There are a lot of techniques for cleaning up skin in Affinity Photo, but this one is my favorite. With this technique, not only does the skin look smoother, but the texture of the skin stays the same, so it looks realistic and natural.
Step 0: Downloading the Image
For this tutorial, we’ll be using this beautiful portrait. I’ve used the first image in this group of images.
In addition to this written tutorial, you can also watch our video tutorial on retouching skin for another example.
Step 1: Frequency Separation
To start off, let’s duplicate the background layer by pressing Command J (Mac) or Control J (PC).
At the top of the screen, go to Filters, then Frequency Separation.
Frequency Separation separates the high and low frequency parts of your photo into two separate layers.
Zoom into the picture. On the left, we see the High Frequency side has the pores of the skin well defined, but it has no color. On the right, we see the Low Frequency side has less defined pores, and all of the color.
High frequency keeps all the texture, while low frequency keeps all of the colors.
When editing skin, we can change the Radius slider in the Dialog Box. Use a smaller Radius for smoother skin, and a higher Radius for more natural looking skin. For this image, we will keep this slider set to 2 pixels.
Press Apply in the Dialog Box.
In the Layers Panel, we now have a High Frequency layer and Low Frequency layer.
Press Command 0 (Mac) or Control 0 (PC) to see the whole picture again.
Step 2: Gaussian Blur
Select the Low Frequency layer, and duplicate it by pressing Command J (Mac) or Control J (PC).
On this duplicate layer, we will apply a Gaussian Blur Filter.
Press on the Filters icon.
Apply a Gaussian Blur Filter.
Increase the Radius until the skin looks fairly blurred. For this image, I’ll increase the Radius to 20 pixels.
We don’t want the whole image to be blurred. We just want the skin to be slightly blurred.
With the Low Frequency layer selected, hold down Alt or Option, then press on the Mask icon. This applies a black Mask to our layer. Now we can paint on our “smooth skin effect” wherever we want it.
Press on the Mask layer icon in the Layers Panel.
Select the Paint Brush Tool.
Set your color to white, and use with a low Flow with 0% Hardness.
You can adjust the size of the brush by using the bracket keys underneath the equal sign on your keyboard ( [ and ] ).
Paint on the woman’s skin to apply the smoothing effect.
Be careful to just blur the skin, not the edges of the face or her eyes.
Step 3: Inpainting Brush
With the skin looking smooth, we can now remove some of the bigger blemishes on the skin.
Add a new Pixel Layer to the top of the layers stack, by pressing on the Add New Pixel Layer button.
Select the Inpainting Brush Tool, then in the Context Toolbar, make sure you have Current Layer & Below selected.
Paint over the blemishes to remove them.
If you ever decide that the skin looks too perfect, and you want to bring back some of the natural skin, we can always lower the opacity of our edits.
First, select all of the layers while holding down Shift, excluding the bottom layer.
Then press Command G (Mac) or Control G (PC) to group the layers.
With the group selected, you can lower the Opacity in the Layers Panel to bring back some of the natural skin.
You did it! You can use these steps to retouch skin in any of your photos, and make it as smooth or natural as you want!
