looks like it's done a really good job until you start to zoom in and what you'll notice is it might be difficult to notice it but you're actually getting very smoothness a lot of smoothness there where it's not using texture it's just covering it over so you kind of got a patch there without any texture on Simas we do it here we're getting a little bit of patch patchiness Conner go in there very smooth very smooth line if you look close at it let's just try and get rid of some of these patches here please see that smoothness much more when we get to this part just here I don't know if you can see that and that can't go too close but now we're just starting to get a lot of smoothness in this area here now if I come over to here let's say let's say I want to get rid of this hair here we go to here now this is when you start to get that tricky bit can you see what I mean now getting all that horrible stuff and you can spend ages doing it so how come frequency separation help us out let's go back to it let's turn it all on let's open it all up and the hair is detailed remember when we did that gray layer we could see all the hair that's detail so I'm gonna click on the detail layer zoom in and on this layer here the grey layers you're gonna use things like clone stamp tool or Healing those are the kind of tools that you're going to use the color layer the blur layer you're gonna use things like paint brushes gradients blurring and all that kind of stuff but we're working on the gray layer at the moment so I want to get my clone stamp tool and this is how quick we can work now to get rid of this hair so I'll hold down the alt or option key just a sample another area of texture like there and the top and the options bar it says current layer make sure that says current layer and then I can very quickly now just come in and get rid of the hair just here alright so sampling just getting rid of all this without any patches where there's no texture we've got no smoothness going on we can get rid of that if I come over to this part over here where we showed you those problems we were just getting if I now sample here with the clone stamp tool and then we can come in and just get rid of it nice and quickly so you can see how quickly that can work there to help you to get rid of textures without getting a smudging all right so that's one little thing that you can kind of do with frequency separation but you can go around the whole pitch here but this is what I did do on this picture of Sophie just very quickly without the frustrations of the smudging getting rid of all these patches and you see how quickly that works just there all right so that's that just just a quick one there now what else can we do and all right so bags under the eyes how could we sort out bags under the eyes well the bags under the eyes he's going to be color that's color within the image so we've got our color layer down here our blur or color layer I'm not gonna click on the original keep that one nice and safe there just in case things go wrong I'm gonna click on the blur color copy layer just here alright so in fact what I'll do is I can actually add a blank layer and what I'm gonna do to get rid of these bags under the eyes here there's lots of ways you could do this but he's just one way you could do it I'm gonna get my gradient tool okay press G on the keyboard to get gradient tool from the toolbar and when I bring my gradient tool over by the I see if I hold down the Alt key you can see you get the color sampler so what I'm gonna do now is on a sample some of the skin just underneath these darkening areas of the eyes here so I'm gonna sample that when I click down it samples that color into the foreground and then all known to do I've got my gradients at the top of the screen if we go to the top of the screen here you got different kind of gradients I'm actually using the second grading which is a radial gradient so we've got a gradient over the left next that all the different gradients here the second one across is a radial gradient so I sample the color click up and drag click up and drag sample because you'll probably keep see my color sampler keeps reappearing that's cuz as I'm moving along I'm sampling different areas each time just to lay down slightly different color just there I'll go to this on the other eye let's just drag up drag up and drag up now I'm being really loose with this and you might find that the colors going into places that I don't really want it to do so what I'm do now now that I've actually laid down that color I'm gonna add a black layer mask to this I'm gonna hold down the Alt key click on the layer mask icon to hide that effect then get a brush and the normal blend mode a white brush and then I can just quickly come in nice and soft and just paint that in over the eyes just there and just there and of course we can use opacity just to bring it down just a touch like so the great thing about this is although we've used paint we've brushed over this if i zoom in you can probably still see that even though I've brushed over it we've still got texture showing through and that's because the in our layer stack here the color is underneath the texture so long as the textures are pub of it we're always going to have the texture showing through so unlike before let's say if I wanted to maybe paint on the skin here let's just say add a layer at the very very top here and I get a gradient it's just gonna grow and just to show you sample the skin curl there and drag it out can you see now me zoom in there's no detail there's no texture that's because that color is above the detail not what we're doing at the moment all right so that's that one there now there's another area notice just on her eye here where she's actually been to the beauticians and they've kind of painfully plucked out some of the Isis it's a