In this episode we're going to use some
spectacular lighting, spectacular
post-production, to create some
spectacular pictures of
a spectacular model!
Hi everybody, welcome to another
episode of Exploring Photography right
here on AdoramaTV.
I'm Mark Wallace in Tactic Studios in
Madrid Spain, and today
I'm going to take this studio and
transform it from a very bland, seamless
white paper, to beyond reality beauty
shoot with a fantastic model, her name is
Fanny Beladona.
Here she is right here,
and you probably recognize her from
some previous shoots we've done on
AdoramaTV. So today what we're going to
be doing is, we're going to be spending a
lot of time in the lighting portion, and
the shooting portion of this video,
because it's very, very simple. You see
that in just a second, we're going to
shoot some very basic beauty shots. But
then I want to take those into
post-production, and take them from
beautiful to beyond reality. So we're
going to make her skin, we're gonna make
your skin sort of flawless, beyond what
is normal in real life, and we might
add some textures and some glow, and some
other things, and so without further ado
let's get our lighting set up, and then
we'll start shooting. So let's set up our
lights right now.
Well now that we have everything set up,
let me give you a better understanding
of how all the lights are configured.
This is an incredibly simple lighting
setup. It's just butterfly lights so we
have a three-foot octabox on the top
with a small softbox below,
giving some really, really, soft light, and
I've added two kicker lights.
These are some Godox strip lights, just to give
her some highlights on the hair,
everything is shot on axis, right between
these two small soft boxes on the front.
And we're gonna make sure that we crop
really tight on Fanny, and it will look
fantastic.
Well now that we understand the lighting
setup, it's pretty simple, let's talk
about how this strategy of shooting.
I'm shooting it at f/8, the reason for that is I
want enough depth of field to get all
of Fannie's face, all of her hair,
everything in focus.
And with my 50 mm lens that is perfect,
now ideally I'd use a little bit longer lens,
maybe a 70 - 200. Ao I might need to
dial that into f/11 or so, depending on
what you're using, and how far away you
are from your subject. But I don't have a
70-200mm. All I have is my 50, so that's
what I'm using. So without further ado
we're gonna shoot some, and then we'll
get to the post-production.
I love these shots, but to make them
exceptional we need to do our
post-production, because we want
exceptionally flawless, artificially
flawless skin. We want to make sure that
we add some highlights, and textures and
all kinds of things. We want to take
these from reality, to beyond reality,
that's the kind of beauty shots that I'm
looking to create, and so to do that we
need to add some post-production, gonna
get to that right now!
For this retouching session
I'm going to be using
a Photoshop technique called
"Frequency Separation".. to keep things short
I'm going to stick to the basics, the steps
are simple. In Photoshop we'll create two
copies of our background layer, the lower
copy will be blurred to create a
low-frequency layer, and we'll use apply
image to the top layer, to create a
high-frequency layer. On the low
frequency layer, we'll adjust our
luminosity tones and colors, and on the
high frequency layer, we'll adjust our
textures. Now it sounds complicated, but
it's not. Let's walk through it together
we're gonna start on a familiar place
for an Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and
I've already looked at the images from
the photo shoot, and these are the ones
I've selected to edit. We're just going
to start with this last image here, and
zip over to the develop module. Now at
this point all you need to do is, set
your tonality and color, so your white
balance, and your basic highlights
shadows, whites, blacks, etc
Now you can do that here in ...
in Lightroom or in
Adobe Camera Raw.
It doesn't really matter, the important
thing is once you're finished.
You need to zip over into Photoshop.
So I will do that by right-clicking,
saying ..Edit in... Adobe Photoshop CC 2019
now once we're in Photoshop,
we need to make two copies of
this background layer. We can do that
using the command or control J shortcut
key. So I'll do that once, twice, to create
two layers. Two copies of this
background layer. Now to keep things easy to
understand I'm going to rename these
layers really quickly, and I've renamed
them to low frequency and high
frequency, and I'm going to put those in a
group just so that I can turn them on and off,
for before-and-after comparisons later.
So FSL, frequency separation layers.
I'll hit okay.
You don't have to put these into a group.
I just do that so I can turn them
on and off, very quickly to show you the
differences later on.
Okay the next thing we need to do is,
we need to set up these
low and high frequency layers. Now the
thing is you don't have to understand
why we're doing what we're doing, you
just have to understand the steps,
because they are the same, every time you
do this. So the first thing we need to do,
is turn off the visibility of the high
frequency layer. You do that just by
clicking the little eyeball, then select
the low frequency layer, and we need to
blur that. We're going to blur that using
the, the Gaussian blur. Now to do this
before I do that, I need to zoom in to
100%. That's important, you want to make
sure that you can see this at a hundred
percent. So we can see all the little
fine lines and details, and our subjects
face. So once I've done that, now I'll go
to filter, blur.. Gaussian.. blur. Now what I
want to do is, I want to set this radius.
Not too high, and not too low. But just
high enough that the details. All the
small details, the eyelashes, the lines on
her lips, the lines around her eyes etc..
Those start to go out of focus, or those
are blurry... so we're just going to go up
to around five pixels. You can see that
those are now soft. Down about one, and a
half, or two pixels.
There's just not quite enough.. so somewhere
around four or five pixels is going to be
the sweet spot.
So I'll do 4.6. Don't go way up
here to a really, really high, blur.
Because that just isn't going to work, so
some of them, one of the big mistakes is
people blur too much on this
low-frequency layer.
Keep that down just enough, where the
small details are being blurred out. Then
hit okay. That's all you have to do for
the low-frequency layer.
For the high-frequency layer, now we'll
select this layer, and then turn back on the
visibility, and then we're going to do
something called apply image. Again you
don't have to understand why, you just
have to understand what.
