Frequency Separation with Lisa Carney

My name is Lisa Carney and we're going to be covering frequency separation. I am a finisher, designer, retoucher, educator, generally a Photoshop artist, and I use frequency separation for almost all of my jobs. What my plan here is to break down frequency separation so it's more accessible to you guys for your daily jobs. So what is frequency separation? Well we're going to break it down. and make it less scary, less overwhelming, let's just say. And by that, we're going to go through skin retouching, fabric retouching, and product retouching, all in the method of learning how to use this for whatever your jobs may call for. So who might this class be good for? Retouchers, photographers who hire retouchers, photographers who have to do their own retouching jobs, and designers who have to do quick... retouching jobs, cleanups, that kind of thing. So let's break it down. What is frequency separation? Frequency separation is actually a technique. It's a way of changing the way you're working in Photoshop and it separates your image into two sections. What's normally called high frequency and low frequency. And what that means is your picture is separated by details. So like skin, hair, fine lines, imperfections, scars, fabric lines, that kind of thing. And the other section is low frequency, which is light areas, color, tone, wrinkles. And it's really, this is kind of the technical jargon about frequency separation that I know really freaked me out when I first started. And I didn't like the definition, which made me not want to do it, to be honest. So let's break it down a little differently. Why you want to use frequency separation is it lets you do really precise retouching and gives you control where you're separating the texture from the color and the tone which lets you kind of be sloppier to tell you the truth or faster because you don't have to worry about cloning color and tone and Texture this is really important so you can modify the texture you can add and remove without affecting the image's tone or color, which means you can do it faster. This is really important and I want to let you know that frequency separation is absolutely not just for portrait work. It's for many things. Most people think it's just for portraiture, but it's just not true. So let me show you a few samples where frequency separation is really good. It's great to use on portraiture. So if you have a lot of work to do, people, catalog, that sort of thing. It's a great way of retouching very quickly and I'm gonna break this process down for you and walk through it. Now let's talk about something it's a little maybe uncomfortable to talk about but how far do you go? Now on this image I don't think her freckles should come out. Client came to me and said I want the freckles out. I'm just gonna show you how you can do this. How you can kind of push it too far. I do not want to tell you that you should be pushing it this far. I just like to show you how to do it and then you guys are the arbitrator of your taste and you can decide how far to go or not go. I just want you to know how to do it. It's done a lot. It's catalog work, it's wedding photography, editorial, family portraiture. It's just a technique to show you how you can quickly do it. You can also pull it back 50% if you need to. and I'll show you how to do that as well. It's excellent to use on men. To retouch men, it's easy peasy, lemon squeezy, and again, you guys can decide how far you go. I'm just going to walk you through the process. It's fantastic for removing things like skin blemishes or tan lines or, you know, let's say someone's shot out in a scene and their legs are really white but their arms are really tan. This is a great way of correcting that kind of thing. It is fantastic for cleaning up seamlesses and sets. You know how it is you have a bunch of people you shoot 50 people in a day and by the second person the seamless is all torn up and looks terrible. It's a really fast method of doing that kind of cleanup. Oh this job my heavens. So you can imagine in the old days you'd have to try to clone or heal in between each one of those herringbone patterns on the nylons. What a nightmare. Frequency separation allows you to clean up quickly and easily but have the tone still there. I'm going to walk you through this process. Fantastic for fabric or product. So in this case if you need to change the the drink so this beverage had cinnamon spice in it and then they didn't want the spice in it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy with frequency separation. In addition to that we were able to easily take out the reflection of the set. You can see on the right it's removed and then even the foam on the top the client didn't like how the stylist did it. They changed their mind. They wanted it smoother. Again frequency separation is a perfect technique rather than straight healing or cloning. It can also be used for more advanced situations like this where this tattoo would need to be removed. We're not going to cover this in the basic class but I just want you to kind of in your minds eye think about this as a possibility if you have a problem like this where the client comes back to you and says tattoo needs to come out and you've got two hours. How are you going to do it? Frequency separation is your key. Let's get to the nuts and bolts. Let's unravel the mystery of what frequency separation is. So I'm going to call this the recipe and very much like a recipe depending on the quantity. that you're cooking, baking, whatever you like for an analogy. You may change some of the numbers here, but the overall recipe is going to stay the same. So here's how it goes. You're going to have your original image and then you're going to make a frequency separation folder. I'm going to demystify this process and we're going to drill down into how to do it, but I really want you to understand kind of what it is first. then I'm going to walk you through a ton of different samples and different usages so you really get a good grasp and understanding. So the high frequency layer you're going to have inside this folder is going to be what I'm going to call the gray layer from now on which is texture and fine detail. High frequency equals gray layer. The low frequency inside this folder is going to be the color and tone. From now on I will refer to that as the blur layer. So once again the blur layer is going to be where the low frequency is found. Listen the reason I do this is because I think the terminology is important. It can get really confusing and let's just simplify here. All right now once you've made your frequency separation folder, again I'm going to go through that in just a minute and show you how to do that. If you turn that folder on and off your image should look exactly the same. This is really important. That means you've actually created your recipe correctly and it is not a step you want to miss. All right. Okay. Let's dive further inside. What is a blur layer? The blur layer is going to be the blurred color and tone. And how you're going to do that for this basic recipe is you're going to use Gaussian blur. All right. Now how much blur? Ah, we're going to get to that in just a minute because that is where the size will make a difference. I'll talk about that in just a second. But what you're trying to look for is you want to obscure fine detail and lines, that kind of thing. All right, that's going to be your guide. The second part of this folder is going to be the gray layer. And how you're going to make this is you're going to use the function inside Photoshop called applied image. And you find that under the image menu. Don't panic. I'm going to explain this ad nauseum to you. So I just want you to know what it is right now. Oddly enough, the second stage, the gray layer, is going to be on top of the blur layer. That is very important, the order of these two layers. All right, we're going to walk through how to do it. And the very important thing to know is that this portion of the recipe for this basic frequency separation is never going to change. So while you may change the quantity of the blur, you are not going to change the settings on the apply image function for the gray layer. Okay, now here's a basic guide for the blur. I do not know what image you're working on. I do not know what size file you are working on. And these two functions matter. So I'm gonna give you a guideline. The guideline is this. If your image is somewhere between 5 and 45 megabytes probably a blur 5 will do you well. Okay? And if your image is 50 to let's say 150 megabytes you'll probably be okay with a blur 7. Now, if your image is bigger than that, like 150 megabytes plus, you're probably going to go for a 10. I want to be really clear. This is a general guideline depending on your image and your subject and your sharpness of the subject. But this is a great place to start. Now, let's get into the how. Let's get started on two different ways of doing actually the recipe making the frequency separation. Now as a caveat what I want to say to y'all is there's different ways of doing this just like baking there's different ways people like to create their blur create their frequency separation folders heck some people don't even put them in folders which I don't think is a good idea. And I'm just going to show you two methods for this course, but even though the methodology may change, the basic principles are exactly the same. OK, and once you get this down, you'll feel really comfortable. So let's get started. Basically, we're going to have an image here. And one of the things you're going to notice, you guys, is I am forever changing the images on this display or program or show. It's because I really want you to get acclimated to the idea that frequency separation is for all kinds of images. okay so one of the things I want you to look at with this image right now is you'll see I have a beginning image and a retouched image I'm gonna turn this off and on you'll notice on the beginning one there's some crosshairs and a few more liney kind of retouching needs like on the eye I'm gonna do it off and on for just a few minutes here why I did this is frequency separation is not good for this kind of detail work like crosshairs So I don't do it with frequency