From all retouching techniques for skin, I like the so-called inverted high pass method the most. It looks very natural and the process is being used by professionals around the world.
And the best thing is: It is a very fast technique.
Retouching skin can be a tiring thing. And when it comes to nude photography, there is a lot of skin. Often, skin colors require a bit of smoothing but you want to bring back some skin structure, at the same time. Adding a texture to a three dimensional image is difficult. So some clever people came up with a method to speed up this process with the help of Photoshop.
Inverted High Pass in Photoshop
- Make sure your image is 16bit.
- Copy the background layer twice, rename to ‘blur’ and ‘high pass’.
- Use Gaussian blur on the ‘blur’ layer with an amount that looks super smooth yet leaves contours.
- Select the high pass layer and go to Image > Apply Image, select layer ‘blur’, check ‘invert’, blending mode ‘add’, scale ‘2’.
- Hide layer ‘blur’ as it won’t be needed anymore. Use Gaussian blur with one third of previous value on layer ‘high pass’ and invert your layer.
- Select ‘linear light’ for ‘high pass’ layer and add a layer mask (filled black). Now, draw with a white brush on the areas you’d like to apply the correction to.
- Reduce opacity of layer ‘high pass’ to reduce the effect, keep
it sublte.