 Hey everybody it's Greg back to here and in this video I'm going to show you how to retouch skin in Adobe Photoshop using the frequency separation technique. All right let's get started. All right so the first thing we want to do is we want to duplicate our original background layer. So here we are on the background layer. Now the shortcut, the keyboard shortcut for this on the Mac is command J twice. On the PC it's control J. So now if you look you can see we have two additional copies. We're going to call this one low and we're going to call the one above that high. Now I suggest you watch this in full screen in HD. If I'm going too fast just go back and watch the clips again. Now we're going to start with the low layer. Now how this works is it allows us to separate the color information and the texture of the skin. So that's how this works. So we're going to start on the low layer. We're going to unclick the eyeball there. Make sure you're clicked on low. Now we're going to come up to filter and we're going to blur this. So we're going to go to blur, Gaussian blur and we're going to click on a blur radius. So you can see here we're on 25. If you want to look at say the area between the lips and the skin I think 25 is maybe a little too much. Let's take it down to about 10 and let's look at that. So what we're looking for you can see here if I have this little square box if we go to various areas on the skin and click we can see if there's texture in those areas. So I think a radius of 10 pixels works on this image. This was shot on the Nikon DA10 with the 85mm the 1.4G lens and this is a 16-bit image. It went from raw so it's a 16-bit. So the Gaussian blur radius we're going to choose is 10. Now the next step is to go up to the high layer. So we're going to click on that. Now once you're in the high layer you go up to image, apply image. Now this is going to change if you're working on a 16-bit or an 8-bit. This is the formula for 16-bit images. Now we go to layer, we go to low which is the one we created that's below this one. We go to blending mode of add you can see there. Now if you were going to do an 8-bit you would choose subtract instead of add there and instead of the 2 and the 0 you would have 2 and 128. That's for 8-bit this is for 16-bit. So it's low blending mode of add scale 2 offset 0 invert. Now when I say okay it looks like a high pass filter type image. So now we want to go back to the high layer on the right we want to go to the blending mode and we want to change that to linear light. Now you can see that it looks like a regular image. Now the next step is to group these so we can toggle in on and off to see if our changes are working. Now in order to do that if you click on the low and the high with the shift applied now we can use a shortcut command G or control G on the PC. We'll just call this FS. So what we've done is we've created the low layer the high layer we've applied the Gaussian blur to the low we've done the apply image technique to the high and now we've separated the skin texture and the color so different on each layer. Now the advantages of this is now that we can use the healing brush to clean up blemishes and we won't be dragging color into those areas and then we can deal with just the color area separately. So let's start with doing some healing first. So I'm going to zoom in command plus or control plus and your keyboard will allow you to do that. Now you can see we have some stray hairs on the forehead. We have a couple blemishes there and we're going to be working on the high layer. So if we come up over here to the healing brush you can see healing brush tool and what we want to do is sample nearby texture and now we're not worried about dragging color in. So we're going to just hold the option key or the alt key and we're going to sample. Now one thing you want to be clear about here is if you go over to the left hand side and you see there's a little eyedropper tool above the healing brush right there the eyedropper tool when you click on that you'll see a sample here. You'll see point sample three by three five by five eleven by eleven. Check to see that you're around five point five for your sample and that's going to sample nearby area. Now again clicking on the healing brush we're going to sample nearby using the option key or the alt key and we're just going to click here and then we're going to paint over and so this will allow us to not drag colors because you'll find sometimes if you use this and you're near say a hairline and you're trying to clean up hairs it'll often take that color and drag it in and then it becomes a bit of a problem. So you can see here I'll just go quickly through this. I prefer the healing brush over the spot healing brush for this type of thing. It just does a better job because it allows you to choose the sample point instead of Photoshop. At least that's how I feel about it although some people probably prefer the spot healing brush because it is a little quicker in some cases. So I'm just sampling nearby with the option key or the alt key on the PC and then I'm just painting over and I'm just cleaning things up. So I'll show you how we're progressing on this and then I'll show you how we can work on the color layer separately. Now also to be conscious of the color areas and the areas of texture that you're sampling as well those are important things to consider while you're doing this and you know it's going to take a bit of time. This isn't a fast technique. This isn't you know a plugin that you just apply and have perfect skin but this is a I guess you could say a very detailed and accurate way of preserving the skin and the color from the original image but allowing you to clean up the image and make the skin look a little more professional pro looking skin image if that makes any sense. All right so I'm just going to keep cleaning this up and then I'll show you what this looks like. So again this is just the healing brush and I'm just sampling so I sample nearby and then I just paint over and then if you find you don't like what you did there you can always just tweak it just look for a cleaner area of the skin as you sample and I'll just keep going here just a little bit just get this a little more refined and then I'll just sort of show you here. So we can just toggle this group on and off and now you can see that I've cleaned up the hairs and some blemishes and you can go as far as you want on this. Now the next part is going to allow us to blend some of the light