separation. I use frequency separation as a general rule for broad areas. Okay so that's why you see two different files here. Now in the recipe what I said is you have a base image. So this is my base image and I'm going to use the retouch layer and I need to make two copies of that base layer. How you choose to do that is your choice but I often just grab it by its name and drag it to the plus icon. There's one and do it again two. So I now have two layers. You can also do Command J or Control J to duplicate a layer. Now, once I have those two layers, what I'll do is hold the Shift key and click the two names, the two layers, and then I'll click the folder icon. And now I've made a layer set, and I'm going to call it FS for frequency separation. This is not necessary. However, this is really good housekeeping. Okay, this is how you keep your file in control. Now that I have the two layers, as I told you earlier, you're going to have one layer on the bottom called blur and one layer on the top called gray. You can call them high frequency and low frequency if that's what you like. Personally, I'd rather not. So my first order of business is to go to the blur layer. And how much am I going to blur it? Well, remember I said if you have a file that's, you know, what, 5 to 50 megabytes, chances are you're going to blur it 5. So I'm going to go blur. Filter blur gaussian blur and I'm going to pick five for this and what I'm looking for is I want to Basically remove the fine detail. Okay. Do you see that in the box here? so that's probably enough for this file you're gonna want to experiment with this and Some people prefer different types of blurring like surface blur or medium blur But let's just stick to this for right now. So I've now have made the blur layer easy peasy lemon squeezy In fact, if I turn the gray layer off, you can see it. There's my blur. Now, the gray layer, this is where it gets a little more complicated. So, take a breath and follow along. I'm going to go under Image, Apply Image. Most folks have never been here in their whole life. That's alright. Once I go to Apply Image, it's going to default to most likely this. You want to go down step by step. I'm going to go to merged under layer. I don't want the merge layer. I want the blur layer. Step number one. Step number two. I do not want to multiply it. I want to subtract it. And here's the crazy thing. What you're actually doing is punching out the color and tone which is going to leave you with this gray layer. I know this sounds weird but just bear with me. and then you're going to want to leave the scale at 2 at 128. this almost always never changes with an 8-bit image in fact i've never changed it except for if i worked on a 16-bit image i'm going to hit ok so what you'll see here i have a blur layer and i have a gray layer what the heck this looks crazy right no it doesn't there's another step and that next step is take that gray layer and put it on linear light now do you remember I said earlier if you turn the folder off and on the image should stay exactly the same so I've now made a frequency separation workspace And I'm now ready to do my retouching because as I said earlier, just making the frequency separation does nothing. You're just creating a space into which you can work. So what we're going to do now is we're going to actually do some retouching on her. And then as we proceed through the course, I will show you the other method of creating your frequency separation folder. As we get started, I'd like you to see that there's a few tools that you're going to use quite a bit in this. So, for example, on the blur layer, you're often going to want to use the blur tool. Brush tool which I use all the time, smudge tool and gradient tool and the idea here is that you're gonna be smudging and moving either pixels that are already there or adding to on another layer and remember the blur layer is blurry so the tools you're using are not sharp let's just call it that okay and then on the gray layer you'll more often than not be using the healing brush or the clone stamp or the spot heal brush because again you're dealing with detail and you want to keep sharp sharp. It'll make more sense as we go along. In addition I love using filters on my layers so for the blur layer I'm more often than not going to use the Gaussian blur in addition to doing the initial recipe and also surface blur. I often use surface blur. It's really handy and it does quick large areas. On the gray layer the filters I use most often are dust and scratch and surface blur from the blur side. Both of them really handy in cleaning up detail on the gray layer. Let's get started on the fun part. So first order of business I'm going to suggest without fail is always make a copy, command J, of your blur layer just in case you really screw up and you need to go backwards. All right and as I said on the blur layer I like to use all sorts of things. I like to use the blur tool. to start blurring it down. It's gonna be a little hard for you guys to see so just bear with me for a second. Or I also like to use the smudge tool that'll allow me to smudge areas. Do you see that? I'm going to undo it. I'm just smudging some areas here. So this is what a lot of people do when they first start using frequency separation. I'm going to tell you here's what I like to do. I like to make a new layer, a new blank layer, and I'm going to not name it because I'm about to change it in one second. Well maybe I should name it paint and I'm going to do paint so that what I like to do is I like to for example the bridge of the nose right here I want to lighten it I will sample with the paintbrush a color nearby and I will start painting it at a low opacity so let's say I'm going to go to a flow of 50 I'm using the same color and I'm painting under the eyes I'm not going to worry about her eyeballs because I'm going to take that out later I'm sampling color here by the chin And I'm painting, sampling a color here by the side of the mouth, and I'm just lightly painting. I'm going to turn this off and on and show you the difference. Off and on. Off, on. So you can kind of see this is starting. Now I painted into her eyeball. That's yucky. No big deal. It's a separate layer. I'm going to add a mask by clicking on the add a mask icon. I'm going to paint with black, and I'm just going to paint off any paint that smudged into the wrong area. So again, I'm going to off and on this for just a second. Off, on. You can see it's starting to really quickly change the image. I'm going to merge that down, merge down, so that I have one blur layer. I like to keep it all kind of neat and tidy. Now the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make a new layer and I'm going to call it gradient. I love using the gradient tool. And I will select the gradient tool on radial. That's the gradient tool on radial. And I will select an area, so let's say I want to add a little lightness to this side of the cheek. I just click and drag and I can add some lightness. Now that's way too much, so I'm going to hit 50% opacity on that layer. And look how much more flexibility I have. Oh, I painted into her eyeball. No big deal. Add a layer mask. Go to your paintbrush tool and click. So can you kind of see how this is starting to get really fun? And when I'm done, I tend to merge down just so I have a retouch layer and a non-retouch layer. See how this is going? Let me show you some more. It's one of my favorite things to do. I'm going to take the lasso tool, L for lasso. I'm going to select a big portion of her forehead, for example, and I'm going to hit command J or control J. And what that's going to do, it's going to put a little floating layer of her forehead. And then I'm going to use the filters. I'm going to go filter, gaussian blur, and I'll do, let's say 20. And do you see how that quickly blurred out that whole area? Now what you should notice is that's way too much. It's too heavy handed. No big deal. Take the opacity down to 50. And this way I can go through the file and keep going. And I'm gonna do another section down here. I'm gonna do her neck. Big section on her neck. Command J. Filter, I'm going to use the same one I just did. And look how quickly that smoothed out the tone on her neck. Again, it might be too much. I'll just put the opacity at 50. Now what you guys should see is, oh, I got a line right there. That's not so attractive. Well, the line is on the gray layer, most of it. Oh, look at that, you guys. There's a little tone left over. Do you see that little line? Go to your retouch layer. I'm going to use the heal tool. I'm just going to heal that out. See what's really awesome possum sauce about this whole frequency separation is you can go back and forth from layer to layer and make your changes. Now we're going to head to the gray layer for a minute. We're not done with the blur layer, but we need to kind of go back and forth from each side. Before we do the gray section or the high frequency, I need to talk to you about something so we don't get lost. You're going to make a copy of the gray layer, just like we made a copy of the blur layer. However, when you do that, that copy of the gray layer is going to be on linear light and you're going to notice that your picture gets super crunchy and gross. So what you need to do immediately after that is clip the top gray layer to the the copy of it to the bottom gray layer. