High End Skin Retouching in Adobe Photoshop

1. Skin Retouching Intro: Hey guys, my name is masked from final form agency. And today we're gonna be learning all about skin retouching. Specifically, we're gonna break it down into a couple of different layers. We're gonna start out with fixing the light. Then we're gonna go ahead and adjust the blemishes, all the acne. And then we're going to get into the real good stuff, which is high frequency and low frequency separation. Which means the details and the color are broken down to create together the actual image on subs done, I'm going to show you guys a little trick for fixing up the eyes, giving them a little bit of a pop to make it look more professional. And on top of that, we're going to go ahead and add some highlights and come dark and some shadows to make it look even more professional so that the overall will give you a perfectly edited high-end skin retouch. So let's go ahead and get started. 2. Understanding Frequency: Alright guys. So if you want to just download the file that I have uploaded, you can just follow along and feel like it would be way easier. Basically, we would have to start out right now with the basics. What is frequency? Frequency is measured in Hertz is the number of oscillations per unit of time. Every color of light has its own frequency as far as light is concerned, would even as it's an EM wave, which stands for electric magnetic wave, a digital image can be depicted, sorry, in a form of frequencies. I'm going to show you guys a little example. So hopefully it gets the point across a little bit better. Alright guys. So I'm gonna go ahead and draw out some frequencies that we can better understand what the concept is before we go ahead and get started with this tutorial, I'm gonna be drawn for low frequencies first. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and draw high frequencies. Right here. This is time. Basically high frequencies is more oscillations per second, which means more changes. And low frequencies is low oscillations per check-in for a second, sorry, what rapidly changes in an image? The texture, right? Looking at the texture, you look at, there's bumps, there's different things going on, so it has way more oscillations. What would be the low-frequency color? Everything that's basically behind the texture. It doesn't change as quickly, which would mean the green line is low-frequency, and that would be the color. And the red has way more oscillations per second. Which should mean That's the details, the texture. Basically, we want to soften the skin without affecting the texture. And how would we want to do that? We would actually like to work on them separately. So the idea is using them separately. So we'd basically divide them into a high frequency and low frequency. This process makes it so much better for skin retouching. 3. Lighting, blemishes, and eye bags: The first thing that we'd have to do is actually adjusting the lights. So there's two different ways you could do that. One would be in Camera Raw, that is my preferred way. Or another way would be in Lightroom. Before we even get started, let's go ahead and make our adjustments. The next step would be removing all the blemishes, the pimples, the acme. After that it would be removing the eye bags which haven't actually little technique to show you guys undoing that. So let's go ahead and start out with the blemishes. We're going to go ahead and click on the Healing Brush tool. And we're just gonna go ahead and zoom in. And any kind of imperfection that you see, you want to kind of brush over it and get rid of it. Alright guys. So at this point, I would say that we can go ahead and get rid of these eye bags that she's got going on a little bit under here. And a way to do that just follow along is Command J. So we're going to duplicate this layer. And then we're gonna put an empty layer in the middle. We're going to go up here. I'm gonna go to filter and we're going to hit Convert to Smart Filter. We're going to hit, Okay, once that's done, we're going to go over here to filter. Once again, we're going to go into other high-pass. We're gonna hit high-pass. Then basically what we're gonna do is you're going to start from 0.01. You're going to work all your way up until you start seeing the iPad. I would say that's good already. We're gonna hit okay. Go onto here. We're going to go over it to overlay. Once we're there, we're going to hit Option. We're going to hit right between this line right here, which is going to come right down to clipping less than, basically what we do is we go into this layer and we're going to hit the brush. We're gonna move into the area that we want to chair of. We're going to sample a brighter area example. Then I would consider putting the flow to 5%. Then we're just going to lightly threshold. Just let her fellow really going to help make a big difference. And then we're gonna go over on the other side. Lighter colors, man sinned, thin brush. You can spend as much time as you want. Perfect it. What I like to do afterwards, since this is a very harsh look, right? It's kinda lowering the opacity and finding good middle ground. This was before. This is after. I'm gonna keep it at above 60% 4. Frequency Separation: All right guys, So what I would suggest is creating a group. And then what we're gonna just go ahead and do is we're gonna create a new layer. We're going to make it above the group. Now we're going to press Control Alt Shift, Command, Option Shift E on Mac, right? What does this do? This creates a merged layer of everything that you see right now. Basically it's the same thing as doing file save as JPEG and then reinforcing it. This is exactly the same thing. We're gonna go ahead and make a copy of this controller Command J. Now we're going to name this low frequency. Then we're gonna go on the above layer and label it high frequency. This is basically the details and this would basically be the color. Since we're dealing of frequency. Low frequency deals with color and the high-frequency deals with the texture and the details. So right now we're just going to turn off high-frequency and we're just going to