little bit of difference in the skin tone underneath the eye here maybe where the makeup hasn't kind of matched up what we could do there is add another blank layer in the color section of our frequency separation and we could get another gradient as an example sample some of the color just above the eye there that nice dark is kind of cooler there and again click and drag up choose another color here click and drag up and a bear click and drag or something like that again hide it with that black layer mask coming with a brush a white brush and then we can come in just to sort of paint it in like so low the opacity down just a little bit like that and zoom out and the concealer already we're starting to improve that but the great thing is no matter what we're doing somebody's put why not use fade we don't use fade debt because you can only use it that once once I've used it and then gone to do something else I can never go back to use fade because it only allows you to use it just the once and if you press another key or anything else on the keyboard or do anything else in Photoshop the fade option isn't available to you all right that's those couple little things there Oh another little thing you can do as well with this now can you notice on the skin there are certain patches maybe how her skin is reacted to this or maybe it's even makeup foundation where you can see some of the tones of the forehead here don't kind of blend in so well because it is like a darker patch here bled trying to get into the lighter patch just here what we can do is click on the blur color copy layer here get my lasso and this is what I briefly showed you last week when we were working on in Monroe's picture and we can kind of make a selection rough selection of certain areas where we want the colors to blend in better so we get nice kind of toning across the forehead now that I've made that selection I've feathered that just a little bit don't know if you can see that on the top of the screen there just a little bit of feathering there but eight pixels on the feather you can see if I press Q it's got a quick mask there you can see how that's kind of soft ish kind of edge to it there so it blends in nicely and then all I'm going to do with filter blur Gaussian blur let's just bring that out the way zoom in so you can see this and we'll take it to roundabout 15 so there's before sort of maybe just bring it up just a little bit more turn on that let's just cancel let's just bring that up here so now we'll go to filter blur Gaussian blur and we'll take that to say 15 and you can see now before after before after how it blends those tones in now you might think that all you could do here is just apply that amount of blur to every part of the skin to help it alter blur in but the thing is different areas will need blending at different amounts so you could kind of find an area over here in fact this is a really good example here can you sell this little patch of skin here doesn't really match him with a bit around it this is what I love about this frequency separation I'm gonna make a selection of just that area and I want you to keep an eye on the fact that there is hair to the side of it there's even a single hair strand going through my selection but we meant remember that is detail not the color I'm gonna go to filter blur Gaussian blur and that's before and after it might be a little bit more take it to run about 1314 some that before after before and after can you see how we got rid of that little patch that it's all blending in nicely but look at that individual hair is still there that's what I love about this it's just so clever how we can actually work on this color and the detail completely independently of each other absolutely love that so with something like this then you can go around you can start to to blend in different areas let's say here go filter blur Gaussian blur we can help that to blend in but as a zoom in you're gonna see there's still that texture there you could as well maybe add some blank layers here get the gradient tool sample some of the color start to drag around and start to kind of do all this kind of stuff here to get the actual skin tones in you can lower the opacity on it but no matter what you do now sort of blank layer there what no matter what you do now you're always gonna have the texture on the top which is gonna give you that little bit of realism when you do that alright that's that little bit just there in fact look at this here got this little dimple here it's kind of quite like this little dimple how we can get the lasso tool let's just make a quick lasso run there we'll go to filter blur Gaussian blur and you see how that kind of blends in there a little bit better smoother tones out smooth that skin out just a little bit but we keep the detail we'll keep the texture absolutely love that it's a really quick way of working and evening out tones alright it's that's one little thing just there right let me just open up another picture and that's this one just here because there's a couple of other little things I want to show you on this one how are we doing so far we walk around the chat room sounds okay is it so with great power comes great responsibility alright so this one here Kwik sip of water alright so this gentleman here explained little about this service Jen this is a guy I photographed my 1940s World War two project he was a child I think he's about 10 or 11 during the outbreak of World War two so he was what they called billeted when he went to go and live with people he didn't know why the war was going on so photographing those has been a really really good experience now there's a couple of things I want to do on this picture here you'll notice is can you see how this hasn't even been researched this is a straight out of the camera image how there's parts of his