LIGHT IT. SHOOT IT.

RETOUCH IT. LIVE!

FREQUENCY SEPARATION SKIN RETOUCHING
This is more of an advanced technique, simply because it takes a lot of steps and takes more time
— not because it’s hard to do, but once you learn how to do Frequency Separation retouching, it
makes it hard to do anything else, because the results are so fantastic.

What this technique does is separate the color and the texture into two separate layers, which
allows you to smooth and blend the skin without blurry the skin texture, so the final results looks
pretty much flawless (which is why this technique is so popular). By the way, since this does have
a lot of steps, it’s a perfect candidate for an Action; doing all the set-up steps for you so all you
have left to do is lasso or paint.

Step One: As always, start by removing any major blemishes. Once that’s done, duplicate back-
ground layer TWICE.

Step Two: Click on the middle layer (and

hide the top layer for now): Apply a Gaussian
Blur — just enough until skin is blurry so that
all the tones are blending (I usually wind up
around 5 to 7 pixels, but the higher resolution
your camera, the higher this number will need
to go).

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Step Three: Click on the top layer.

Go under the Image menu to Apply
Image. From the Layer pop-up menu,
choose Layer 1. From the Blending
pop-up menu, choose ‘Subtract.’ For
Scale choose 2. For Offset chose 128,
and click OK. Your layer should look
gray with a little of your image show-
ing through.

Step Four: Change the blend mode

of your top layer to Linear Light. At
this point, the image should still look
normal. Select the top layer,
and the middle layer, and
click on the Group button
at the bottom of the Layers
panel to put these two lay-
ers in their own group (so
you can toggle off/on to see
a before/after as you work).

Step Five: You’re going to

work on middle layer — the
color layer (that way we
don’t mess with the texture
on the top layer): Put a
lasso around an uneven area of your subject’s skin. It can be a
fairly large area, like most of a cheek or their entire chin area,
etc.

Step Six: Apply a Feather to your selection (I usually use

15 pixels) to hide the edges of your retouch so it blends in
nicely with the surrounding skin.

Step Seven: Now you’re going to apply a Gaussian Blur to

your selected area (I usually wind up anywhere from 18 to
24 pixels) which smooths out and blends skin pretty amaz-
ingly. Now just repeat this process for other areas on the
face; (1) make a selection around the skin area: (2) Apply a
feather to the edges (3) apply the Gaussian blur.

BRIGHTENING / DARKENING SKIN TONE

This is another awesome part of Frequency Separation, because you can lighten or darken areas so
the skin tone matches perfectly.

Step One: Get the Clone Stamp tool. Up in the Options bar; choose Current Layer. Set your Mode
to Lighten. Set your Opacity and Flow settings to 45%.

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Step Two: Option-click (PC: Alt-

click) to sample a lighter area
of skin, and then paint over the
darker spots — you want it to
look gradual to you might have
to paint over the same area once
or twice — just depends on the
image. All you are effecting is the
tone and brightness of the skin
in that area — the texture is still
there untouched on the top layer.
If you need to darken an area, switch the blend mode for the Clone Stamp tool to Darken and do
the same process

FREQUENCY SEPARATION BLEMISH REMOVAL:

If after you’ve done the first two techniques (evening out
skin tone and balancing light and dark areas), you can
do more details blemish removal using the Healing Brush
and/or Patch tool by clicking on the top layer (the layer
with the texture), and do your removal there, using the
tools like you normally would, but now you’re just work-
ing on the texture — not the color, so you’ll have more
natural looking results.

ADDING AUTOMATION
So do we have to jump through all these hoops every sin-
gle time we smooth out skin? Nope. You only have to do
it one more time, because we’re going to automate the
process from here on out using Actions (if you’re not familar with actions, it’s like a tape-recorder
built into Photoshop that can automatically automate repetitive tasks, like Frequency Separation,
and you can have it “do it’s thing” with just one click and better yet, it goes at super-fast speed).
Here’s how it’s done:

Step One: Go under the Window menu and choose Actions to

bring up the Actions palette (shown below). To see the Actions
controls you may have to turn off “Button Mode” (in other words,
if your Actions palette doesn’t look like the one shown here,
you’re in Button Mode), by going to the palette’s Pop-down
menu and then choosing Button Mode. Choosing it toggles
between button mode being on and off.