deal with the low-frequency layer right now. What we're gonna do is we're gonna start blurring it out. We're going to go ahead and hit the filter blur and then Gaussian Blur. Basically from the beginning, once again, we're going to gradually increase it. We're going to then stop at the point where the skin texture kinda starts to fade away. I wouldn't overdo it like that. You're just going to need to do it to the point where most of the skin texture actually starts fading. I'm gonna go ahead and go with 8.5. I'm gonna hit, okay. Now this blur is a photo. But what did we actually do? We deleted the high frequency, the color and the tones remains, but the texture is gone. Since the texture is actually gone, we've deleted the high frequency. If we wanted to just have another layer with the high-frequency, how would we do that? Turned the high-frequency layer on, we delete the low-frequency. We would basically get what? The high frequency. We're going to turn the high-frequency layer on. We're gonna go to Image, and then we're gonna go to Apply Image. Then we're going to go ahead and make sure that we're dealing with low frequency. So we're going to make sure that the channel is under RGB. The blending mode is going to be subtract. The scale has to be two with the offset of 128. The scale, the lowest is one, and the highest is to the offset wise, the offset up to be 128, because 128 means it is perfectly great. It's perfectly in-between. So when we go ahead and we subtract, it's going to get rid of everything that's in-between the grades. We're gonna get rid of it with this blending mode. So basically a 128 comes in as a neutral gray. Then what we do is hit okay, and change the blending mode to Linear Light. Since we're changing the blending mode to be linear light, we need the background that we're subtracting to be perfectly middle gray. Linear Light knocks off everything that is 50% gray. And that's why we set the offset to 128. If we go ahead and we make a group, these Control or Command G. Basically if we make a group for them, even if you go ahead and turn it off and nothing changes. Because these two combined make the same image. But if you go ahead and only keep one of them on or off for it. And you're gonna see this is blurred out. This just says the details. Combined together. They make the image and we want to blend the colors and go ahead and do that. We're gonna select the brush and we're going to go ahead and hit the mixer brush this time. So what is a mixer brush do so that we can actually go ahead and use it correctly. We're going to make an example right now and just do Control or Command J. Let's go ahead and see what the mixture brush actually does. Notice the mixer brush just mixes all the, all the colors together. It actually looks like it's adding a little bit of the sampled color. Why is that? Because we've chosen this color. We want to paint on the existing color. So what we'll do, we do, We're gonna go ahead and make sure that this is unchecked. That it's going to automatically show up as transparent. It's not going to add white to it. And it just blends in the axis colors, which is what we're looking for. The mixer. The mixer brush has a similar, similar properties as the other brushes, which are very simple to understand. We're going to go ahead and make sure once again that this is checked off and that it's transparent. I would go ahead and put the wetness anywhere between one to 5%. I'm gonna put out three. And then I would leave the load at 75. And that would leave the mix, honestly 50%. Once again, we're not gonna worry about that. Then I would choose for the flow anywhere between ten to 20%. I'm gonna go ahead and go with 15. It honestly depends with how much you want to paint. Basically, what are we doing now? We separated the details with the color. We need a blend the colors in, right? Go ahead and zoom in on our subject. While we're under the mixer brush. It's important right now as we start to paint in a follow where the actual skin texture is. So I'm not going to start painting up and downwards because that's not the way that skin goes. It goes from side-to-side. So that's how I'm going to start painting it in to make sure that everything is seamless. You guys can see the different direction where I'm brushing is the direction of the skin. Let's go have a look at the before and after. You can tell much of a change. But if you look at the before and after, before, after, before, after, you guys see how actually hits working on what's generally happen, a way that would help some of you, some of you who might not work is basically keeping the high-frequency layer is turned off so that you can actually see what you're brushing anymore. Making sure everything is super smooth. Keep going. You guys want to go a bit faster about this workflow and you don't like painting as much, you can just change the flow and heighten it. So for example, right now I'm probably just going to go up to 17. I would not recommend going anywhere over 20 though. Another tip guys, I would not call for the smile lines because it's just going to give it away and it's not gonna look realistic at all. So I would not go near those. I would kind of work around them. This could go on forever, guys. Honestly, it's all about just perfecting the look. The more you perfect it, you kinda wanted to just look like a wax figure. That's the idea. The options are honestly limit unless you just kinda have to keep going two standard and experiment with it until you find a way that really works for you. Guys. I want to stop right here. This should be generally what you shouldn't be striving for. It should look too uniform. This area right here is normal because that's where the shadows are falling here as well. Now we can go ahead and see once again before after before. Once again, after I've been worked on the neck too much, I'm going to kind of avoid this area right now, but it's certainly something that you guys should go ahead and do using the same technique. You're just gonna come to smooth everything out and make sure that it's all pretty uniform. This is pretty much the best way to do frequency separation using the mixer brush. I personally use this technique. It's definitely gives you a very professional look. Now basically, what we can do is enhanced different parts of it, such as the eyes. I have a nice tool that I could show you guys right now. We could even do some glow and do some highlights and some shadows in different parts. And that's honestly pretty much it. That's how generally frequency separation works. This is the final product. This is before. This is after. 