Pro Skin Sharpening with Hidden Frequency Separation Trick Photoshop Tutorial

Today I'm going to share with you one of my little shared secrets when it comes to enhancing the skin texture. You see when you do frequency separation, high-end dodging and burning, or any kind of retouching, sometimes when you have retouched, it looks good from right here. But as soon as you zoom out, this starts to look very very soft and retouched. So in those cases, we need to figure out a way to make the skin texture pop. And regular sharpening can do it, but it's slightly different. But this one does an incredible job and it's a step hidden inside of frequency separation. Even if you're not applying frequency separation, you can sharpen it through frequency separation. Here's how it works. First of all, just as you normally do, create the frequency separation group with the high frequency and the low frequency layer. If you want to learn how to manually do it and the math behind it, there are videos, but I'm going to share with you an action that you can download from the description of this video. Once you download the action, you can go to Window -> Actions. From here, if you want to load the action that you just downloaded, go to Yours tab in the later versions of Photoshop, click on the grid right there and go to Import Actions. Load the action that you just downloaded and it should show up right here, which is Pix Frequency Separation. Right there. Then figure out whether you're working with 8-bit image or 16-bit image. If you're working with 8-bit, it should say RGB8. One another way to check it is by going to Image -> Mode. Have a look. 8 bits per channel is checked. Simply play the corresponding one. If it's 16, play the 16. If it's 8, play the 8. Click on that. It automatically shows you a Gaussian blur dialog box. You can easily zoom into the image or use this box right there and move to any of the skin texture section and increase the radius from the left slowly and gradually and stop at just the point where all the skin texture goes away. In this case, I'm going to stop at right about 9 or 8.9. That works too. Hit OK. Now we have the Frequency Separation group created right there. If you were to open that up, we have the High Frequency layer, which has just the texture and the Low Frequency layer for the color and the tone. You can soften the skin here if you like, using the regular Frequency Separation method, but in this case it is not needed. We just want to sharpen. So here's what we do. We select the High Frequency layer and watch this. It's obvious. You duplicate it by pressing Ctrl or Command J. And just as you do, have a look at the texture. It's popping. It's back. It's so good. So here's the before. Here's the after. If you want more texture, duplicate it one more time. Obviously this is too much. Let's go back. One more thing you can do is that you can mask it in just certain areas. So hold the Alt key or the Option key and click on the Mask button to create a negative mask. Then you can take the brush with white as the foreground color, only paint on areas where you need the skin texture. This also creates a 3D sharpening effect where only the areas that are in focus, or you want to bring them in focus, are sharper that way. You can actually remove it from the eyes if that's what you want. There you go. Maybe remove it from the eyebrows. That's up to you. I've only kept it on the face. It just helps the face stand out. On top of that, you can also add some texture here as well. There you go. Makes it stand out so darn well. And if it is making it too sharp, there's one more thing we can do, which I'll show you in the next example. In this example, I've done a very simple frequency separation. Here's the before. Just removed a few things. Here's the after. No matter how high the level of skin softening you have done, it doesn't matter. Once you have applied frequency separation in whatever way, just select the high frequency layer and duplicate it by pressing Ctrl or Command J. We have the texture, but this time it is way too much. So how do we control it? Obviously we can create a mask, but there's one more way. The texture is looking good in the highlight areas, and this adds shine to the skin texture, but in the shadow areas, not as good. So here's what we do. We remove the extra texture from the dark areas. And one of the easiest ways to remove stuff from the dark areas is Blend If. So double click on the right side of this copy to open up the Layer Style dialog box. Inside of that, to take the texture away from the dark areas, take the slider of the underlying layer from left to right. See, the texture is going away from the dark areas. So there was texture here. As soon as we take it away, see it's going away from the dark areas. But this is very harsh and creates a harsh edge. So to make the transition smoother, we hold the Alt key or the Option key and click on the slider right there to break it apart. And then you can take it apart like so. There you go. This does the job. 180 is fine. Hit OK once you're satisfied. And there you have it. It minimizes the halos a lot, makes the texture more natural. And take a look. Here's the before. Here's the after. That texture is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. However, you can always create a regular mask by clicking on the Mask button. Take the brush, black as the foreground color. You can always press X to toggle between the foreground and the background colors. And then you can just erase it from the corners because it was creating some kind of a halo effect. And this also allows you to limit the sharpening to areas of focus, giving it a 3D sharpening feel. So you can take it away from areas where you do not want it. There you go. Not on the hand, only on the face. And on top of that, you can, of course, control the Opacity. Again, if you think the sharpening is too much. And by the way, if you're using a non-brush tool like the Move tool, then if you press 1, the Opacity would be 10. If you press 5, the Opacity of that layer will be 50. If you have selected the brush, it controls the brush Opacity. So make sure you have chosen something like the Move tool before using that Layer Opacity shortcut. 2 for 20, 8 for 80, 6 for 60. And if you press 6, 7 fast, it is 67. 6, 7. So this helps you add wonderful texture to the skin so that when you zoom out, it doesn't look retouched because without it, it looks too soft. But with it, probably you cannot see the difference unless you're watching it in 4K. If I were to duplicate this, look at the difference. It just makes the skin texture pop. It's hard to see the difference if you're not watching this video on YouTube in 4K, but I highly recommend that you try it on your photos to see the difference for yourself. I hope you enjoyed this video and if you did, make sure to give us a like and also don't forget to subscribe and not just subscribe. Ring the bell so that you, my friend, don't miss any other future tips, tricks or tutorials. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in my next one. Till then, stay tuned and make sure that you keep creating.