Step Two: To create a new action,

click on the New Action button at
the bottom right of the palette (it’s
icon looks like the New Layer icon,
just to the left of the Trash icon).
When you click on this button, the
New Action dialog appears where

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you can name your Action. In this case, name the Action “Frequency Separation.” Then from the
Function Key pop-up menu choose an empty F-key on your keyboard (I chose F11, so anytime
from now on when I press the F11 key, it will run the action we’re just about to record). Now, did
you notice that there’s no OK button? That’s right, where OK usually is located, the button reads
“Record” instead. Click that button and it beings recording your steps.

Step Three: Now let’s run through our Frequency

Separation steps: first duplicate the Background layer
twice. Click on the middle layer and add a 6-pixel
Gaussian Blur. Click on the top layer, then go under the
Image menu to Apply Image. In that dialog, from the
Layer menu choose Layer 1; for Blend choose Subtract.
Set the Scale to 2, and Offset to 128, and click OK. Now
change the Layer Blend mode to Linear Light. Select
both layers; put them in a group; and lastly click on the
middle layer. Now, in the Actions panel, click the Stop
Button.

Step Four: That’s it—you’ve created your first action. Now to use it, just open another photo, press
F11, sit back and relax and the entire process happens before your eyes, completely automated, in
just seconds. All you have to do now is make a lasso selection, and blur it. Life is good.

Skin Smoothing
This is different technique, with a different result (plus it’s easier and faster than Frequency
Separation), and it still aims to maintain skin texture as well. So why techniques? Well, depending
on the image, you might like this one better, and it’s good to have another option in your retouch-
ing bag of tricks.

NOTE: As always, before we do any skin softening, always remove any major blemishes first using
the regular Healing Brush (not the Spot Healing Brush — because of the different directions of
skin texture, it doesn’t work very well because if often picks a place to sample from that’s too far
away from the problem you’re trying to fix, so it looks unnatural).

Step One: Duplicate the Background layer two times. Click

on the middle layer, then go under the Filter menu, under
Blur, and choose Surface Blur. Enter 30 for the Radius, and
60 for the Threshold amount, and click OK (these are the set-
tings I use).

Step Two: Click on the top layer: Go back under the Filter
menu, under Other and choose High Pass. When the dialog
appears, enter 3.5 pixels and click OK.

Step Three: Change the Blend Mode of this top layer to

Hard Light. Merge these two layers together by pressing
Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E).

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Step Five: Hold the Option key (PC: Alt-key) and at the bot-
tom of the Layers panel, click on the Layer Mask icon to hide
this layer behind a black layer mask.

Step Six: Set your Foreground color to white; get the Brush
tool, choose a medium sized soft-edged brush, set the Opacity
to 50% up in the Options Bar; then paint just the skin areas
but avoid all the detail areas like the eyebrows, eyes, hair, nos-
trils, lips, teeth, and the edges of the face as well.

REDUCING EVERYTHING FROM WRINKLES TO MOLES TO FRECKLES TO SCARS

How’s that for a headline, eh? Well, it’s only that because we pretty much use the same technique
for all of them. This is tricky business, because if you “remove” these things, then it will be an obvi-
ous retouch to all your subject’s friends and family, which could be very embarrassing for your
subject (and the last thin you want to do, right?), so we don’t remove — we reduce — that way
you create a more realistic-looking retouch. First, we’ll quickly look at how to remove blemishes
and stuff with the Healing Brush and Patch Tool, then we’ll get to reducing.

