Writer and designer Ben Secret reveals why a functional jacket, luxury furniture, and a 1960s magazine are among his top sources of inspiration. Fascinated by what really makes designers tick, we asked another to reveal what inspires them the most. http://www.creativebloq.com/design/design-classics-ben-secret-812633

Retouch images using frequency separation link Stylised gradient effects using Photoshop’s channels link Get to grips with layer groups link Desaturation? Desaturation’s for amateurs. Use the Black & White filter link Skin Smoothing – SmartFilter Inverted High-Pass Technique link Tone and Colour Stylising…

Ben Secret is a designer, writer and photo retoucher. He regularly writes tutorials for Computer Arts and is a Photoshop pro. Here, he talks about daydreaming and his love for the Apple iPhone.

Overlooking the city of Budapest from the loft apartment he shares with his girlfriend, Aaron Funk struggles to cope with the difficulties of order breakfast in a foreign land. “It’s tricky because I’m a vegetarian, but I’m ordering sushi, online, in Hungarian,” he mutters from behind his laptop as he tries to navigate a cryptic-looking menu page…

I’d been looking at the way film handles colour for ages, particularly in cinematography. If you’ve ever noticed, turning up the saturation in Photoshop (with HSL or Vibrance), things tend to get garish and noisy. Yet in film, it seems you can get incredibly vivid colours which really define their own space and don’t seem [...]

This works best if you’re trying to match two fairly similar skin tones. Curves has a function that lets you set the grey point – it’s the middle eyedropper icon in the curves bit. Select it, and then whatever you click on in the scene becomes grey by virtue of having it adjust the red, [...]

Local contrast can help give images more descriptive and well balanced tones. What you’re doing is making a vague/blurred version of the image; using that to lighten/darken the image underneath; then inverting the effect. So light areas get darker, and dark areas get lighter, but with this kind of area-based effect. Similar to what you [...]

Going all the way to B&W with the saturation filter gives you dull, subdued images (which is why we don’t use it for B&W conversion of course). And yet desaturation’s something I use in every picture. The first thing you can do is simply change the blending mode of your saturation adjustment layer to Color. [...]