Lessons

Lesson Info

Sharpening Images

Another thing that I do to a good number of my images that you find on my website is a special kind of sharpening that I would like to show you just simplifying this image so I could do it on it. One other thing to simplify this. Just trying to get it to be a normal picture. Okay, now it's like a normal layer with nothing special on it. If I want to really exaggerate the textures that are in a picture to make it look almost like a drawing, I'll do the following technique. I'll duplicate a layer by typing command J. Then I'm gonna change the blending mode in that layer to a choice called overlay. And when I do that, the image is gonna have more contrast. But the contrast boost will be temporary. In a moment, I'll be able to get it back just the way it waas. After setting the layered overlay, I'm gonna go to Filter, I'm gonna choose other. I'll choose High pass. That's filter other high pass. If I bring the slider for high past all the way down, it'll look just like it did a few minutes ...

ago. Remember when I said it was gonna come back to the way it used to look White House right now. Now, if it bring the radius slider up, watch what happens to this area. It might be hard to see somewhat on the stream just because the streamed images usually highly compressed, and it's hard to see really, really fine detail. But you should be able to see some sort of change happening, getting a lot more fine detail, bring it up to hide, starts looking a little soft and glowy. I'm gonna bring it up the highest I could get where it still seems to be bringing in a good amount of detail. And then I'll click. OK, if I really want to exaggerate the detail, I could duplicate it more than once here. I've duplicated it, so have a total of three of them, and I'll hide them to show you the difference. That's when you should be able to see it on the stream. You see a big difference out that's known as high pass sharpening. You don't usually apply three times like that. In extreme cases, you can, though the technique was to duplicate the background, set it to overlay mode and then use high pass. And I do that any time. I want an overly illustrative look where people ask, Is it a photo? It feels too detailed to be a photo. If I don't want it to look like a drawing where it's overly detailed, then there's two different sharpening filters I would use instead. And those are known a smart sharpen. An uncharted mask. That way I choose between them is if my picture contains skin tones, people I always use unsure mask. If it doesn't contain skin tones, I will usually use smart sharpen. One thing to know about doing things with skin tones is that if you come in here and sharpen, you want to use on short mask and skin tones. And the problem with it is if I bring this up, I'll exaggerated. She might be able to see it more easily on the video because on the stream it's really hard to see subtle things like sharpening. But it'll sharpen everything in the face, and it will make people look older because all their little variations in their skin tone will be exaggerated. The reason why you want to use on sharp mask is because it has a feature called Threshold in with skin tones. I always bring threshold up. I'm gonna bring it up a very small amount, usually up in single digits. It's gonna be up at 45 in that general range, sometimes as high as six. And what that does is it helps prevent the small variations in skin from being exaggerated. What it says is that things must be at least six brightness levels different in tone before it decides to sharpen it, whereas when it's turned all the way down, it sharpens everything. That means the tiniest little variation in your skin is gonna become exaggerated. But if you bring up threshold a little bit, then that won't be the case. So I use uncharged mask for skin tones, and I use smart sharpened for everything else because with everything else, I want more control over my sharpening and that and I don't have that feature available when I am working with smart sharpen. All right, one final thing. It's panoramas with panoramas, a couple things we got to think about. The first thing with Panorama is is that I always shoot my panoramas whenever practical, I start on the left side of the scene and I pan towards the right. The reason to pan towards the right when doing panoramas is that when you look at your images and bridge or in light room, you find that the images are presented in the same order. Then that you shot them so that they look visibly like a panorama with just gaps in a little vertical lines that separated so I can recognize this is a panorama, but below I can't. The second line was shot in the opposite direction, starting on the right side of the scene in panning towards left, and when I look at it, I don't recognize those images. If they go together, does that make sense? This one? I glanced at him. Go. That looks like one continuous image just needs to be stitched. The 2nd 1 I'm like, Why did I take those pictures? Let's start throwing some of them away. So if at all possible, started the left scan to the right. If you need to start on the right side and pan towards the left, take a picture of your hand pointing that way so that you know, there's a reason why you've done that in at the end of the panorama, take a picture of your fist. That way, when you look at it in bridge, you always see your hand pointing in the direction you pant in a fist at the end of it, and you know not to throw away what's in between. Yeah, then you need manual exposure because if you shoot a panorama in the brightness of seen various tremendously, like in this case where I have a son right here very bright in one shot, and over here I almost have blackness. My picture. My camera would be compensating for the brightness level in each one of those if I didn't have it in manual mode. If you hate shooting in manual mode, though, there's a button on the back. Your camera you can hold in that will lock the exposure on a canon looks like an Asterix, and on a Nikon, it says e l auto exposure lock. So if you hate manual mode, push and hold that button whenever you do a panorama that will keep your exposure consistent when it comes to shooting used the little focus points that are in your viewfinder. Line them up with either their horizon or just remember how far away they were from the horizon and keep it consistent. Otherwise, you're gonna end up with a panorama of the dips down like that. Where you gonna have a panorama that does this and you won't realize it. When you were