Frequency Separation For Beginners

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How Does Frequency Separation Work?

The way Frequency Separation works is by separating the colours and the textures. Once these have been separated from each other, we can make adjustments to them individually to remove anything that we don’t want in our photos. With the colours, if there is unwanted tones or shadows we can replace them by either cloning surrounding colours or, by painting in new colours. If the problem lies in the texture such as a crack, blemish or surface. All we do is copy desirable texture and replace the bad with the good.

This is by far the best way to remove unwanted objects in photoshop, from skin blemishes to graffiti. The possibilities are literally endless and you can have so much fun using this technique when you’re editing your images.

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Step-by-step Guide To Frequency Separation 

1. From your base images create two more Duplicated layers 

 

2. Rename the two duplicates, the middle one will contain your colours and the top one will hold your textures

 

3. Hide the Textures layer and select the Colours layer. We are going to add a Gaussian Blur by going to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur.

 

4. Adjust the blur Radius so that we lose the unwanted colours. This blur will seem extreme. That’s OK.

 

5. Now, Select your texture layer and go to Image>Apply Image.

 

6. For Layer choose your Colour Layer. For Blending lending select ‘Subtract’ and ensure your Scale is set to 2 and Offset is set to 128 then click OK.

 

7. Change the Blend Mode of your texture layer to Linear Light.

 

8. With the texture layer selected. Select the Clone Stamp tool. Now hold the Alt or Opt key and select an area that you want to copy texture from. Then, left-click on the area you want to replace and continue to paint over the bad texture.

 

9. Once you have made all the corrections to the texture layer, repeat the same process on the colours layer. Using the Clone Stamp Tool, select the colour layer and clone the desired colours over unwanted colours.

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Additional Resources

Here is another article to Clean Up Your Landscape Photography Using Frequency Separation.

Also, see how we used Frequency Separation to process a challenging landscape using Luminosity Masks on DIFFICULT Landscape Photo

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Online Resources

If you want to find out how to use frequency separation to remove freckles or blemishes, I found a really useful video here on Youtube. 

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