TECHNIQUE: To completely remove a blemish; get the Healing Brush tool; make your brush a little
bit larger than the blemish you want to remove, then just click right on it. Don’t paint. Just click.
For larger stuff (like a scar or a wrinkle), use the Patch tool instead. It works like the Lasso — so use
it to put a lasso-like selection around the scar or wrinkle, then click inside that selected area and
drag it to a clean area nearby. Release the mouse-button and it snaps-back into place and the scar
or wrinkle is gone. OK, now let’s apply that to our scenario of reducing, not removing.

Step One: In this case, we’re going to reduce a mole (not remove it, because that would be a dead
giveaway that the image has been retouched). Start by getting the Healing Brush; make your
brush a little larger than the Mole (use the left/right bracket keys on your keyboard to resize your
brush), and then just click. It’s gone.

Step Two: Now, before you do anything else,

go up to the Edit menu and choose ‘Fade’
which brings up the dialog you see here.
The best way I can describe fade is that it is
“undo on a slider.” If you drag the slider all
the way to the left the mole is completely
back. If you drag the slider all the way to the
right the mole is completely gone. Anything in between you’ll just see a portion of the mole — it’s
like lowering the intensity of the mole; try lowering the Opacity to 50% and you’ll see the mole is
still there, but its intensity has been reduced by 50%. So, it’s there, but it doesn’t stand out to the
viewer.

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Step Three: We do the exact same thing with Hot Spots (shiny, oily-looking highlight areas on the
face). We remove it completely using the Patch tool, then immediately Fade it so we retain the
highlight without it looking shiny. Same thing for wrinkles — remove the wrinkle completely with
the Patch tool, then Fade it to around 30%. Same thing with dark circles under the eyes. Remove
each one completely, then Fade it until it looks good (for women, lower the Opacity a lot, to
around 20 or 30%; for men, much less). So, that’s the technique.

NOTE: Since this has to be mostly done with you making a selection, this doesn’t make an ideal
candidate for creating an action. However, you can save time by using the Fade keyboard shortcut
Shift-Command-F (PC: Shift-Ctrl-F).

RESHAPING THE FACE & HEAD

This is a very common retouch, and thanks to Photoshop, a very easy, fast, and even fun one.

Step One: Start by selecting the Liquify Filter from the Filter menu. You’re going to use the very
first tool at the top of the toolbar — the Forward Warp Tool (this is the one I use most of the time).
This tool allows you to move parts of your subject as if they were a thick liquid (like molasses).

There are two tricks to making Liquify work for you: (1) make the brush tip
size the same size as the thing you want to move, and (2) make nice little
nudges, instead of big strokes. Just kind of nudge it along and it’ll work and
look great. Before we start on liquify, the seamless paper runs out on the left
side leaving a gap, so I’ll start with a quick-fix for that, which is to make a tall
rectangular selection from top to bottom in the clean area of the gray back-
ground. Then go to Free Transform; grab the center point on the left side,
and just drag it to the left to stretch it out so it covers the gap. OK, now onto
the retouch.

Step One: I’m going to introduce you to this tool by first fixing some areas on
her arm, by simply sizing our brush to the size of what we’re trying to move
(use the left and right bracket keys on your keyboard to change brush sizes) and just nudge them
into place. Same thing with the top of her
head — the right size brush, and then just
nudging.

When we start working on her nose, the

size of our brush can cause parts of your
image to move that you don’t want to (for
example, we’re going to smoothing out the
bump on her nose, and we don’t want to
move her eyes or cheeks, or anything else).
Luckily, you can keep those areas from
moving.

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Retouching Faces
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Step Two: Choose the Freeze tool from

the toolbar (shown circled here at
right) and paint over any facial features
that you don’t want moved when
you do you retouch (try painting over
the entire center of the face, if you’re
reshaping the head). As you paint, it
paints a red tint over those areas just
to show you which areas are frozen (if
you mess up, paint over your spill over
with the Thaw tool—it’s right below the
Freeze tool in the toolbar).

Step Three: Now turn off the checkbox

for “Show Mask” so you don’t have to see the frozen area while you’re working. Choose a brush a
little larger than the area you want to adjust then, using very small, gentle little nudges, tuck in the
areas that need reshaping.