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. You can either go to the layer menu and click create clipping group or you hold command shift G and when you have done this When you have done this, two things are going to happen. One, an arrow is going to appear on the top gray layer, and then an underline is going to appear on the bottom or clipping layer, and that's how you're going to know you did it right. And when you have done this, this is the most important, you need to switch that top gray copy to normal mode. Honest to God, this is the one mistake everybody makes when they do their frequency separation retouching. So please do not skip this. So here we are ready to start with gray layer. As with the blur layer I'm going to have you make a copy command j and as I said in the earlier lecture what we need to do is clip the top gray layer to the bottom. A quick key to do that is option click on the line in between the two layers. Now look at this for a second. I'm going to turn that layer on and off for a second and holy criminy she looks terrible. Why that is is that layer that you just copied is on linear light. You simply need to make that normal. And now we're ready to do the copying. Or excuse me, the retouching. Alright, so let's get started on the retouching. As I said before, I often use the clone tool or the heal tool. And you've got to keep in mind, what are you trying to do here? So what I'm trying to do is I'm actually trying to get rid of some of these fine lines. So I'm going to start with the clone tool. Option click an area to start with. And do this. Oh my goodness, what has happened? This will happen to most of you. When you start using the clone or heal tool, you need to go up to the toolbar setting and make sure you have it set to current layer only. All right, so make sure you do that. And so now I'm going to option click to start a section. And what's so amazing about this, I'm just keep option clicking, you can hear my little mouse tapping or my pen, is it allows you to clone areas of detail, not tone, but detail without having to worry about the color. You'll see in this area she's got a blemish or a mole. If you want to take it out, that tone's going to have to be taken out here underneath. Okay, so I just want to be really clear about that. In fact, what I'm going to do for just a second is take the heal tool and heal that out and go back to the gray layer. Listen, with frequency separation you're going to be doing this all the time going back and forth between layer and layer. So I'm back on the gray copy and I'm just cloning out really quickly easy peasy lemon squeezy cloning out some of these lines and marks oops I made a mistake there no big deal some of this texture here I'd like to reduce and you just keep going until you get something you like and why I'd make a second copy I'm gonna do some more stuff up here is what if you go too far or what if you want to take a look to see how it looks before and after you can do it so quickly by just turning off and on that extra layer lines come out not the tone but the high detail lines so with big lines like smile lines you're going to have to fix them both on the blur layer and the retouch layer and sometimes you want to leave the tone but you just want to take the texture out it's really up to you and your client and i'm going to tell you this without fail what happens to most folks is you tend to go too far when you first start No big deal because you have an extra layer. You can turn it off and on. You can change the opacity of this layer if you've gone too far. So you have some flexibility. And I'm going to tell you the layer that more often than not that you're going to need to turn back on, meaning go a lower percentage. will be this tone layer. That's where people usually go a little too far. That's 50% opacity, that's 100. Now let's have some fun with this and try some filters. I'm going to use a filter on the gray layer. Always please make a copy to be safe. So command J, control J to make a copy, option click on the line in between. It's exactly what we did before and I'm going to call this filter just so we know what we did. And I'm going to zoom in here a little bit so we can see. I'm going to go ahead and go to my filters and I'm going to use my noise filter dust and scratch on the gray layer and watch what this does. It's a great cleanup job. The radiuses are going to change depending on the size of your file. I'm going to pick let's do it before and after. I think I'm going to do something like let's I like even numbers for the most part. I'm going to pick 20 and 7 for this particular piece. There is no right answer for this, okay? You're going to have to experiment. And then let's turn that off and on. And look how that really smoothed a lot of her skin out. But heavens, it ruined her eyes. No big deal. I'm going to put a black mask. Option, hold the add a mask icon. And then I'm going to take my paintbrush. And I'm going to make sure I have white as my foreground color. And I'm just going to paint this in. And this is a way to lickety split, clean up skin texture. or texture on fabric or texture on fiber products excuse me really quickly let me turn this off and on before after before after and the cool thing is I can do that logistically wherever I want by painting it in so I'm just gonna paint it around this area I'll tell you for the most part you want to avoid things like eyes and eyebrows and eyelashes because it'll mess it up now let's try another filter I'm going to on this bottom copy, the blur, I'm going to make another copy and I'm going to call it filter. You should probably call it the filter you're using, but we'll get to that in a minute. And I want to show you something. I'm going to do blur, surface blur, and I'm going to change the radius on this. And can you see what's happening here? Do a before and after. Before. After, before, after. This is another way of actually changing, I'm gonna cancel that, changing the blur of the skin underneath. I'm gonna tell you, for the most part, I don't use it too often. I would much rather make a large section. I'm on the copy of the blur layer. I'm going to select two sections of her cheeks. I'm going to hit Command J. And then I'm going to go back to the good old Gaussian Blur and do it that way. Look how much blur it gave. I'm going to stick to that 20. This is what it looks like when it's done, right? It's just a little, two little crescents. I'm going to do before and after. I like it, but it is definitely too much. So once again, I'm going to take that opacity down to something like 50. Yep, I think I'm good with that. And then I'm going to just merge that with the bottom layer and call that retouch. So let's just take a look. Where are we at? Before, after. Before, after. And as I said, the area that most likely is going to get overdone is on the blur layer. And you could, if you need to, pull back the opacity. Or you can add a layer mask to that and paint out with maybe a 50% brush. Paint out if you just went a little too far in some areas. Can you see the control you can get? It's just amazing. And just for giggles I want to throw in a little extra. Do you know what else you can do? You can do eyeshadow here really easy. I'm gonna make a new layer and I'm gonna call it eyeshadow. I'm gonna pick a strange color just so you can see it. Maybe teal. I'm right above the retouch blur layer and I'm going to paint that in. Now that looks ridiculous, there's no question of it, but what you can do is change that to color mode. And when you change it to color mode, it gives you a lot more flexibility. And then I can just paint it out. where I don't want it. I am going to have to fix the tips of her eyelashes, but that's okay. But look how quickly and easily and natural that looks. Not bad, huh? Let's just quickly recap this section, okay? So here's what we did. We had an original image. then there was some initial retouching on things that are fine lines like hair, crosshairs, that kind of thing, because frequency separation is not good for that. Here is the frequency separation folder, on, off, on, off. And if you look inside, what we have is we have a copy of the blur layer on. and off and we have two layers on the gray one is a standard heal or cloning layer and the other is that dust and scratch filter we used again I want to remind you if you think you went too far before after remember your first place to look to pull back on the retouching is the retouch copy you know the blur layer you could take that down by 50% see if you like that who knows Or you always could go back to the frequency separation and change the entire folder down 50%. I got to tell you though, imagine how fast your workflow can go. Because this image would take me about 10 minutes. Once you get in the habit of this, it's fast. You'll have a formula. And if you have a whole bunch of images, you'll get faster and faster and faster for each one. It'll be like a formula. Let's take a look at 10 minute retouching samples using frequency separation. Before, after. I'm going to zoom in so you can see a little better. That's after, that's before. Again, these are about 10 minute jobs. So let's take a look at what we have here. By now you should feel fairly comfortable at what you're looking at here on the screen. So let's dissect this. First of all, we have the initial blur and then I did a Gaussian blur 15 and I labeled it as such. That was on a copy. It's masked in very loosely. Then I did a little bit of extra paint just on this camera right side I'm going to show you what that looks like real quickly It quite literally is a tiny bit of paint just to even out that hot highlight then on the gray layer You have your traditional gray layer You have your copy on which you retouched and I realized that skin was going to be a little problematic So once again, I did a filter and this time I did a dust and scratch at 10.5 and I masked it in So again before and after just on the filter and then overall original image Not bad for a 10 minute retouching job. Retouching men can often be quick and easy. Here's a after and a before. After, before. Let me show you how easy this is. When you open it up you'll see what I've done here. I've got a blur layer that is the standard blur. I made a copy of it and I used the dust and scratch filter on 40 slash 0 for the setting. Please notice I keep writing my settings in there so when I come back to the job later I know what I did. That's what it looks like. without the mask and then the paint layer Just a teeny little thing over his eye. I'll show you that in one second. Teeny little paint right on the side. So let me show you how quick and easy this can be. The gray layer is nothing. The gray layer is the original gray. So let me throw that layer away, and in fact I'll throw the paint layer away. And I'm going to make a copy. There's the original with the gray. I make a copy of the blur layer, and I'm going to use dust and scratch. And I said 40 slash 0. I just happen to know that. You'll have to go back and rename it. Noise, Dust and Scratch, 40 slash 0. Hit OK. Put a black mask on it by holding the Option key. And paint it in. it helps to have your paintbrush turned on there you go look how fast that