and dark areas for a smoother transition so that was the high layer we were working on the blemishes and removing hairs and things like that like for example here and if we came down here you can see we have a little bit of a hair there we have a little bit of a mark there so that's a good technique for that but sometimes you want to just sort of even out the skin area you want to even out the lighting on the skin to make it look a little more smooth because sometimes if you're you know shooting in natural light or your flash is very harsh you're going to have bright and dark areas and it may appear to be a little blotchy so what we're going to do is we're going to click on the low layer now one thing too I want to show you is we're going to go up to the lasso tool here the lasso tool look in the box that says feather this might vary slightly but we want to feather the edges here so I have it set to 25 pixels and now what we're going to do is we're going to take an area of say light to dark and we're going to smooth out that transition area so you can see here above her left eye or her right eye but it looks left us see how we have this bright area above the eye now what we're going to do is we're just going to sample some of this area with the lasso tool and we're going to use it to blend that transition from light to dark to smooth out that area now to do that we can come up to filter and we can go blur Gaussian blur now when we have this up we can drag this slider for example to see how this is going to look so you can see here we have this area sampled and it's going to blur and create more of a transition now we can drag this up as much as we want but if we go too far what'll happen is the edges you'll see get a little dark so we don't want to go that far but if we go too low then nothing will happen so I suggest starting around maybe 25 or radius of 25 pixels we're going to click ok now to deselect that area I click command D now let's just toggle this on and off so we've got our group here and let's just look at this area above the eye and you can see that we've got our hairs that are cleaned up and it's smoothed out some of that transition so I'll show you a couple more examples so you get a better idea of how that works so we'll go to the cheek area here click on the low layer you can see we have that highlight on her cheek and then we have that darker area now we don't want to get rid of the highlight entirely but we want that to be a smoother transition so what we can do is we can just sample that area the lasso tool go up and now that we've chosen our radius all we have to do is click on that again and that'll apply our 25 pixels there so I'll do it in a couple places and then you'll probably see a better idea now this is a very subtle technique Gaussian blur now you can see that was a little more effective in that area now we could take that here again here on the cheek and so we're really just going around and we're just smoothing those transitions from dark to light so for example here we could do that as well on the top of this highlight now this isn't going to work if you get too close to say a dark color like an eyebrow so be conscious of where you're doing this now command D to deselect now if I toggle on and off look at her cheekbone look at the highlight above look at the shadow below and just watch how that sort of has a smoother softer transition so looking there I'll zoom in so you can see it right here now if I click on and off you could see it it's just sort of smoothed out that shadow detail just sort of made a smoother transition so you would use these two techniques in combination so clearing blemishes stray hairs on the high layer and then smoothing out some color toning on the low layer now an advanced technique is you can create a layer between the low and the high so you come down here and create a new layer now this will allow you to sample color and brightness and bring that into a darker layer I'll say that for another video that's a little bit more complicated but basically use this technique to separate the texture from the color so that's the basis of that now let me go through it one more time to recap how to set this up so we'll just get rid of this entirely you've got your background layer for example we're going to duplicate that command j twice or control j we'll just label it we'll call this low keeping in mind this is a 16-bit image and so we have our low and our high we're just going to uncheck that eyeball we're on the low we're going to go filter we're going to go blur Gaussian blur and then we have that blur radius we were just using recently we'll go near the lips so we can see that I think something like 10 is probably fine for this image it might vary slightly depending on how this was shot now we'll go back up to the high layer we go up to image we go up to apply image it's a 16 bit so the formula is layer low blending mode add scale to offset zero invert checked okay then we go to the blend mode here on the high layer we choose linear light now we have our frequency separation we're going to group that we're going to hold the shift key make sure that both of these are highlighted command g on the mac or control g we can call our group whatever we want i'll call it fs and then that's how you create your frequency separation and then you have the low color layer the high texture layer the high layer you can use the healing brush the clone stamp tool low layer you can use that technique with the lasso tool and you can just sort of blur transitions if you want to get really advanced you can create a layer between the two and you can use your brush key and you can sample areas and then blend them into other areas but be very careful when you start messing around with highlights and shadows you can really change the shape of someone's face like I said that's a little bit more of an advanced technique i'll save that for another video anyway thanks for watching this video if you have any comments or questions you can post them in the comment box below if you like this video hit the thumbs up button also click on share and share this video freely on forums photography groups facebook twitter whatever you want share this and if you're not already subscriber just click that subscribe button and if you see a little bell notification click on that and if i go live it'll send you a notification of any live streams that i do all right subscribe back to here thanks for watching this video and i'll see you in the next one