shooting and you went across something, you're were thinking about it and slowly went up or down as you scanned across. So I used the focus points in my viewfinder. Say, how far away is that focus point from the horizon, and then I paying over and say, Is it still the same distance? Is it still the same distance to make sure I'm being consistent? You can also think about the lens that use. If you use a wide angle lens near and far objects will feel very far away from each other. If you use a telephoto lens, near and far, objects will feel much closer together. This is the same scene shot with a wide angle lens vs a telephoto to get it with a telephoto. I had to back up way far. In order, Teoh get the difference. But that's Cadillac Ranch with the 10 Cadillacs there in telephoto compresses, space wide angle expands space. And so consider that when you're thinking about stitching your panorama, select the images in camera. Enbridge. I'm sorry. And you're gonna just them a camera so you could go to the file menu, choose opening camera and pick the most important part. And before you move any slider hit the select all. But then all the changes you make will be consistent across that. Make sure you at least adjust your white balance. Because if your camera was set to auto white balance, it will most likely vary between all those images and just moving these little lisp. It will make them consistent across all of them. Then you get the done button. Then, to stitch your panorama, you select the images. Enbridge, you go to tools, Photoshopped, photo merge, and when you dio this dialogue box appears on the left side, you have choices for different layouts. Let me show you the results of those choices. I'll go from the top, appear perspective and work my way down. Auto simply automatically chooses one for you. Perspective. Do you see how much distortion isn't that it's not always gonna be that great, because I had near and far objects in here. Here's the second choice. Third, fourth in the fifth. You might think the fifth would be the best. But inspect your image closely. I can see a doubled object here on the right side. And if you can see that or not right over here, and if you look in other spots, you might find other doubled up objects. Also, this central portion, if you look at it, shape how it's kind of coming in with a little hook there. If you look at the original shots, I don't see that hook there, do you? In the shape. So it distorted it. Even though it looks like it fills the frame nicely in order to fill the frame nicely, it distorted things in a different way. So that last one was called re position. It means only move. The pictures don't believe bend them, usually use auto. And if I don't likely look at the end result, I will come in and do it a second time and manually hit those. Yeah, um, when you're shooting these, where do you typically meet her. I'm meeting just like any other shot. I'm picking the most important section of the panorama, and I'm testing it right there. I'll take a shot. I'll look at the end result, and then I'll adjust my exposure until that area looks appropriate. And then I'll lock down my exposure for the most important part and shoot them all. Now, when you stitch Panorama, you can come in here and select these. I think I might have some of my desktop help. So yes, here is a panorama where I shot straight up above my head and then I tilted down and then I tilt it down and then I tilted down. I was on a bridge and I tilted down and I tilt it down until I could see the bridge. Okay, so this is from straight above my head to straight down. I can select these and I choose tools Photoshopped photo merge. I'm just gonna leave it on auto. Make sure blend images together, is turned on and click OK in photo shop Could be able to stitch all that. It's used to stitching horizontal one so occasionally gets confused and it rotates them but it stitched it. I can always come appear to the image menu and choose image rotation and rotated back another direction, clockwise or counterclockwise. But before I do any rotation right after I'm done stitching, here's what I do. I merge those layers together because it will have in this individual layers, and they're not usually helpful to have him as individuals. And then you notice the horizon line is not straight. You see, it's bent and the edge of the bridges at a slight angle. Well, in photo shop CS six, I could go to the filter menu, and there's a choice called adaptive wide angle that's new, not available in older versions. When I choose that, it will figure out that I stitched Panorama and will put me in a mode called Panorama Mode. And in here I can try to click and drag across an area to see if I can get it to straighten things out. If I end up clicking and dragging like that, you can right click on it and tell it. I want that to be vertical. It will try to straighten it, but you see what I did with the rest of the image I find if I'll choose, undo a few times here I found that Panorama isn't always the best choice. There's other choices over here. And if I choose fish I on occasion, I can get more interesting image. If I click and drag and then right click, they want that to be a vertical. Then I could go to another edge, like the edge where the bridge waas who and it's not doing at this time before I've done it on this image, and it did do it the right direction. I'm not sure why it's not. Now let me go back to Panorama because there's a chance I was in that that mode. Okay, I'll try it again over here on this edge. Okay, you see how this line is bending its bending with the bridge. So if I get that tow line up, then I can right click on it and say it wanted to be a vertical. See how? Straighten that And then, even though there is not a line like a bridge up in the sky, I can click and drag across it, and it'll act as if there is. It bends with the bending of the picture because knows what lens I used. And I can say Make that a vertical, too, to try to make that more consistent. Look. OK, And now only after using that filter. Because that filter would mess up if the image was rotated 90 degrees, I can rotate it. Yes. What if that was only available? Set six, right? Yeah. What would we do with this? Fine. Just fine. Maybe the lions roommate. You can use something called warping. And there's something called pin warping, which is what I would look into So dio Google search cause we have time here can look up pin warp CS five. You can figure out how you could do it there. Then the other thing I would do is crop. And if I didn't feel