is super duper super duper fast and you can decide how much or how little you want to do your client may want less the client want may want more but it's so easy and the thing it's the easiest about men which I really am envious of is they don't have to often have the skin texture layered retouched because people like it when there's more of a texture to them before after. Well that was about 30 seconds worth of work. You can get really fast with frequency separation. Let's look at frequency separation on a product. It's no different than a face. So here's our after, here's our before, let's dissect it. You guys should be really familiar with this the recipe now. So here's the recipe. You've got your standard blur layer and you've got your standard gray layer. On this particular image as you can see by the titling I copied the blur layer and I used the dust and scratch filter on it. And this was a pretty severe dust and scratch. And I painted that in just where I wanted it. So I'm gonna do a before and after there. So I got rid of a lot of this area. I really was having trouble with this highlight in the center, so I did something different. I used the smudge brush on that to smudge it out. Look, there's before and after. So as I said earlier in the class, you can use a paintbrush, you can use smudge brush, you can use clone, you can use heal. And then in addition I added a little paint to get rid of the highlights on the top and some other spots. Let's take a look at what those highlights look like. Look it's just blobs of paint just added on top to get rid of some tone. Again before, after. Now let's take a look at the blur layer. On the blur layer I had to excuse me on the gray layer I did the extra fine detail. It might be a little hard for you guys to see on the screen. before after so when you've done your smudging or you've done your painting you've got to get rid of the detail that's left in those areas Okay, so pretty easy. I'm going to say this took me about 20 minutes to figure out, but once I had it figured out, the rest of the cups in the series went pretty darn quick. Let's take another look at a great use for frequency separation, and that is seamless cleaning. Oftentimes you'll have these jobs where you have to get these seamless pieces cleaned up fast and easy, and there's not a lot of money for it. Let's dissect it. Again, it's basic frequency separation, so let's see what we have here. We have, like we started on all the other ones, we have the blur layer and the gray layer. These are original basic frequency separation. And then I started with a copy of the blur layer. And what I did was I did a Gaussian blur 20. And I realized, I smudged a little bit on there, I can see as well, this wasn't gonna cut it, at least alone. So after I did that I've said you know what we're just down to basic paint. So I've made the paint layer and let me show you what that looks like. It quite literally is just paint. Paint right on top. Now had to be masked in. It's very loosely masked in. Do you see that? I covered the feet. I didn't care about the feet at all because I knew I was going to mask out this frequency separation. And let me tell you, sometimes the best course of action is to work with a broad brush, not try to get real tight and accurate, but broad strokes, and then mask it out later. Now as you can see very clearly here on the detail, my goodness, there's a lot of detail here. So on the gray layer where the detail is. I did a copy of it and I just used a dust and scratch filter on 30 slash 3 and then did a little bit of cloning. So that cleaned it up pretty darn good. And then I've got a problem, which is now it's all over her feet. No big deal. I masked in the frequency separation. Oh, I just noticed I missed a little spot there. I hate it when you see those things on demos. Clean that up real quick. So. Keep in mind, when you use the frequency separation function, you can also mask that whole folder. Who says you can't? And then that way, you can very quickly, in about five to ten minutes, get a seamless cleaned up without having to pay attention to really imagine if you had to smudge exactly just to the border of her feet. That would have been really difficult. So again, same story as before. Filter, Gaussian Blur, some paint, some dust and scratch filter with a little cloning. and then put a mask on the entire layer set and mask it in or out as needed. One of the things I love about frequency separation is it can really get you out of a jam quickly. So this is the original and then this is the after. Before, after. Let's dissect it. Again, it's the same formula as everything we've discussed already. It's just a question of how you use it. So once again, here's the basic. frequency separation the blur and the gray and on this one I did a dust and scratch 40 30 this is what it looks like and I masked it in okay that's all on the paint layer on the blur and it's not quite there so I did the same thing I've always done which is another paint layer again just a little bit of extra paint to finish it out Again, masked in. And that's pretty darn good. Let's do a before and after on that. Before, after. Now I just have a few problem areas, and that's going to get handled on the gray retouching layer. So I just had to retouch a couple little spots. And I got to tell you, that beats the heck out of the old school way of doing this before. Do you see that, that tiny little spot there? Really small retouching. I got to tell you though in the old days this would have taken me forever to retouch but now that was about 15 minutes. At the beginning of the class I told you there's two different ways of starting up your frequency separation folder. In fact there's many ways but I'm just giving you two for right now. And the second way I'd like to tell you about is using actions. So I have a frequency separation called basic frequency separation and I'm going to click on that. And then I'm going to go back. Back to my layers and you will see Photoshop has already started this for me. In fact, let me undo that. I'm going to delete that. I'm going to pull out my layers for a second just so you can see the action in progress. I'm going to click on the button mode for the action and there you go. Bada bing, you've got your basic frequency separation all started for you. This action is available for you with this class. However, I would like to ask you to do it by yourself first for a while by hand as I like to call it. just to get acclimated to the process and then go ahead and use the action. Besides using frequency separation for beauty work, I do a ton of entertainment print work. So that's for TV, streaming, theater. And inevitably what happens is they need to do a lot of different buys and extensions. So for fabric, frequency separation, utterly amazing. So let's do this. Let's go ahead and hit the action that you guys will now have from the course. There's my basic frequency separation and here's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to make a paint layer. I'm going to make a brand new layer. I'm going to call it paint. I'm going to pick the gradient tool set on radial and I'm just going to option click and start clicking on some color samples I have. Oops that one's a little dark. No big deal. Let's do a new one and I'm just trying to get a little variegated coloring and tone. I'm not worrying that it's going over her back because as I said before I'll take that out and so now what I'll do is I'll put a mask on that paint layer I'll take the airbrush tool I'm holding the control and option key to make my brush bigger. You can also increase the opacity by hitting the numbers on your keyboard and I'm just going to paint that out real quickly. So what happens in my business a lot of times people need to put text or type and that's why you have to get rid of all this detail. You'll see that there's still that detail from the detail layer. I'm going to go ahead and make a copy of the gray layer, Command J. Hold the option key, click it on the line in between to group it. Turn it off linear light and put it on normal just like we've been doing for every single one. And then I'm just going to hold the option key, use the clone tool and start cloning out these lines. It'll take me just minutes, literally minutes. Hopefully you can see this. I don't want to bore you with this. But I'm trying to kind of show you how fast and easy you can get this done. And in fact, you know what, can I show you guys something kind of another trick? It's a little advanced, but I feel like you guys have gotten the swing of things here. You can also put a brand new layer filled with the color of 50% gray. I'm going to hit OK. There's nothing on that layer. I'm going to Shift-Delete to get the fill background color or foreground menu. I'm going to select, you guys will probably default to foreground. I'm going to... Click on the color 50% gray. I'm going to hit OK. Ah, my picture disappeared. But what I'm going to do is do the option click again on the line in between. And you'll notice all the texture disappears. So what I'm going to do is put a black mask option, click on the mask icon. And then I'm going to take a paintbrush with the color white, paint on the mask. And I'm going to paint that in and all I will be left with is the tone, the color and tone. that's underneath. I'm going to make my paintbrush 100% opaque, which it is not right now, and see all I'm left with the tone. And now, do you remember what I said earlier? You'll often go back and forth between the paint blur layer and the gray layer. So now look how quickly I can get rid of all those folds. and where the client needs to put their type, they can easily do it so fast. And again, I got some overspray on her back. Not a problem. Go back to the paint layer and make sure you paint all that out. What was that, two minutes? Pretty darn easy. Thank you for joining me for the basics of frequency separation. Hope I made it a little less intimidating. Please make sure to make sure please please please to make copies of your blur layer and your gray layer before you proceed just so in case you make a mistake and go backwards and there's so much more to frequency separation and once you get your feet wet you really feel comfortable come and join me for the advanced frequency separation. Thank you.

