The First Part of this series demonstrated the power of the high pass filter in Photoshop. Now I will walk you through this Photoshop technique step-by-step.

Below is the original image- a few more wrinkles than I want. Duplicate the background and re-name it something like “high pass”

Next I want to even out the shading a bit on the right side. I will use a curves layer and a gradient mask to accomplish this.

So now we’re ready to apply the high pass filter. You can find it in the menus under: Filter>Other>High Pass.

The key to finding the best setting for your image is in the preview. If your radius is too large you will not get rid of the major wrinkles. If you set it too low you will lose fine detail. This image works with about a 6 pixel radius. Don’t worry if it looks a bit flat- we will add some shape back later.

In order to make sure I’m able to keep the fine detail I sharpen this layer a just a bit. This step helps the detail to come through when we reduce the layer transparency later. The settings you use may vary. I kept the threshold at 0 – again to help with the fine detail.

The next step is to use a layer mask to mask out any areas you do not want to apply this technique. It is best to do this step now, as it helps with the next step. It doesn’t have to be perfect, you can refine it later. At some point set the layer mode to luminosity.

Of course it doesn’t look quite right, so we’ll need to add a curves layer (clipped to your Highpass layer) to get the overall luminosity to match. Since we masked out some portions of the image we can visually adjust the curve to match.

So now we have a wrinkle free shirt. It still looks a little “flat” however. The quickest way to remedy this is to lower the opacity of the layer. How much is up to you. You may also want to refine your mask a little at this point.

You can compare the results to the original. You can make it as subtle or dramatic as you want.

Below the 100% crop shows that I was able to keep the fine detail.

So that is the basic technique. I chose a pretty simple example- you should experiment with this technique and make it work for your images.  The next time I revisit this technique I will look at some more difficult images.

I did do a little more work on the final image in the slide show in part 1. I completely masked out the stethoscope, placed it on it’s own layer and added a new shadow. I also painted  some gentle folds using a multiply and a screen layer, painted with black and white respectively.

If you missed part 1 you can read it Here If your ready to move on here is Part 3

Filed under: High pass Filter, Photoshop, Retouching, Tutorial, high pass filter, layer mode, Photoshop, Tutorial, wrinkles