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Lesson Info

Portrait Recap and Frequency Separation

And so the changes that you need to make to a portrait in general are different. You know, you don't have to make as much changes or you need to be more subtle about them. So I'm going to retouch her a little bit the old way and then to show you real quick what frequency separation is. And if I could describe it to you, I will tell you, if you want to follow up and see more advances, plenty of resource is out there. But what it lets you d'oh is it basically says, OK, let's separate out skin details separate from skin tone ality and the actual color, and it puts them on two different layers. And so what that allow you to do is I can go ahead and smooth out watching us. No problem, because I can smooth out the tone al it ese. But then those details I could do separate. I could retouch the details and keep them separately. It also makes it easier to do a lot of things like Patch Tool. I'm in spot healing because you notice how sometimes the reason that spot healing a pastoral doesn't work...

because it makes a good streak of color. Well, you separated your texture from your color there on two totally different planes. So now those tools like patch tool and clone stamp and a spot healing work better because they're not sampling into color. So I'm gonna work on this file, wants to see, and I want to make any of my overall changes doing good here. I'm gonna zoom in. I feel that. I hope she's not watching either. It's d'oh! Ah, Okay. So is your man. I'm just gonna make sure if you add a little bit of clarity, but overall just a little bit overexposed and that Simon's gonna leave it open up, so and add it in photo shop. And so they said before, this is a portrait, so you don't need to go see severe. One of things I was watching for is when I posed her. I did poser in a way so that her leading shoulder would be low. And then it gives me a nice appearance of a longer neck. If she's facing for that shoulders high, it hides her neck. It makes everybody look heavier when you do that. So I'm gonna click duplicate my background and I'm gonna move in and I just start asking myself the questions. Okay, She have any blemish sister move. She really doesn't. It's really, really nice. Um, she's beautiful skin, so I might get rid of, you know? Okay, this was a dust spot on my sensor, and I give it a a couple. I don't age spots, is it not? But they're not freckles and moles is spots a couple of those. I'm just watching. If there's anything I think is an identifying mole or a freckle or something, I'll keep it like I'd keep that have a giant freckle in the middle of my forehead that I always retouch out. But I don't like I might feel different if someone else retouched. It's like you can make fun of your significant other, but if someone else says they're in trouble and that is completely true, Okay, so clean up the hairs. I'm looking and her forehead is too bright for me. I think it's too late, so I could go ahead and come in here with my clone stamp on darken late opacity and just fill it in just a little bit. So you'll see no kind of fill in the highlight. I'd come down to her eyes and I can lighten them up. No. One of the ways that you could do it is you could do a selection with levels. And what tends to happen to people is when they do that selection, you increase the contrast and lighten things up. The color doesn't match any more. So you switch your blend modes luminosity, and I have lighten things up without messing in the color like I've done it before. I really need to brighten up those eyes, and I do it. And now, if she has red skin around your eyes, so the same thing, Um, I would definitely come in here and get rid of the this rogue hair using my spot healing. And I'm looking for where it smears and places like that I have to get in a little closer. 285% really close. And I tried this a couple different tools, So one of them looks correct. Okay. Nice. Little, a little tedious kind of human in here. All right, so I would actually get rid of that, but I'm gonna say this time, all right? I could go ahead like before. Clone stamp on, lighten and feeling under her eyes a bit and just kind of fill it in to see how it keeps the texture. It doesn't make it look blurry, but it also light fills it in a little. So I could do that. I know it also kind of Layton that up just a little bit, that extra highlight. There are the extra shadow there. I'd also kind of fill in some of the spot the darker areas around the nose, and I always and she's lucky. She has almost nothing, but I always get rid of people's necklines. It makes people look heavier and her older, but she's just no problems with that. So I would either use the clone stamp or if you're special, select and eliminated. And I'm also seeing here that I don't like that texture, so I kind of smooth that out. But what I really want to do is I want to make sure that I show you this last technique, so I'm gonna fix your eyes, and then we're gonna do the frequency separation so we can move on from retouching in General Slimming, Select, arise. Come in, Jane and New Layer. I'm just gonna make them a little bit brighter. I'm doing our image adjustment. Shadow highlights. You guys have seen me do it a bunch of times. It's gonna lighten them up a little bit. Zoom in, add my layer mask and paint the effect off where I don't want it. And I just wanted to be brighter. Really? Just in the irises of her eyes. Yes, I like that. It makes a big difference. I could go in. We talked about this a little bit yesterday. If I want to make them really blew, I create a new layer I could with my brush tool. Select my brush to with Stuart. Cut is b can click on and maybe grab blue. I could paint on the iris and then change my blend mode. So overlay soft, light, hard light or color. It's back off and I can change the color office. It's on a real blue, so you could go to image adjustments, hue saturation and try to pick a truer blew that somebody might actually have something like that. I'm gonna give it a little bit of a blur, filter, blur, Goshen Blur and just soften it up of it. Maybe, like around there. Okay. So I can give her, you know, blew her eyes. You could also do the colorized effect. All right, so let's do the frequency separation. I'm gonna flatten everything down for the purposes of this demo, and I'm gonna say these things slowly because there's a lot of buttons. But if I can put up quick reference, I don't know if you can go on blogged or page of these numbers in case somebody misses it. I don't know. Well, we can talk and figure out where it should go. Okay, So what you want to do is you want to start off by making two copies of your background. So clicking drug click and