Hi. Welcome back to the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com.
I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this video, I'm going to show you an insanely powerful tip
to enhance texture and detail in Photoshop.
I'm going to show you nondestructive techniques that will allow you to apply selective sharpening.
Now, just to be clear, this tutorial is not about sharpening the entire image.
It's about targeting specific areas of an image.
If you're looking for a tutorial that will teach you about sharpening the entire image,
then check the link down below in the description.
It's my tutorial on how to sharpen in Photoshop.
It teaches you everything that you wanna know about sharpening, but in this tutorial, we're
going to focus on targeted sharpening.
Okay, let's get started.
We're going to work with this portrait, and this image has already been developed.
It already has tonal adjustments and color adjustments.
In the final step of every image, of course, is sharpening, and this image has already
been sharpened globally,
but now, we're going to focus on enhancing the detail and texture of the image.
And before we actually get into the sharpening effect, I'm going to show you an example that's
going to teach you how
the filter, the High Pass filter, works.
That is the main filter that we're going to use for this effect, and you need to know how it works.
I don't wanna give you a recipe, a step-by-step tutorial,
without really showing you how and why it works.
So, we're gonna take just a moment and explain how this filter works.
So, the very first step is to right click and convert this layer into a smart object,
because we want to work non-destructively.
We want to be able to come back and edit adjustments at a later time.
Then, I'm going to press Ctrl J, Command J on the Mac, to duplicate the smart object.
With this duplicate copy, I'm going to rename the layer and call it 'low'.
And I'm going to press Ctrl J, Command J on the Mac, once again, to duplicate the layer,
and I'll call this layer 'high'.
Then, with the high layer selected, I'm going to hold shift and click on the low layer,
and then press control G, Command G on the Mac, to put that into a group, and I'll call
the group 'example'.
This is just for the example of how the sharpening works.
I'm going to expand the group, and I'm going to select the low layer and disable the high layer.
So, we're working with the low layer.
And although, also, the same with the portrait layer so that you're sure that we're only
working with this layer.
So, with this low layer, I'm going to apply a filter, a filter that you probably already know.
But before I do so, I'm going to double click on the zoom tool to see the image at 100%.
And I'm gonna hold the space bar, click and drag and pan up to her face.
Then, I can go into Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur.
So, I'm sure you've seen this before.
This is just a filter that blurs the image, right?
We've removed all the detail.
In other words, we're removing the high frequency information.
We're left with the low frequency information.
So, I'll select the radius of three, and then press OK.
So, as you can see, I removed all the detail, all the high frequency information.
Like many other tools in Photoshop, the blur filter has an opportunity filter.
I'll enable this layer, and I'll show you what that filter is.
If you go into Filter, Other, High Pass, you have a filter that does the opportunity.
This filter removes the low frequency information and it keeps the high frequency information.
More specifically, High Pass retains edge details in the specified radius where the
sharp color transitions occur, and suppresses the rest of the image.
So, notice that as I adjust the slider, you can see that I'm only keeping details, and
if I drag the slider all the way to the end, notice that I essentially bring back the original
image, which is not what we wanna do.
So, I'm gonna add the same radius that I used in the Gaussian Blur.
I'll add three pixels.
Notice that the filter is now only keeping the detail in the image, the high frequency
information, so High Pass looked for edges in the image, and expanded the radius three
pixels, and that's what you see on screen.
So, anything that is not detail, not part of the high frequency information of the layer,
becomes 50% gray.
And that's gonna be really useful when we apply a blending mode.
So, I'll press OK for now.
Now, using blending modes, I can blend these two layers together to get back the original
image, which is the portrait.
So, select the high layer, the layer that contains the detail of the image, anything
that is not detail is 50% gray.
Then, open the list of blending modes.
And what you wanna do is blend the two layers together, the high and low layer, and we want
to blend them by removing everything that is 50% gray,
which means that we'll only keep the detail.
And to do so,
we can use any one of these blending modes.
All these blending modes remove 50% gray.
The one that we're gonna use is linear light, and once I select it, you'll notice that we
almost have the original image back.
Almost there.
What I'll do now is simply bring down the opacity to 50%,
and I have pretty much the original image back.
If I double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen, you'll see that when
I disable the example group, it'll look virtually the same as the portrait layer.
It's not 100% the same, but it's close enough.
It's about 99% or 98% the same.
And the reason that I went through this long explanation was just to simply show you what
the High Pass filter is doing.
A lot of times when you're learning Photoshop, people just show you the steps, but they don't
really explain to you
what the filter is actually doing, and then that was the purpose of this example here.
Also, for those of you that are more advanced and who are paying a little attention, you'll
notice that what I just did here is frequency separation.
I have the low frequency layer and the high frequency layer above, so the layer without
detail and the layer with detail, and combined they create the final image.
And this is, um, frequency separation.
Which, as you may know, is a popular retouching technique.
Let me know down in the comments below if you want to see a frequency separation tutorial from PTC.