forehead here where there's absolutely no frown lines whatsoever and in fact as i zoom in there's absolutely no texture now this has happened because of an injury when he was a lot younger when he was struck in the face by some metal and he damaged his skull and lots of operations and what-have-you later on this is how its kind of resorted obviously healed very well but we can see there's areas here that we might want to work on there's actually the color of the skin there can you see how the colors different to what it is on the rest of his forehead over here I want to show you how we can fix that first of all so let's go through our frequency separation I've got an action we're gonna do it I'm gonna press that action and then I'm gonna show you how what that's actually made of so I'll go to my actions and you see here my actions little tab I've got two FS 16-bit FS 8-bit this is a 16-bit image let's just click play on that nice and quickly it does that for us puts it in a group and we can open it up and there they are alright so that's that there so what I blue original we've got our blur color how can we now use this then to blend the tones in again this there's so many ways you could do this when you're working in Photoshop there's no right or wrong way as long as you get the result you want in the day there will be somebody will say you should have done it this way it doesn't really matter as long as you get what you want but this is how when I retouch this image how I got the skin on this patch of his face here to match the rest of his face all I did was this blank layer and this is nothing new to you now it's gonna be exactly same as what you've seen already but just shows how effective this is add a blank layer let's call this forehead forehead color spelt the correct way with a year you'll notice and then I'm gonna get my gradient tool and we're gonna sample some of the color over here on the left hand side of his head where we do have these frown lines and then we're just gonna drag out drag out okay so we've done that there let's add a black layer mask so we don't have that color going onto his hair get a brush white brush and we'll just come in and paint it onto that just there so zoom out we can also lower the opacity just a touch but can you see how very quickly we can help that to kind of blend in all right so that's that little bit there now there's something about this area I'm gonna show you in a moment how we can get rid or we actually can add in some texture and detail as well all right now this little patch over here this was a perfect example the good little mark on his face here now I'm only showing you things that would be challenging to fix and I'm not saying that you must fix these on people's faces that's obviously your call and your ethics and stuff like that but I want to show you just some challenge what would ordinarily be quite challenging areas to work on with things like the clone stamp tool the healing brush and what-have-you but this I think is really really cool illustrates again how good frequency separation is I want to kind of remove this area here we've got kind of little marks but also there's a slight change in the color of the skin as well sometimes what I'll do is I'll come to my layer stack and also try to find out what is color and what is a detail so I'm going to click where the actual very top layer is here the detail layer and I'm gonna hold down my option key and I'm gonna click just underneath the eye and that's gonna reveal just that layer and you can see here that yeah look there are both two little marks there that's clearly texture so I'll be able to use this texture layer to get rid of those and that must mean that the rest of it this discoloration here is obviously on the color side of things so let's just click on the uppermost layer here the texture or detail layer get my clone stamp tool and what I'm going to do is hold down the Alt key on a nice clean piece of skin here with the texture somewhere like that and then just come in and get rid of it would you notice as I do that you notice how there's absolutely no change in the color it looks completely natural even on moving these marks let's get rid of this one here you'll see what I mean so again sample a nice clean piece of skin come and brush in over that area there nice and clean it's all blending and looking great so how can I now match this skin tone in well let's try a different way let's click on the blur or color layer we've already looked at using gradients and maybe brushes how about a bit of blurring let's get the lasso tool make a selection of this area and we're really close to the hair here the detail but this isn't going to affect that because we're on the color layer only we'll go to the filter menu choose blur Gaussian blur and there we go so before after before after that's pretty much got rid of it but you could if you wanted to add another blank layer use that gray let's escape into that selection there get that gradient sample the skin and then drop it down it's just something like that so there you can see if we do that before and after how quickly we can get rid of something of that and the great thing about it is yes you could maybe spend some time doing this with the Healing Brush and a clone stamp tool but it's the realism and I always tell people when we're talking about retouching it's the small things that make the big difference when it comes to this kind of stuff so you can see that's got rid of that really realistically there now I'm gonna show you something to do with skin at the moment but actually in a minute I'd rather but I want to show you another little trick you can do with this to actually sharpen eyes and this is now my go-to way of sharpening eyes and this is super cool it really is great I'm gonna go to the detail texture layer because we know if