So what is frequency separation? Well we're going to break it down. and make it less scary, less overwhelming, let's just say. And by that, we're going to go through skin retouching, fabric retouching, and product retouching, all in the method of learning how to use this for whatever your jobs may call for. So who might this class be good for?

Retouchers, photographers who hire retouchers, photographers who have to do their own retouching jobs, and designers who have to do quick... retouching jobs, cleanups, that kind of thing. So let's break it down. What is frequency separation? Frequency separation is actually a technique.

It's a way of changing the way you're working in Photoshop and it separates your image into two sections. What's normally called high frequency and low frequency. And what that means is your picture is separated by details.

So like skin, hair, fine lines, imperfections, scars, fabric lines, that kind of thing. And the other section is low frequency, which is light areas, color, tone, wrinkles. And it's really, this is kind of the technical jargon about frequency separation that I know really freaked me out when I first started. And I didn't like the definition, which made me not want to do it, to be honest.

So let's break it down a little differently. Why you want to use frequency separation is it lets you do really precise retouching and gives you control where you're separating the texture from the color and the tone which lets you kind of be sloppier to tell you the truth or faster because you don't have to worry about cloning color and tone and Texture this is really important so you can modify the texture you can add and remove without affecting the image's tone or color, which means you can do it faster. This is really important and I want to let you know that frequency separation is absolutely not just for portrait work. It's for many things. Most people think it's just for portraiture, but it's just not true.

So let me show you a few samples where frequency separation is really good. It's great to use on portraiture. So if you have a lot of work to do, people, catalog, that sort of thing.

It's a great way of retouching very quickly and I'm gonna break this process down for you and walk through it. Now let's talk about something it's a little maybe uncomfortable to talk about but how far do you go? Now on this image I don't think her freckles should come out. Client came to me and said I want the freckles out.

I'm just gonna show you how you can do this. How you can kind of push it too far. I do not want to tell you that you should be pushing it this far.

I just like to show you how to do it and then you guys are the arbitrator of your taste and you can decide how far to go or not go. I just want you to know how to do it. It's done a lot. It's catalog work, it's wedding photography, editorial, family portraiture.

It's just a technique to show you how you can quickly do it. You can also pull it back 50% if you need to. and I'll show you how to do that as well. It's excellent to use on men. To retouch men, it's easy peasy, lemon squeezy, and again, you guys can decide how far you go.

I'm just going to walk you through the process. It's fantastic for removing things like skin blemishes or tan lines or, you know, let's say someone's shot out in a scene and their legs are really white but their arms are really tan. This is a great way of correcting that kind of thing. It is fantastic for cleaning up seamlesses and sets.

You know how it is you have a bunch of people you shoot 50 people in a day and by the second person the seamless is all torn up and looks terrible. It's a really fast method of doing that kind of cleanup. Oh this job my heavens.

So you can imagine in the old days you'd have to try to clone or heal in between each one of those herringbone patterns on the nylons. What a nightmare. Frequency separation allows you to clean up quickly and easily but have the tone still there. I'm going to walk you through this process. Fantastic for fabric or product.

So in this case if you need to change the the drink so this beverage had cinnamon spice in it and then they didn't want the spice in it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy with frequency separation. In addition to that we were able to easily take out the reflection of the set.

You can see on the right it's removed and then even the foam on the top the client didn't like how the stylist did it. They changed their mind. They wanted it smoother. Again frequency separation is a perfect technique rather than straight healing or cloning.

It can also be used for more advanced situations like this where this tattoo would need to be removed. We're not going to cover this in the basic class but I just want you to kind of in your minds eye think about this as a possibility if you have a problem like this where the client comes back to you and says tattoo needs to come out and you've got two hours. How are you going to do it? Frequency separation is your key. Let's get to the nuts and bolts.

Let's unravel the mystery of what frequency separation is. So I'm going to call this the recipe and very much like a recipe depending on the quantity. that you're cooking, baking, whatever you like for an analogy. You may change some of the numbers here, but the overall recipe is going to stay the same. So here's how it goes.

You're going to have your original image and then you're going to make a frequency separation folder. I'm going to demystify this process and we're going to drill down into how to do it, but I really want you to understand kind of what it is first. then I'm going to walk you through a ton of different samples and different usages so you really get a good grasp and understanding. So the high frequency layer you're going to have inside this folder is going to be what I'm going to call the gray layer from now on which is texture and fine detail.

High frequency equals gray layer. The low frequency inside this folder is going to be the color and tone. From now on I will refer to that as the blur layer.

So once again the blur layer is going to be where the low frequency is found. Listen the reason I do this is because I think the terminology is important. It can get really confusing and let's just simplify here.

All right now once you've made your frequency separation folder, again I'm going to go through that in just a minute and show you how to do that. If you turn that folder on and off your image should look exactly the same. This is really important. That means you've actually created your recipe correctly and it is not a step you want to miss. All right.

Okay. Let's dive further inside. What is a blur layer? The blur layer is going to be the blurred color and tone.

And how you're going to do that for this basic recipe is you're going to use Gaussian blur. All right. Now how much blur?

Ah, we're going to get to that in just a minute because that is where the size will make a difference. I'll talk about that in just a second. But what you're trying to look for is you want to obscure fine detail and lines, that kind of thing.

All right, that's going to be your guide. The second part of this folder is going to be the gray layer. And how you're going to make this is you're going to use the function inside Photoshop called applied image.

And you find that under the image menu. Don't panic. I'm going to explain this ad nauseum to you. So I just want you to know what it is right now.

Oddly enough, the second stage, the gray layer, is going to be on top of the blur layer. That is very important, the order of these two layers. All right, we're going to walk through how to do it.

And the very important thing to know is that this portion of the recipe for this basic frequency separation is never going to change. So while you may change the quantity of the blur, you are not going to change the settings on the apply image function for the gray layer. Okay, now here's a basic guide for the blur.

I do not know what image you're working on. I do not know what size file you are working on. And these two functions matter. So I'm gonna give you a guideline. The guideline is this.

If your image is somewhere between 5 and 45 megabytes probably a blur 5 will do you well. Okay? And if your image is 50 to let's say 150 megabytes you'll probably be okay with a blur 7. Now, if your image is bigger than that, like 150 megabytes plus, you're probably going to go for a 10. I want to be really clear.

This is a general guideline depending on your image and your subject and your sharpness of the subject. But this is a great place to start. Now, let's get into the how.

Let's get started on two different ways of doing actually the recipe making the frequency separation. Now as a caveat what I want to say to y'all is there's different ways of doing this just like baking there's different ways people like to create their blur create their frequency separation folders heck some people don't even put them in folders which I don't think is a good idea. And I'm just going to show you two methods for this course, but even though the methodology may change, the basic principles are exactly the same. OK, and once you get this down, you'll feel really comfortable. So let's get started.

Basically, we're going to have an image here. And one of the things you're going to notice, you guys, is I am forever changing the images on this display or program or show. It's because I really want you to get acclimated to the idea that frequency separation is for all kinds of images.

okay so one of the things I want you to look at with this image right now is you'll see I have a beginning image and a retouched image I'm gonna turn this off and on you'll notice on the beginning one there's some crosshairs and a few more liney kind of retouching needs like on the eye I'm gonna do it off and on for just a few minutes here why I did this is frequency separation is not good for this kind of detail work like crosshairs So I don't do it with frequency separation. I use frequency separation as a general rule for broad areas. Okay so that's why you see two different files here.

Now in the recipe what I said is you have a base image. So this is my base image and I'm going to use the retouch layer and I need to make two copies of that base layer. How you choose to do that is your choice but I often just grab it by its name and drag it to the plus icon. There's one and do it again two.

So I now have two layers. You can also do Command J or Control J to duplicate a layer. Now, once I have those two layers, what I'll do is hold the Shift key and click the two names, the two layers, and then I'll click the folder icon.

