How do I smooth the texture of this fabric in Affinity Photo?

[Catrin]

How do I smooth the crushed velvet fabric in this chair without losing too much detail in the back? I've tried frequency separation and it keeps all the texture, just makes the image lighter (lighter image attached to this thread). Really not sure how to approach this, some help would be greatly appreciated please!

[EmT]

Hi @Catrin

I've mocked up a quick example of smoothing the texture using the paint brush, selection brush tools and blend modes. 

Is this along the right lines of the effect you are aiming for? 

 

[Catrin]

Hi @EmT

 

Thank you! Yes that's going in the right direction! Which sort of brush effects and blend modes did you use?

[EmT]

The steps I took were: 

1. Use selection brush tool to select only the grey material, you could further refine this to remove the metal studs from the selection. 
2. Create a new pixel layer
3. Use colour picker to select darker grey shade from chair. 
4. Use paint brush to tool to paint over whole of selection area. I used a basic brush with hardness, opacity and flow set to 100%
5. Set blend mode of pixel layer to 'Darker Colour' 
6. Adjust Layer opacity to desired effect. I set the opacity to 30% in the example, but you can go as far as 50% before it becomes too obvious. 

I would also add a Brightness adjustment after this, but again this is personal preference. 

[Catrin]

@EmT That's really helpful, thanks!

For the remaining texture that's there, do you know of any way I could blend everything together to create a flatter texture all around? The median brush sort of does what I'm looking for but it's essentially blurring the piece. 

[EmT]

You can try using the de-noise filter to remove some, however after a certain point you will see it start to blur or look unrealistic, so it may not be possible to remove all the texture. 
I would advise you select just the grey material and then apply the denoise filter so the legs and studs aren't affected.