I just only look at that layer there here's the eyes we can see that this this gray layer here is showing us where all the detail and textures are so what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to get my marquee selection tool and I'm gonna drag out a selection that includes the eyes alright so he just includes the eyes there then I'm gonna go hold down the ctrl or command key and press J to put that up onto its own layer and you can see there it is now now the reason it's gone gray is because it's not clipped to the layer directly below so at the moment this layers blend mode is normal but if I change this from say normal to go linear light can you see he's sharp and contrasted they are obviously the rest of the skin around there is as well but all I need to do now is add a black layer mask hold down the Alt key or the option key click and automatically gives us a black layer mask and then just come in with a brush with a white foreground color and very quickly paint own to the eyes just like so and what I really love about this is sometimes when we add contrast and sharpening to certain parts of the images especially eyes you might start to notice just a little bit of a color shift when you do that now what we're doing here is we're using frequency separation to sharpen the eyes and we're only using the detail or the texture layer to do that no color so we're not gonna get any color shift no halos no nothing we're just gonna get really nice sharp eyes and the great thing is again because it's on its own layer we can then lower the opacity to kind of get it to be as sharp as you want to be I think sometimes the best way to check that as well is to bring the picture out almost to the viewing distance and then control your opacity from there because if it's really close in you might have it a bit too sharp or maybe not sharp enough zoom out and you'll give it a better kind of opinion on that now something else I wanted to show you and this is just a couple of methods here with regards to texture how you can add texture in because sometimes you might smooth some skin out and you lose texture if you've not done it using frequency separation or sometimes you might have areas of skin where you it's naturally very very smooth like this gentleman here where we've got this kind of area of skin where there's just no texture whatsoever we've already blended in the color in fact one of the requests from him was could I actually do something with this side of his face just here which I did do and I'll show you how I do that I'll show you a couple of ways of doing it what I'm going to do first of all is close down my frequency separation so we can jump out of that just for a second and I'll show these two separate ways okay so what I'm gonna do is this and by the way if there are stuff there's things coming into the chat room I will quickly dive into that in a short while I'm just show these two - I see before I forget about it okay first way we're gonna use noise I'm gonna add a blank layer and then I'm gonna go to the Edit menu could use the keyboard shortcut but I'll go the long way around for those of you don't know it we're gonna edit fill and we'll choose 50% gray because we need to give the noise something to cling on to let's just get rid of actions just there then we go to filter noise add noise now you can see now this those who were old enough to remember when the TV used to go off about midnight this is the kind of noise you'd see on the TV and a mount here I'll go around about it anyway between 10 and 15 Gaussian and I prefer to use monochromatic I know Lisa tends to use she actually has pull aful not a noise with puller in it which again I'm not gonna say anything negative about that's all she does Hollywood posters goddamnit she knows what she's doing but my own preference is monochromatic so I'll click OK on that then we're going to do is I don't change the blend mode from something like normal I'll go to overlay just at the moment and you can see that obviously that's adding in this texture just here now at the moment that's over the whole picture so for now let's just add a blank sorry black layer mask I'll get a brush a white brush and let's just quickly put that noise into this area just here doesn't really stick at the moment I appreciate that so that's something like that there and then what you could do at this stage is you could if you wanted to just lower the opacity it's not gonna replicate exactly but it's it's just giving something into that area now if you want to take it a step further here's what you can do click on the actual thumbnail there of the gray layer then we're going to go to filter and we'll go to stylize and emboss and if I turn that on and off there's before after before after it just gives a little bit extra to that noise it gives a little bit of life as opposed to just being grain it gives a little bit of lift and click OK and then we can just lower the opacity so there's at least something there on that skin so that's one way you could do it I sort of see something over here so Devon is he just meal the bridge of his nose and around his eyes look off in color yes Devon it does this isn't the final retouch picture might I'm just showing certain areas of it all right certain patched areas that's the idea behind tonight was literally just to show you to give you some food for thought so then you can go on and do the rest of your pictures but you're right these areas here I worked on I got rid of the bags under the eyes let's have a look here where's the color this had a blank layer there I could get rid of the bags under the eyes just a little bit but I dragon that up and lowering the opacity and then painting that in we can do all that kind of stuff but I'm just showing this certain areas now let me just show you another way that we could actually add in