And now I've made a layer set, and I'm going to call it FS for frequency separation. This is not necessary. However, this is really good housekeeping. Okay, this is how you keep your file in control. Now that I have the two layers, as I told you earlier, you're going to have one layer on the bottom called blur and one layer on the top called gray.

You can call them high frequency and low frequency if that's what you like. Personally, I'd rather not. So my first order of business is to go to the blur layer.

And how much am I going to blur it? Well, remember I said if you have a file that's, you know, what, 5 to 50 megabytes, chances are you're going to blur it 5. So I'm going to go blur. Filter blur gaussian blur and I'm going to pick five for this and what I'm looking for is I want to Basically remove the fine detail. Okay.

Do you see that in the box here? so that's probably enough for this file you're gonna want to experiment with this and Some people prefer different types of blurring like surface blur or medium blur But let's just stick to this for right now. So I've now have made the blur layer easy peasy lemon squeezy In fact, if I turn the gray layer off, you can see it. There's my blur. Now, the gray layer, this is where it gets a little more complicated.

So, take a breath and follow along. I'm going to go under Image, Apply Image. Most folks have never been here in their whole life. That's alright. Once I go to Apply Image, it's going to default to most likely this.

You want to go down step by step. I'm going to go to merged under layer. I don't want the merge layer.

I want the blur layer. Step number one. Step number two. I do not want to multiply it. I want to subtract it.

And here's the crazy thing. What you're actually doing is punching out the color and tone which is going to leave you with this gray layer. I know this sounds weird but just bear with me. and then you're going to want to leave the scale at 2 at 128. this almost always never changes with an 8-bit image in fact i've never changed it except for if i worked on a 16-bit image i'm going to hit ok so what you'll see here i have a blur layer and i have a gray layer what the heck this looks crazy right no it doesn't there's another step and that next step is take that gray layer and put it on linear light now do you remember I said earlier if you turn the folder off and on the image should stay exactly the same so I've now made a frequency separation workspace And I'm now ready to do my retouching because as I said earlier, just making the frequency separation does nothing.

You're just creating a space into which you can work. So what we're going to do now is we're going to actually do some retouching on her. And then as we proceed through the course, I will show you the other method of creating your frequency separation folder. As we get started, I'd like you to see that there's a few tools that you're going to use quite a bit in this.

So, for example, on the blur layer, you're often going to want to use the blur tool. Brush tool which I use all the time, smudge tool and gradient tool and the idea here is that you're gonna be smudging and moving either pixels that are already there or adding to on another layer and remember the blur layer is blurry so the tools you're using are not sharp let's just call it that okay and then on the gray layer you'll more often than not be using the healing brush or the clone stamp or the spot heal brush because again you're dealing with detail and you want to keep sharp sharp. It'll make more sense as we go along.

In addition I love using filters on my layers so for the blur layer I'm more often than not going to use the Gaussian blur in addition to doing the initial recipe and also surface blur. I often use surface blur. It's really handy and it does quick large areas.

On the gray layer the filters I use most often are dust and scratch and surface blur from the blur side. Both of them really handy in cleaning up detail on the gray layer. Let's get started on the fun part.

So first order of business I'm going to suggest without fail is always make a copy, command J, of your blur layer just in case you really screw up and you need to go backwards. All right and as I said on the blur layer I like to use all sorts of things. I like to use the blur tool.

to start blurring it down. It's gonna be a little hard for you guys to see so just bear with me for a second. Or I also like to use the smudge tool that'll allow me to smudge areas.

Do you see that? I'm going to undo it. I'm just smudging some areas here. So this is what a lot of people do when they first start using frequency separation. I'm going to tell you here's what I like to do.

I like to make a new layer, a new blank layer, and I'm going to not name it because I'm about to change it in one second. Well maybe I should name it paint and I'm going to do paint so that what I like to do is I like to for example the bridge of the nose right here I want to lighten it I will sample with the paintbrush a color nearby and I will start painting it at a low opacity so let's say I'm going to go to a flow of 50 I'm using the same color and I'm painting under the eyes I'm not going to worry about her eyeballs because I'm going to take that out later I'm sampling color here by the chin And I'm painting, sampling a color here by the side of the mouth, and I'm just lightly painting. I'm going to turn this off and on and show you the difference. Off and on. Off, on.

So you can kind of see this is starting. Now I painted into her eyeball. That's yucky. No big deal.

It's a separate layer. I'm going to add a mask by clicking on the add a mask icon. I'm going to paint with black, and I'm just going to paint off any paint that smudged into the wrong area. So again, I'm going to off and on this for just a second.

Off, on. You can see it's starting to really quickly change the image. I'm going to merge that down, merge down, so that I have one blur layer.

I like to keep it all kind of neat and tidy. Now the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make a new layer and I'm going to call it gradient. I love using the gradient tool.

And I will select the gradient tool on radial. That's the gradient tool on radial. And I will select an area, so let's say I want to add a little lightness to this side of the cheek.

I just click and drag and I can add some lightness. Now that's way too much, so I'm going to hit 50% opacity on that layer. And look how much more flexibility I have. Oh, I painted into her eyeball. No big deal.

Add a layer mask. Go to your paintbrush tool and click. So can you kind of see how this is starting to get really fun? And when I'm done, I tend to merge down just so I have a retouch layer and a non-retouch layer.

See how this is going? Let me show you some more. It's one of my favorite things to do.

I'm going to take the lasso tool, L for lasso. I'm going to select a big portion of her forehead, for example, and I'm going to hit command J or control J. And what that's going to do, it's going to put a little floating layer of her forehead.

And then I'm going to use the filters. I'm going to go filter, gaussian blur, and I'll do, let's say 20. And do you see how that quickly blurred out that whole area? Now what you should notice is that's way too much.

It's too heavy handed. No big deal. Take the opacity down to 50. And this way I can go through the file and keep going. And I'm gonna do another section down here. I'm gonna do her neck.

Big section on her neck. Command J. Filter, I'm going to use the same one I just did. And look how quickly that smoothed out the tone on her neck. Again, it might be too much.

I'll just put the opacity at 50. Now what you guys should see is, oh, I got a line right there. That's not so attractive. Well, the line is on the gray layer, most of it.

Oh, look at that, you guys. There's a little tone left over. Do you see that little line? Go to your retouch layer. I'm going to use the heal tool.

I'm just going to heal that out. See what's really awesome possum sauce about this whole frequency separation is you can go back and forth from layer to layer and make your changes. Now we're going to head to the gray layer for a minute.

We're not done with the blur layer, but we need to kind of go back and forth from each side. Before we do the gray section or the high frequency, I need to talk to you about something so we don't get lost. You're going to make a copy of the gray layer, just like we made a copy of the blur layer.

However, when you do that, that copy of the gray layer is going to be on linear light and you're going to notice that your picture gets super crunchy and gross. So what you need to do immediately after that is clip the top gray layer to the the copy of it to the bottom gray layer. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

You can either go to the layer menu and click create clipping group or you hold command shift G and when you have done this When you have done this, two things are going to happen. One, an arrow is going to appear on the top gray layer, and then an underline is going to appear on the bottom or clipping layer, and that's how you're going to know you did it right. And when you have done this, this is the most important, you need to switch that top gray copy to normal mode. Honest to God, this is the one mistake everybody makes when they do their frequency separation retouching. So please do not skip this.

So here we are ready to start with gray layer. As with the blur layer I'm going to have you make a copy command j and as I said in the earlier lecture what we need to do is clip the top gray layer to the bottom. A quick key to do that is option click on the line in between the two layers.

Now look at this for a second. I'm going to turn that layer on and off for a second and holy criminy she looks terrible. Why that is is that layer that you just copied is on linear light.

You simply need to make that normal. And now we're ready to do the copying. Or excuse me, the retouching.

Alright, so let's get started on the retouching. As I said before, I often use the clone tool or the heal tool. And you've got to keep in mind, what are you trying to do here? So what I'm trying to do is I'm actually trying to get rid of some of these fine lines.