5. Eye Retouching and pop: What I'm going to show you guys right now is we're gonna go ahead and give the eyes a different touch. So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're gonna make a curves adjustment layer. What that hit controller command I to invert the mask. And we're going to bring this all the way up, pretty much set Stan are going to close this in the eyes. You're gonna get a regular brush tool. It would be easy enough just to paint over this, but we're not going to go ahead and do that. Oh, sorry. Make sure that I'm like I just did. You're using quite sharp. So basically this would be an easy way to do it, but we're not going to be doing that. It's not very realistic. What we're gonna do instead is we're gonna be adding something that I like to call it like some fake texture. Basically, what we're gonna do is we're going to start creating some lines, turning from the out parts. And so we're gonna go ahead. I like to do a long stroke and a short stroke. Among stroke. Short-circuit. Have you guys do this all the way around? And then I'm going to show you what we do next. Well, you can increase the flow as well. 50%. Now we're going to go ahead and move on to the next slide. All right guys. That's done. That looks pretty fake. Answer, cool, hypnotic type of look. But what we can do is we're going to go ahead and lower the opacity to make it look more realistic. I'm going to go ahead down to 60%. This is before, this is after, before. This is after. Another thing we can do is we can go ahead and change the brush to black and make it look even better, is we basically would follow how the highlight, basically where they took the photo with these lights on the opposite side. We're gonna kind of brush, wash it out a little bit. I would go ahead and put the flow of this time a little 5%. Very lightly. Even better, I could duplicate or flare side do the same. We're going to have to capacity is after, before. 6. Adding Highlights and Shadows: To further add some process and make this look even more professional. But basically be adding another curves adjustment layer. With this, what we're gonna do is once again, going to frame this way up. Once that's up, we're going to go over here, click twice on sets done. We're gonna scroll from the underlying layer. We're going to go from the left side to the right. Casts some highlights. What you can do is hit the Option key. To get farther control. You're doing. Worry about one area at a time. I'll explain to you guys why. Because we're gonna be making duplicates which each assess different parts. But you will want to generally focus on. So basically this first part would be the nose. This is me focusing on the highlights of that now. So that looks pretty realistic and it looks nice and natural. Gonna go ahead and hit, Okay. I'm going to go over here and under brush makes sure the brush is white. And we're gonna still highlighted x. And we can do is we're gonna duplicate this two more times. You can go as many times as you want obviously. And then here We're gonna hit Shift. Click. Same thing with this. Now, once again, I'm gonna double-click. What we're going to go ahead and do right here is we're going to focus on next part. Probably be the chin. We'll get out some highlights to the axis. I'm gonna go ahead and focus on the neck this time. We could do the cheek as well. Okay. Napl this once again. Brush, brush, brush before not doing twice damage. Turning this off because my brush once again, focus. I would do with this one now. Re-enable it with the knowledge. We don't get confused. Shift-click stable mosque. Once I click in here, I'm going to focus on different areas. Do the lips, as Sam. I said, that's a pretty good gonna enable them. With white. There, you guys have it. What we're gonna do is we're gonna hit Ship and we're gonna make another drug. And it's gonna be called highlights. We could also do is create some more contrast by adding shadows, which would be the opposite process of what we just did. Python down a little bit. I'm not going to make some copies. Here. We're going to click over here. You're going to be pulling it from the right side to the left. I'm gonna be focusing this time on this part of that sheet that's black and we're gonna pay on a plate. Start fresh and shadows. That's some further than that. I don't believe we really need to add anymore. Go ahead and just do one last check. Check over here. Has a last touch. We could add some shadows back into the eye. It's refreshing, would lower the opacity a little bit, a little less dramatic. I'm going to keep it about 65%. Flip this last one. Make another group here. It's gonna be called shadows. 7. High End Skin Retouching Conclusion: All right guys. So I hope you learned a bit of stuff. We got a ton of different things here. We got started off with fixing the lighting. Then we went ahead and corrected the blemishes. After that, we did the low-pass, which was the color. We added back in the detail with a high-pass. Once that was done, we went ahead and we added a little bit of touch to the eyes. Then to further the project and make it look even more professional, we went ahead and added a little bit of glow, some highlights on the nose on come on this side of the forehead. And then we went ahead and we brought back a little bit of shadows around the eye area and the cheek. So this is the final result. Your assignment is going to be to download the file that I've attached in the description and go ahead and do your own skin retouching to the file. You're going to go ahead and upload it in the discussion so we can see what you guys came up with. Once again, it guys. Thank you for watching and I hope I'll see you guys on the next one.