Retouch images with frequency separation

One of the black arts of photographic retouching is how to achieve the impossibly smooth, yet sharply rendered skin, textures and fabrics seen in fashion and beauty images. Photoshop has its own high quality smoothing and sharpening filters, but the two processes tend to be somewhat contradictory.

In this tutorial I'll walk you through how I retouch an image from start to finish, using a technique that enables you to selectively process not only different areas of an image, but also different detail levels. Frequency separation involves creating a high detail (high spatial frequency) layer and a low detail layer from a source image - a particularly clever method of doing this was popularised by Sean Baker, a Maryland-based photographer and retoucher. Using this technique enables you to smooth and rework rough and fine details independently, and opens up some very high-quality and non-destructive methods with which to sharpen your images.

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