So I'm going to start with the clone tool. Option click an area to start with. And do this. Oh my goodness, what has happened?

This will happen to most of you. When you start using the clone or heal tool, you need to go up to the toolbar setting and make sure you have it set to current layer only. All right, so make sure you do that.

And so now I'm going to option click to start a section. And what's so amazing about this, I'm just keep option clicking, you can hear my little mouse tapping or my pen, is it allows you to clone areas of detail, not tone, but detail without having to worry about the color. You'll see in this area she's got a blemish or a mole. If you want to take it out, that tone's going to have to be taken out here underneath. Okay, so I just want to be really clear about that.

In fact, what I'm going to do for just a second is take the heal tool and heal that out and go back to the gray layer. Listen, with frequency separation you're going to be doing this all the time going back and forth between layer and layer. So I'm back on the gray copy and I'm just cloning out really quickly easy peasy lemon squeezy cloning out some of these lines and marks oops I made a mistake there no big deal some of this texture here I'd like to reduce and you just keep going until you get something you like and why I'd make a second copy I'm gonna do some more stuff up here is what if you go too far or what if you want to take a look to see how it looks before and after you can do it so quickly by just turning off and on that extra layer lines come out not the tone but the high detail lines so with big lines like smile lines you're going to have to fix them both on the blur layer and the retouch layer and sometimes you want to leave the tone but you just want to take the texture out it's really up to you and your client and i'm going to tell you this without fail what happens to most folks is you tend to go too far when you first start No big deal because you have an extra layer.

You can turn it off and on. You can change the opacity of this layer if you've gone too far. So you have some flexibility.

And I'm going to tell you the layer that more often than not that you're going to need to turn back on, meaning go a lower percentage. will be this tone layer. That's where people usually go a little too far. That's 50% opacity, that's 100. Now let's have some fun with this and try some filters. I'm going to use a filter on the gray layer.

Always please make a copy to be safe. So command J, control J to make a copy, option click on the line in between. It's exactly what we did before and I'm going to call this filter just so we know what we did.

And I'm going to zoom in here a little bit so we can see. I'm going to go ahead and go to my filters and I'm going to use my noise filter dust and scratch on the gray layer and watch what this does. It's a great cleanup job. The radiuses are going to change depending on the size of your file. I'm going to pick let's do it before and after.

I think I'm going to do something like let's I like even numbers for the most part. I'm going to pick 20 and 7 for this particular piece. There is no right answer for this, okay? You're going to have to experiment.

And then let's turn that off and on. And look how that really smoothed a lot of her skin out. But heavens, it ruined her eyes.

No big deal. I'm going to put a black mask. Option, hold the add a mask icon.

And then I'm going to take my paintbrush. And I'm going to make sure I have white as my foreground color. And I'm just going to paint this in.

And this is a way to lickety split, clean up skin texture. or texture on fabric or texture on fiber products excuse me really quickly let me turn this off and on before after before after and the cool thing is I can do that logistically wherever I want by painting it in so I'm just gonna paint it around this area I'll tell you for the most part you want to avoid things like eyes and eyebrows and eyelashes because it'll mess it up now let's try another filter I'm going to on this bottom copy, the blur, I'm going to make another copy and I'm going to call it filter. You should probably call it the filter you're using, but we'll get to that in a minute.

And I want to show you something. I'm going to do blur, surface blur, and I'm going to change the radius on this. And can you see what's happening here? Do a before and after.

Before. After, before, after. This is another way of actually changing, I'm gonna cancel that, changing the blur of the skin underneath. I'm gonna tell you, for the most part, I don't use it too often. I would much rather make a large section.

I'm on the copy of the blur layer. I'm going to select two sections of her cheeks. I'm going to hit Command J. And then I'm going to go back to the good old Gaussian Blur and do it that way. Look how much blur it gave.

I'm going to stick to that 20. This is what it looks like when it's done, right? It's just a little, two little crescents. I'm going to do before and after. I like it, but it is definitely too much.

So once again, I'm going to take that opacity down to something like 50. Yep, I think I'm good with that. And then I'm going to just merge that with the bottom layer and call that retouch. So let's just take a look. Where are we at? Before, after.

Before, after. And as I said, the area that most likely is going to get overdone is on the blur layer. And you could, if you need to, pull back the opacity.

Or you can add a layer mask to that and paint out with maybe a 50% brush. Paint out if you just went a little too far in some areas. Can you see the control you can get? It's just amazing. And just for giggles I want to throw in a little extra.

Do you know what else you can do? You can do eyeshadow here really easy. I'm gonna make a new layer and I'm gonna call it eyeshadow.

I'm gonna pick a strange color just so you can see it. Maybe teal. I'm right above the retouch blur layer and I'm going to paint that in.

Now that looks ridiculous, there's no question of it, but what you can do is change that to color mode. And when you change it to color mode, it gives you a lot more flexibility. And then I can just paint it out. where I don't want it.

I am going to have to fix the tips of her eyelashes, but that's okay. But look how quickly and easily and natural that looks. Not bad, huh?

Let's just quickly recap this section, okay? So here's what we did. We had an original image. then there was some initial retouching on things that are fine lines like hair, crosshairs, that kind of thing, because frequency separation is not good for that.

Here is the frequency separation folder, on, off, on, off. And if you look inside, what we have is we have a copy of the blur layer on. and off and we have two layers on the gray one is a standard heal or cloning layer and the other is that dust and scratch filter we used again I want to remind you if you think you went too far before after remember your first place to look to pull back on the retouching is the retouch copy you know the blur layer you could take that down by 50% see if you like that who knows Or you always could go back to the frequency separation and change the entire folder down 50%.

I got to tell you though, imagine how fast your workflow can go. Because this image would take me about 10 minutes. Once you get in the habit of this, it's fast.

You'll have a formula. And if you have a whole bunch of images, you'll get faster and faster and faster for each one. It'll be like a formula. Let's take a look at 10 minute retouching samples using frequency separation. Before, after.

I'm going to zoom in so you can see a little better. That's after, that's before. Again, these are about 10 minute jobs.

So let's take a look at what we have here. By now you should feel fairly comfortable at what you're looking at here on the screen. So let's dissect this.

First of all, we have the initial blur and then I did a Gaussian blur 15 and I labeled it as such. That was on a copy. It's masked in very loosely. Then I did a little bit of extra paint just on this camera right side I'm going to show you what that looks like real quickly It quite literally is a tiny bit of paint just to even out that hot highlight then on the gray layer You have your traditional gray layer You have your copy on which you retouched and I realized that skin was going to be a little problematic So once again, I did a filter and this time I did a dust and scratch at 10.5 and I masked it in So again before and after just on the filter and then overall original image Not bad for a 10 minute retouching job.

Retouching men can often be quick and easy. Here's a after and a before. After, before. Let me show you how easy this is. When you open it up you'll see what I've done here.

I've got a blur layer that is the standard blur. I made a copy of it and I used the dust and scratch filter on 40 slash 0 for the setting. Please notice I keep writing my settings in there so when I come back to the job later I know what I did.

That's what it looks like. without the mask and then the paint layer Just a teeny little thing over his eye. I'll show you that in one second. Teeny little paint right on the side. So let me show you how quick and easy this can be.

The gray layer is nothing. The gray layer is the original gray. So let me throw that layer away, and in fact I'll throw the paint layer away.

And I'm going to make a copy. There's the original with the gray. I make a copy of the blur layer, and I'm going to use dust and scratch.

And I said 40 slash 0. I just happen to know that. You'll have to go back and rename it. Noise, Dust and Scratch, 40 slash 0. Hit OK.

Put a black mask on it by holding the Option key. And paint it in. it helps to have your paintbrush turned on there you go look how fast that is super duper super duper fast and you can decide how much or how little you want to do your client may want less the client want may want more but it's so easy and the thing it's the easiest about men which I really am envious of is they don't have to often have the skin texture layered retouched because people like it when there's more of a texture to them before after.