So to do this go to image
and then we're going to go to apply
image. Now this is going to ask us for a
few things, and the good thing is, this is
the same every single time. So it's going
to ask for the layer that you're applying.
So what we want to do is, make
sure we choose the low frequency layer.
So that is this low frequency layer here
the first layer that we just blurred.
So if you name that something else, whatever
you've named it. It's going to show up in
this drop-down. So low frequency is what
I've selected. The blending mode we want
to make sure that we choose subtract,
subtract is the blending mode, and then
the opacity should be 100%, and these
other two values here are always going
to be the same the scale. Should be two,
and the offset should be 128, make sure
the scale is to offset 128 and then
click OK. Now this looks like a high-pass
filter, so we have to fix that. So we go
over here to our layers panel, we choose
our blending mode, and then make sure you
choose linear light. Now this is sort of
crazy here. If I just have my low
frequency layer, I have a blurry image.
If I just have my high frequency layer, I
have this high-pass filtering look. If I
put those together, using linear light we
have a complete image. So I have my
textures on this layer, and I can choose
to fix those totally independent of my
colors and tones here on this low
frequency layer. So let's dive in and
start working with this. We're going to
start by working on the low frequency
layer. What we want to do here is, notice
on Fanny's face that she has some areas
on her face that are similar tones. So
some reds on her cheeks, we have some
nice light. Forehead here, but notice that
it's sort of blotchy. We've got different
darks and light likenesses here, some reds and
some oranges. We want to start blending
those together. So it becomes smooth, and
we're going to overdo it
in this demo, just to make sure it shows
up on YouTube.
So to do this what I... first thing to do is
get my lasso tool.
So I'm going to click over here, you can
use the shortcut key L,
to make this much faster.
I need to make sure I have a nice
feather, so I'm going to use about 15
pixels. So I will just select this area
here that I want to blend now. If I want
to see what that feather looks like, I
can hit the quick mask shortcut key,
which is Q, and then I can see if this
is a nice feather if it's not I can hit
Q again to get rid of that, deselect.
I can change my feather, make it maybe 20
select again, and then hit Q to see if
that's a nice feather. It looks pretty
good to me, okay so, I've got our selection.
it's a nice feather, and now what we need
to do is, we need to blur this, just on the low
frequency layer. So to do that, I'm going
to go to filter, and then I'm going to
select blur, Gaussian blur.
Now notice, I've set up a shortcut key.
I've got some keystrokes here to do this really
quickly, and I've got a Wacom tablet that
emulates those keystrokes. So you'll see
me start to do this really quickly, but
that's how I did it. I set up a custom
keyboard shortcut, and then assigned that
to a key on my tablet. So I'm going to
select Gaussian blur, and then for this
what I want to do is. I want to move this
to a radius where all of these different
tones start blending together, now make
sure preview is checked,
so you can see that,
and notice that all this blotchiness is
starting to go away.
What.. for about oh.. 40, 45.
That's probably way too much than you'd
normally do, but I really want to make
sure that you can see this on YouTube.
So I'm going to go with about 59 here,
and say okay. Now what
I'll do is, I'll start selecting
different areas. So I'm going to select
this area, they have similar tones and
then I'm using my shortcut key to go
ahead and blend that.
They go down here.
These are similar tones, I will select
that, he's my shortcut key,
blend that... I'm just going to do this really, really
quickly here on some of the larger portions of
Fanny's face, and watch what happens if
I turn off the group. Whoops, if I turn
off the group with the background later
on. So this is before, this is after, you
can already see this to really start
taking effect.
Now I'm overdoing it for the sake of
YouTube, but you can see how this works.
it's very very simple, low frequency, you
select areas that are similar, you blur
them move to the next area, blur them.
So we're fixing the tonality of our
low-frequency layer. The high-frequency
layer is what we use to fix things like
these little lines around our subjects
eyes. So to do that, what I'm going to do
first, I'm gonna blend these really fast
using the same technique. So I'm going to
blend all these areas right here.
So that's blended using the same method now.
I'm going to go to the high frequency
layer. I'm able to choose a different
tool. The tool I'm choosing is the clone
stamp tool. I know you're thinking, well
why not use the blend...ah The healing
brush tool. Well the clone stamp tool is
what we want to do, because we want to
take areas of texture from one area
that's similar, and apply them to another
area. So we're just doing a transplant,
so we're cloning that stuff. The thing
that's important to understand is, we
need to make sure that this sample is on
the current layer. So not current and
below, or all layers, make sure it's set
to current layer, that's very, very
important.
Then what we can do is, we can
use our option key to select where we
want to pull from. So I'm going to pull
from about right here. I'm going to place
that in here, and we're just going to
keep doing that very quickly, and notice
that all of that detail just goes away.
So I'm quickly and easily able to change
the textures, without changing the tones
and the colors underneath. It is a really
fabulous technique,
so we can spend some
time on this.
Normally this would take
you 20-30 minutes..
maybe an hour or two
to do this correctly.
So I'm gonna work on this image
and then I will show you
the before and after results.
So I've worked on this image for a few
minutes now, and now we can show you the
differences between 'the before' and 'after'.
So this is the 'before' image, looked
pretty good until we did all the
retouching. This is the 'after', this
frequency separation technique allows
you to create some stunning differences
between your 'before' and 'after' image with
a very simple technique.
I loved these images, we went beyond
reality to create something that's really
beautiful.
Thank you so much Fanny for being in
yet another wonderful video.
Make sure you check out Fanny on
Instagram it's
@fanny_beladona ... here is her link right here..
Also checking me out
check me out..on integral as well.
@jmarkwallace, here's my Instagram.
Check it out, make sure you subscribe to
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Thanks again, we'll see you again next time.