But anyway, now that you know what the High Pass filter is doing, I'm just going to select
the example group, and I'm going to delete it.
And I'm going to duplicate the portrait layer by pressing Ctrl J, Command J on the Mac.
And I'll call it "High Pass", because that's the filter that we're going to apply.
So, I'm gonna go into filter, other, High Pass.
Notice that in the preview window, all the low frequency information is gone.
We just have the detail, the high frequency, and we're going to use this detail information
and apply it to our portrait selectively in areas that we want to enhance the detail and texture.
And you can set the radius, which determines how much sharpening you're going to apply
to this image.
I'll leave it at three for now, and I'll press OK.
And I'll select the linear light blending mode, and I'll bring the opacity to 50% for now.
Now, this is exactly the same layer that I had a moment ago in the example group.
I just wanted to show you how to do it without having to go through the Gaussian Blur steps.
One other thing I wanna mention is that in Photoshop, or any other software, you cannot
really add detail to the image.
You can only create the illusion of detail by adding contrast on edges,
so that's really what we're doing here.
So, creating the illusions of more detail.
I'm gonna select the zoom tool, and I'm going to zoom in,
and I'm gonna work at 100%.
You always want to work at the 100% view
to get an accurate representation of what is going on.
Any other zoom level could be misleading, so try to work at 100% if you can.
So, with this High Pass layer, obviously, it adds
a sharpening effect to the entire image, and we don't want that.
We want to selectively sharpen the image.
Now, before we do that, I also wanna mention that we are currently in the linear light
blending mode, but you could also use overlay,
soft light,
hard light,
and vivid light,
so any one of these blending modes.
For this tutorial, I'll stick with overlay,
and now I'll move on to the step of selectively sharpening the image.
So, with this High Pass layer selected, I can create a layer mask, but I'm going to
hold alt, before I click on the layer mask icon, to create a black layer mask, which
means that it's going to hide the High Pass effect.
Now, with the brush tool and with white as my foreground color, I can paint in detail.
So, I can paint in detail in her eyes, for example.
See that?
Before and after.
Her eyebrows.
Before and after.
And you can also duplicate the layer by pressing Ctrl J, Command J on the Mac,
and fill this layer mask with black so that we can start from scratch.
Black is currently my background color,
so I can press control, Backspace, that's Command Delete on the Mac,
to fill the background color, which is black.
Everything is invisible,
and now I can use this second High Pass layer
to bring in more detail on her hair.
And obviously, I'm going fairly quickly here for the example.
You wanna spend a little more time with working on your images.
So, that's before and after.
And the reason that you want to have separate layers and not work on a single layer is so
that you can fine tune the High Pass.
So, when I expand the smart object, you'll see the High Pass label.
If you double click on it, it brings up the High Pass filter controls once again, and
you can make adjustments
to the High Pass layer if you want.
So, that is one of the reasons why it's good to work non-destructively.
It gives you the flexibility to make changes at any time.
And, of course, you can keep fine tuning all the details in the image, maybe even bring more
detail into the texture of the camera.
It's totally up to you what you want to sharpen on your image.
What I'll do now is I'll hold shift, and click on both layers,
then press control G, Command G on the Mac,
to put them into a group, and I can just call this effect
sharpen
texture/details.
And when I zoom out, you can see the before and the after.
Notice that in this zoom level, you can't really see what's going on.
I'm at 21.92%,
so I'll double-click on the Zoom Tool and zoom in to 100%,
and then you'll be able to see
the before and the after.
And you can see the texture on the camera as well.
Now, I do have one more trick for you.
It doesn't have to do with sharpening, but it has to do with High Pass layer, so
I'll show it to you in this tutorial.
For now, I'll disable the sharpen texture details group,
and I'll select the High Pass layer
and duplicate it by pressing Ctrl J, Command J on the Mac, and drag it out of the group.
Then, I'll right-click and select, Delete Layer Mask.
And obviously, it applies the High Pass effect to the entire layer.
You can see that there, right?
And I'll increase the opacity to 100%.
And the trick that I wanna show you is that you can press
Ctrl I, Command I on the Mac, on that High Pass layer to create a softening effect.
So, you can actually soften skin with this same filter.
So, notice that I inverted
the information on that layer.
And I can then hold Alt, Pption on the Mac and click on the layer mask icon to create
a black layer mask,
and I can paint in softness in the skin.
Obviously, I would have to fine tune the adjustment by maybe bringing down the opacity, and maybe
painting a better layer mask.
I got a little bit of her eye there, which I didn't intend to, but you get the idea.
You can spend a lot of time in your images fine tuning the effect, but I just wanted
to show you how you could use High Pass to also add a softening skin effect.
And if you enjoyed this tutorial, don't forget to check out my tutorial on
how to sharpen images in Photoshop.
That tutorial is all about sharpening the entire image, so check it out.
There's a link right below in the description.
Let me know down in the comments below if these techniques were useful to you.
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Thank you so much for watching, and I will talk to you again in the next tutorial.