drag, and you want to name them or you want to know which ones which the bottom one is going to be low frequency. And that means kind of your color or skin. Um, skin tone lair. Whereas the top layer is going to be your high frequency, which is your texture layer in your detail there. So you you have to label them on go. Actually, you'll see why in a second when Mabel that low and high Okay, so first thing we're going to start with, I'm gonna hide the first layer on, grab the low, and we're going to blur it. And so what you need to do is do the Goshen blur, and you're basically just trying to find a way to eliminate detail because you're trying to say, OK, this is not the detailer. This is the color layer, so you can just go to filter blur. Gosh, gambler. And the amount that you smooth is kind of hard to say. It depends on the shot. But if I zoom in, uh, you want just barely have gotten rid of your detail more or less so when your eyelashes blur or your skin texture goes away. So that would be something I don't know. I usually find something between, like two and 10 pixels. It kind of depends. It's gonna zoom out a little bit, and so notice. See how now it's more about color than detail by zoom out even more. It's much more about color than details, so I'll probably put something around. I don't know, 3.5 for this one. All right, so I'll hit. Okay, It's now I have a blurry layer can. The next one is where we're going to extract our detail. So this is the more complicated button parts. I'm gonna say this really, really slow, and we'll do it again. All right, So you click on your, um, hi area and you go to and okay, please note rate an asterisk. This depends. The numbers you enter here depends on if you working with an eight bit file or a 16 bit file. So you have to know which one you're working with right now. I'm working with 16 so I'm gonna give you the numbers for 16. We're going to do it that way, but it's actually different if it's an eight bit I I know why, but it's very basically the numbers that you're working with in reference. There's much bigger numbers if you're working with 16 bit versus smaller, so it'll change the way it interacts. Difference. So all right, so let's just say you're being good people and you're using beautiful 16 bit files and you have a computer that can handle it. So you go up to image and you go to apply image. All right, So what you want is to school here where it says select and you're applying low, Okay, doing a select low, and then you're changing the blend mode. And in this example, the blend mode in this particular one is supposed to be ad. Okay. All right, so now it's looking old, funky. Um, So the next things that you need to do is you need to make sure that Enver is checked. Good. And you need thio sux. Doubts are missing scale. The numbers that you need here are two and zero. Okay. And can you see what it's doing? See how it just gave you detail? So let me make sure run through that one more time. You selected low. So you made sure you went ahead and applied low. You're going thio. Um, do add invert selection to for scale zero for off set. And then you don't want transparency or masks selected. You hit okay. And to see it pulled out detail. You just made a layer that's all detailed. Noticed, no color value, no information in it. Now to make it go back to looking normal, you change the blend mode of this layer Now that you've hit okay, too linear light or July near light right here. Okay, let your light. And now, if you look at your before and after, nothing's changed at all. The photo is identical in your before after, okay, because what you've done, all you've done is separated. Here's one for the color kind of the smoothness. And here's one for detail. Or if you look without the low, see how superstar. But it is so you could actually use this process if you understand how it works to sharpen things, cause you could pull out a detail there and layer it on multiple times. So it's if you really understand how it works and you pay attention, you kind of move these things around. You understand? It's separating details so you can sharpen just the detail instead of sharpening kind of skin color and skin tone. So what you do from here, um, is this is the kind of retouching part. So if I want to smooth out blotchy nous and skin, I can do it on the low area, and it won't touch any of the detail so I can come over here and I can start. For example, grab a clone stamp. And I'm just showing you now with the low looks like and I can clone and maybe like enough these highlights here a little bit. And I don't want current and blow, actually just want current. You only want to be on your current lawyer, so I'm gonna smooth this out of it. And if you had any blotchy Nissen the skin CEO, it kind of got rid of detail there. If you look, it's smeared it a little bit. But it's okay because you have a layer that has detail, so it doesn't really matter. And maybe down here, I'm thinking, Okay, that looks a little a little blotchy, so I can kinda cleanup around here. You can actually paint colors you can grab like we did before. When I had the channel selection, we painted color. You could do the same thing you could more correctly paint color in. Right now, I'm just kind of clicking around and smoothing things out. It's come down here where her chin iss. And so before, if I were coming down and I'm cloning and I'm smoothing out her chin. I lose the detail, but I turned back on my detail there, and there's all the detail. So this is the best way to retouch. It's more time consuming, but this is the way that is, gives you the most. Control maintains the most detail, and again it's free as opposed to having a plug in. But I do find my flooding to be useful. And I'm sorry that this ah tool pops up with the bottom every time I click a button. But okay, I'll try to move it down a little bit. So I'm just smoothing out the chin and so I can click and you can just click around and smooth out blemishes and anything that you need gone. I'm just doing a lot of klicks in case you're wondering what this things doing. So watch. Turn this on. I food that all out. I smoothed out if you looking down here to the chin, but look how the texture is 100% there. So that's what I would I would tell you. The thing to keep in mind is that this is the way that you can maintain every bit of skin detail where you completely smooth things out, and then I'm out of time for this section. So what was I can kind of finish up with is, if you go to your high pass or go to your detail, you can clone out detail there, so there's blemishes or detail. You don't want bags under the eyes, pockmarks, whatever it may be your clone out on high, you smooth out on low, and then you always maintain all the detail that you want.