like cropping here and I really wanted to keep the full area, we could cheat. I mentioned once, but I doubt that you actually used it, that you can hold down the command key on your keyboard, control on windows and click on stuff. And when you dio it loads selections. We didn't really use it much, though, but I mentioned it. If you command clicked on the thumbnail. For this layer, you can get a selection of what's there. You see little marching ants all way around. All he did was command click on the thumb. Now then, I need to make that selection the tiniest bit smaller, so I can tell it to contract it by just one pixel. That makes it a little bit smaller for the technique I'm showing you. I need that. Then I'm gonna select the inverse meaning the opposite of that because the panorama parts find it's the area out here that I don't like. And if I need to fill that in so I can crop it into a nice rectangle, just choose Phil in here. The default setting, this content aware. And if you choose that photo shop will try to figure out what to put in those areas doesn't always do a perfect job, but it often allows me to crop my image without cutting off so much information compared to if I had a curvy edge on it. So that was going to the edit menu and choosing Phil and I used the setting called Content Aware After that final thing would be to crop it, get rid of any parts for the content aware screwed up In this particular case, I might decide to get rid of the bridge and try to keep that river that's going down the middle centered. If I try to crop out just a little bit of the top, you'll find it snapping to the edge. I mentioned once, but I doubt you remember there was a key you could hold down that would prevent that. It's the control key. So if I help control, I can you just a little bit. Then if I switch out of my crop tool, I can say I'm done. So when it comes to Panorama, as you can stitch panoramas that you wouldn't otherwise imagine, I wouldn't think to shoot a panorama that goes all the way from pointing straight down, pointing straight up that wide of a thing. You can even do that to the interior of a building if you're careful enough where I can see both the floor and the ceiling. Photo shop is pretty powerful when it comes to that to show you how crazy you can get with it, I sometimes take a bunch of photographs that overlap. Sometimes I zoom my lens in, walk around while I do it, and when it puts them together, it has to distort them. These are what I call panel lodges, all news, taking one shot at an angle thing, doing another angle that overlaps, taking another one, another one in varying the angle and making sure they all overlap. The only thing you have to do differently than what we've done here so far is when you select your images and you do Photo merge is turn off the check box that has found at the bottom called blend images together. And if you don't want it to distort the shape of what it is you have, choose collage, collage. Please don't distort. Not sure if he'll be able to do it with ease, but it has the power to be able to put those together. Do that. Make it look. If you wanted to have more separation, some of the actions that I have will be called Somewhere in here will say panel lot panel AJ treats treatments. You want a white edge I have in action where if I hit that hit play, we'll put the white edges on or the drop shadows on or little glows on the edges in that kind of stuff s so I don't have to spend the time to do it myself. But if you end up shooting creatively, then you can end up creating more interesting looking images because of it. So the general concept I've been trying to do in three days is pick what I consider to be the most important things in the beginning, things where I used them every single day. And I find that a lot of other people are using something else in that. Something else is often something that is a lot less powerful, a lot less versatile and can be more frustrating if you try to do something sophisticated with it, because it's a basic tool that isn't really designed for that. In the concentrate on the two most important adjustments that I feel there are, which will actually three and that would be a dull became a raw is the 1st 1 cause and get the most out of your image there to use curves because you could do the most with it and do hue and saturation because it allows you to do a lot with color and then learn how toe put those in, interpret your images and then finally progress into more creative results as well. But we have questions. We have any. Well, we could ask you questions another full day. I'm sure their heads are exploding, Yes, and however we have run out of time. In fact, when you just answered my final question for you, which was going to be, we have taught us so much information in over the course of three days. And for people who are purchasing this course, what is the best way to go about starting from scratch with not from scratch but with the workshop. You've got all the different videos, but then also your actions and also your your files. What I would suggest you do is if you purchase the course where you have the files to be able to watch again is watch each major segments individually. Don't watch them all in a day or anything like that. Ah, watch a segment, then use whatever it is I talked about for at least a couple days and then watch the exact same segment over again because there'll be a lot of things you missed and you'll be able to pick up on again and then get into the next segment and do the same thing if you could do it where you spread it out over time because I know you're busy with other things. You get distractions and all that. If you try to absorb the whole thing like we did here three days where you're just watching it, you're only going to get little bitty gems if you actually rewatch the same segment twice with some space in between, where you concentrate on using those techniques, it's gonna get in your head a lot more. Once you've gone through them all like that, then wait a month or two in watching one more time and you'll pick up all the little things that you're not going to get the first few times. But really, that's the way you learn. Photo shop is to do it over and over again. Washington just wants your brand only pick up little stuff. Absolutely genius explanation. Exactly. So that's fabulous. Now you not only have the course itself, but how to use it. So from on behalf of Creative live on behalf of the Internet. Please help us give Mr Ben World War a huge round of applause. Yeah, Thank you.