some real skin texture now this is something that Lisa does I know when she's working on skin it's also similar to somebody called Aaron Blais which if you followed me you'll definitely have heard of our Emblaze Disney artist this is the way that he will add textures of like elephant skin on to some of the drawings that he does it just looks super super realistic so I'm gonna go and choose a picture now that's got some skin texture in it let's just go over to my libraries over here let's just choose some of these people these are some of the old folks here of mature folks and from the pictures I've been doing with the wartime I said look at this chap here yeah you've got a decent forehead let's open his pitch rockin first shop just for a second and okay so what I do then is I'm just gonna run that frequency separation action on this picture just for the moment so it's gonna get my actions windows actions 16-bit image let's just click Play and like magic it just does it for us like so so and I open the group up you can see we got the color the blue layers and the texture and detail lies at the top I'm gonna click on the top light here the detail texture light and all I'm gonna do like I did with undid the sharpening of the eyes I'm gonna get my lasso tool this time and just make a selection rough selection of his forehead like so and then I'm gonna go command or control J to put that on to its own layer alright now what I love about this it's just check ease for that one yes that one there I'm gonna get my move tool press B on the keyboard click directly on that so I can move it around bring it up to the top of the screen hold it over the tab of the guy that we've just been working on don't let go yet bring it in and then drop it down and let go so now we've got this and can you see already can you see how we've got some texture in here alright so doesn't line up perfectly but let's just kind of rotate it just to touch something like that maybe put that there this is just to show you how you can if you collect skin textures it sounds a lot of stuff silence to the lambs isn't it but if you collect skin textures you can actually use them in your retouching like this as well so now that we've got that let's just change the blend mode from normal to let's go to linear light something like that can you see look their texture looking pretty good I like that we can actually add a layer mask to it I'll leave that as a white layer mask get a brush and we're just kind of blend it in just a little bit take it off over there like let's just go to that's get the black foreground color there we go and just blend that in just a little bit and I'll put a little bit more down here as well but you can see already starting to get some texture in there we can lower the opacity if need be if it's not strong enough we can duplicate it so you get it's nice and strong texture we can even lower it down like that but you can see how you can actually just build it up to start to add texture into the skin just by using skin of other people all right so it's just just a really handy little thing to northing that's that there right so let's just close that anything else on this particular picture just refer to me notes [Music] no I think that's good right right so to kind of show you something else that you can do with this how we doing for time pretty good I'm going to kind of wrap up on something to show you an older picture now this one here let's just bring this up now this isn't a picture that I took by the way quick sip of water but this is the picture was given by a friend and I said I'd kind of work on it for him for a Christmas present last year and let me just show you what I actually did with this one is try and find it where I put it over here we go James lion so there's the original and that's what I did with it in the end so a toned version and a black-and-white version now the reason I show you this picture is because of you'll notice in the final retouch I actually got rid of this elephant I'm guessing this is elephant dong it's more like a about on a road is huge but this elephant tongue here how I could get rid of it so I didn't want him to have this huge pitcher which he got printed on canvas on his wall cuz mother about you but my eyes go straight to that so I just get rid of it but not easy to get rid of because look at all this stuff you've got to contend with here that is not going to be easy unless you use frequency separation alright so let me just show you this here here we've got our picture background layer this is the original image that's zoom out again sorry our original image now we can see top left-hand corner it's a 16-bit image so I'll go to my action here that is frequency separation for 16 bits we'll click play so it does all the little processing for it puts it into a nice little group and there we go so the actual it's have a look let's do what I did before with other pictures hold down the option key and click underneath the eye on the detail and texture light to see exactly what his detail texture well so this here there's a lot of detail in that cow elephant dung but I'm guessing as well there's a lot of color in there so we're gonna have to work on both the color and the detail to get rid of this so let's have a look how we can do this click on the detail texture layer and I get my clone stamp tool from the tool bar let's just put the foreground and background to their default of black and white so I've got my clone stamp tool and all I'm gonna do for now is hold down the option key you'll notice you'll keep seeing this little symbol here the sampler you'll see that keep appearing because what I will do is continually sample from different texture areas to try to cover it over so start doing it here and you'll notice as I'm doing this it isn't actually disappearing and that's because it's