Inverted High Pass Retouch

Here’s a quick reminder on how to retouch with inverted high pass in Photoshop. This works best when there’s a skin structure in a photo already.

1. Make sure the image is 16bit.
2. Copy the background layer twice, rename to blur and high pass.
3. Use Gaussian blur on the blur layer with an amount that looks super smooth yet leaves contours.
4. Select high pass layer and go to Image > Apply Image, select layer ‘blur’, check ‘invert’, blending mode ‘add’, scale ‘2’.
5. Layer ‘blur’ won’t be needed anymore. Use Gaussian blur with one third of previous value on layer ‘high pass’ and invert your layer (Strg+i).
6. 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.

See for yourself in this video tutorial by Marcin Mikus. Like him, I agree that you should not overdo the grain: