Photoshop Tutorials High Pass Filter

Today we had to create several effects on sample images supplied by Ste our photoshop tutor.

The first one is HIGH PASS.

You could easily confuse this as sharpening the chosen image but in action, it actually does the opposite. Below is a step by step tutorial.

Below are the before and afters:

Before 

After

Step One:

Start by pressing Command J or for PC it would me CTRL-J to duplicate background layer

Step Two: Change the blend mode of this duplicate layer to overlay . Press Command-I to invert the layer. This can look at bit scary

Step Three:

Under filter menu, go to Other and choose High Pass. When the filter dialog appears, enter 10 pixels, cick OK. This part makes the image real blurry but dont panic

Step Four:

To limit the blurry effect I ill now add the Gaussian Blur. Go to FILTER menu and under blur select the Gaussian. Drag the radius to were desired. I chose 2 pixel. The skin starts to look smoother now.

Step Five:

Now because the above step has made the entire image blurred we need to isolate it to just the skin.

Press and hold the Option Key (ALT) and click on the Add Layer Mask to hide the textured layer behind a black mask.

Step Six

Select the brush tool, choose a medium sized soft brush with the opacity set to 100%. Ensure the foreground is set to white and then paint over the skin areas, revealing a softened skin texture in those areas.If the texture seems to be to OTT then you can reduce the opacity until it looks pleasant to the eye. Ensure that you have selected the correct filter layer not the background.

To finish off flatten image and save.