Well that was about 30 seconds worth of work. You can get really fast with frequency separation. Let's look at frequency separation on a product. It's no different than a face.

So here's our after, here's our before, let's dissect it. You guys should be really familiar with this the recipe now. So here's the recipe.

You've got your standard blur layer and you've got your standard gray layer. On this particular image as you can see by the titling I copied the blur layer and I used the dust and scratch filter on it. And this was a pretty severe dust and scratch.

And I painted that in just where I wanted it. So I'm gonna do a before and after there. So I got rid of a lot of this area. I really was having trouble with this highlight in the center, so I did something different. I used the smudge brush on that to smudge it out.

Look, there's before and after. So as I said earlier in the class, you can use a paintbrush, you can use smudge brush, you can use clone, you can use heal. And then in addition I added a little paint to get rid of the highlights on the top and some other spots.

Let's take a look at what those highlights look like. Look it's just blobs of paint just added on top to get rid of some tone. Again before, after. Now let's take a look at the blur layer.

On the blur layer I had to excuse me on the gray layer I did the extra fine detail. It might be a little hard for you guys to see on the screen. before after so when you've done your smudging or you've done your painting you've got to get rid of the detail that's left in those areas Okay, so pretty easy. I'm going to say this took me about 20 minutes to figure out, but once I had it figured out, the rest of the cups in the series went pretty darn quick. Let's take another look at a great use for frequency separation, and that is seamless cleaning.

Oftentimes you'll have these jobs where you have to get these seamless pieces cleaned up fast and easy, and there's not a lot of money for it. Let's dissect it. Again, it's basic frequency separation, so let's see what we have here. We have, like we started on all the other ones, we have the blur layer and the gray layer. These are original basic frequency separation.

And then I started with a copy of the blur layer. And what I did was I did a Gaussian blur 20. And I realized, I smudged a little bit on there, I can see as well, this wasn't gonna cut it, at least alone. So after I did that I've said you know what we're just down to basic paint. So I've made the paint layer and let me show you what that looks like.

It quite literally is just paint. Paint right on top. Now had to be masked in.

It's very loosely masked in. Do you see that? I covered the feet. I didn't care about the feet at all because I knew I was going to mask out this frequency separation. And let me tell you, sometimes the best course of action is to work with a broad brush, not try to get real tight and accurate, but broad strokes, and then mask it out later.

Now as you can see very clearly here on the detail, my goodness, there's a lot of detail here. So on the gray layer where the detail is. I did a copy of it and I just used a dust and scratch filter on 30 slash 3 and then did a little bit of cloning.

So that cleaned it up pretty darn good. And then I've got a problem, which is now it's all over her feet. No big deal. I masked in the frequency separation.

Oh, I just noticed I missed a little spot there. I hate it when you see those things on demos. Clean that up real quick. So.

Keep in mind, when you use the frequency separation function, you can also mask that whole folder. Who says you can't? And then that way, you can very quickly, in about five to ten minutes, get a seamless cleaned up without having to pay attention to really imagine if you had to smudge exactly just to the border of her feet.

That would have been really difficult. So again, same story as before. Filter, Gaussian Blur, some paint, some dust and scratch filter with a little cloning. and then put a mask on the entire layer set and mask it in or out as needed.

One of the things I love about frequency separation is it can really get you out of a jam quickly. So this is the original and then this is the after. Before, after. Let's dissect it. Again, it's the same formula as everything we've discussed already.

It's just a question of how you use it. So once again, here's the basic. frequency separation the blur and the gray and on this one I did a dust and scratch 40 30 this is what it looks like and I masked it in okay that's all on the paint layer on the blur and it's not quite there so I did the same thing I've always done which is another paint layer again just a little bit of extra paint to finish it out Again, masked in. And that's pretty darn good.

Let's do a before and after on that. Before, after. Now I just have a few problem areas, and that's going to get handled on the gray retouching layer.

So I just had to retouch a couple little spots. And I got to tell you, that beats the heck out of the old school way of doing this before. Do you see that, that tiny little spot there? Really small retouching.

I got to tell you though in the old days this would have taken me forever to retouch but now that was about 15 minutes. At the beginning of the class I told you there's two different ways of starting up your frequency separation folder. In fact there's many ways but I'm just giving you two for right now. And the second way I'd like to tell you about is using actions.

So I have a frequency separation called basic frequency separation and I'm going to click on that. And then I'm going to go back. Back to my layers and you will see Photoshop has already started this for me. In fact, let me undo that. I'm going to delete that.

I'm going to pull out my layers for a second just so you can see the action in progress. I'm going to click on the button mode for the action and there you go. Bada bing, you've got your basic frequency separation all started for you.

This action is available for you with this class. However, I would like to ask you to do it by yourself first for a while by hand as I like to call it. just to get acclimated to the process and then go ahead and use the action. Besides using frequency separation for beauty work, I do a ton of entertainment print work. So that's for TV, streaming, theater.

And inevitably what happens is they need to do a lot of different buys and extensions. So for fabric, frequency separation, utterly amazing. So let's do this. Let's go ahead and hit the action that you guys will now have from the course. There's my basic frequency separation and here's what I'm going to do.

I'm just going to make a paint layer. I'm going to make a brand new layer. I'm going to call it paint. I'm going to pick the gradient tool set on radial and I'm just going to option click and start clicking on some color samples I have. Oops that one's a little dark.

No big deal. Let's do a new one and I'm just trying to get a little variegated coloring and tone. I'm not worrying that it's going over her back because as I said before I'll take that out and so now what I'll do is I'll put a mask on that paint layer I'll take the airbrush tool I'm holding the control and option key to make my brush bigger. You can also increase the opacity by hitting the numbers on your keyboard and I'm just going to paint that out real quickly.

So what happens in my business a lot of times people need to put text or type and that's why you have to get rid of all this detail. You'll see that there's still that detail from the detail layer. I'm going to go ahead and make a copy of the gray layer, Command J. Hold the option key, click it on the line in between to group it.

Turn it off linear light and put it on normal just like we've been doing for every single one. And then I'm just going to hold the option key, use the clone tool and start cloning out these lines. It'll take me just minutes, literally minutes. Hopefully you can see this.

I don't want to bore you with this. But I'm trying to kind of show you how fast and easy you can get this done. And in fact, you know what, can I show you guys something kind of another trick? It's a little advanced, but I feel like you guys have gotten the swing of things here.

You can also put a brand new layer filled with the color of 50% gray. I'm going to hit OK. There's nothing on that layer. I'm going to Shift-Delete to get the fill background color or foreground menu. I'm going to select, you guys will probably default to foreground.

I'm going to... Click on the color 50% gray. I'm going to hit OK. Ah, my picture disappeared. But what I'm going to do is do the option click again on the line in between.

And you'll notice all the texture disappears. So what I'm going to do is put a black mask option, click on the mask icon. And then I'm going to take a paintbrush with the color white, paint on the mask. And I'm going to paint that in and all I will be left with is the tone, the color and tone.

that's underneath. I'm going to make my paintbrush 100% opaque, which it is not right now, and see all I'm left with the tone. And now, do you remember what I said earlier?

You'll often go back and forth between the paint blur layer and the gray layer. So now look how quickly I can get rid of all those folds. and where the client needs to put their type, they can easily do it so fast.

And again, I got some overspray on her back. Not a problem. Go back to the paint layer and make sure you paint all that out. What was that, two minutes? Pretty darn easy.

Thank you for joining me for the basics of frequency separation. Hope I made it a little less intimidating. Please make sure to make sure please please please to make copies of your blur layer and your gray layer before you proceed just so in case you make a mistake and go backwards and there's so much more to frequency separation and once you get your feet wet you really feel comfortable come and join me for the advanced frequency separation. Thank you.

Transcript for:Frequency Separation with Lisa Carney

Transcript for:
Frequency Separation with Lisa Carney