not just texture this is made up of it's also made up of color but I'll just have a very quick job you gotta be very careful about things like repeating patterns when you're doing this but just because you're kind of going through it now it doesn't mean to say you can't kind of get rid of those repeating patterns later let's just come down here and it's just sample some of this stuff just into there like so again just going quick but it kind of shows you the technique that I used to get rid of this when I was working on the final picture so I think that's looking pretty good alright so something like that so that's kind of got rid of the you can see it kind of all out there's get rid of that I've actually got the texture from ever else we're covering the cut the the original texture of the dong there let's now go to the blur section let's add a blank layer and I'm just going to choose something like gradient it's just see if this works here get the gradient the radial gradient this is my brain hurts gens Torsen thank god this is recorded so you can go back and look at it after him sample some of the color underneath and we'll start dragging up - you see how we're getting rid of it and can see how the colors going onto it as well going really quick but just kind of gives you an idea of how we can use this to help us to get rid of stuff it's not the best example but you can see what I mean but I mean you can see there I might want to blend the colors in actually not that easy to blend those colors in but can you see what we're doing there getting rid of the dung I'm actually coloring or with that kind of stuff there Milo there I passed on that just a little bit that go back to the texture layer and I might just start to get rid of some of these repeating patterns just by bringing over some texture from elsewhere but that's just kind of give you an idea of one of the ways that you could maybe think about using it I don't know that's quite a difficult area I guess but just shows how you can separate let's just go to there how you can separate detail and texture sorry detail and color so that you can work on those separate areas within the picture anything else I want to show you anything else I don't think there is it's a quick one it feels like a quick one although we have been going for 47 minutes Stewart I've got hands immer going on the background blends quite well with Glynn I don't know what you mean by that holy dung it is working Peter what you like and alright let's just dive back over to my camera as heavy stuff isn't it it is heavy going I think but with frequent separation it's just one of those things just experiment we got a member is to separate the color by the blurring and then use that apply image to actually get the detail within the pitcher now I'm going to send out those action and I'll send those out tomorrow two people have signed up on my part of my email group that will then become part of that creativity toolkit bundle so you got those and I'll also put a link in so that you can see certain parts of this video so you know what's that what that is there but like I said this wasn't to sort of say right in this 48 minutes I'm going to show you exactly how to use everything and get to really fully understand frequency separation the idea there here today was to kind of throw it out there for you and then for you to go blimey oh I like that I like this I like that I don't expect you to remember all of it but just certain little things the way that we remove those hairs the way that I blended that skin tone in without affecting that single hair shows how it can separate the color and the detail really really really clever stuff no cool and right what I let you know about before I disappear if you haven't already make sure you subscribe to the channel I'm not really fussed about numbers but it's just nice to know that you subscribing the creativity pac-3 the one for the color toning which I've been asked about a lot lately how I'm toning my pictures and giving them that kind of that look that is out this week coming for definite and he shoots he draws our podcasts the podcast to do with Dave and my best mic Dave Clayton there's a new episode coming out tomorrow we're recording straight after I've done this so it's a busy night tonight and then when I finished that I'm gonna go and watch the new episode of Vikings which came out in America yesterday and he's now an Amazon Prime so I'm gonna go and watch that I'm so excited about that can't wait but that's pretty much it thank you very much for spending time with me tonight it's time you can't get back so I really do appreciate it any questions by all means I've been hanging around the chat room just for a short walk because me and Dave aren't recording till 9:00 so I'll stick around there just for a short while any questions if I don't get you there drop me an email I will do my best to get back to you I think I'm pretty good at doing all that but before I go let me just show you this one more time I want to show you this cuz I'm super super proud of this let's just go to here scroll down and like a portfolio G let's go to answer here and and we go there's Greg I have startup with this I'm really I'm happy with this and this guy here this is my own called Jeff this is the guy that is responsible for my incredible massive interest in the 1940s and World War two my uncle Jeff an absolute legend a real man's man super super guy alright folks that's it I am going to now disappear into the chat room I'll be there for a short while thanks for your time and I will catch you next week I don't press a little advert for you now as I go bye bye [Music] you

Channel: Glyn Dewis

Views: 21,209

Keywords: Photoshop, Frequency Separation, Retouching

Id: rcgINjP8j20

Length: 53min 46sec (3226 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 29 2018