Clean up your face

Remove blemishes and stray hairs with the help of frequency separation – and Wendy Evans

Before

After

Wendy Evans

Four LUTs to apply to your images

No video tutorial this month

Project files to follow along

Download your files

www.digitalcameraworld.com/dc304 Download your project files from the folder titled ‘Affinity_Frequency Separation’.

Cleaning up portraits, especially female ones, can be a laborious process. It’s also easy to go overboard and end up with an unnatural-looking result. While you can start with the Clone Brush (K) tool for obvious moles and blemishes, it’s tricky to remove uneven textures and stray hairs. In this tutorial, we’ll look at combining the Clone tool with frequency separation layers to make it easier to get good results. But before we get to that, the first thing to do is to ensure you have tweaked any exposure or perspective issues in the image, as doing it afterwards can affect the visible results of your editing. The reason for using Affinity’s frequency separation ability is that it’s completely customisable and allows you to separate detail from background colour. This makes it easier to then correct details without changing colours.