Adobe® Photoshop® CC® Bootcamp

Lesson 85 of 118

Sharpening with Filters

Lesson Info

Sharpening with Filters

On the flip side of that, which also works hand-in-hand with that, is going to be our sharpening. So when I sharpen this, I've reduced the noise. Now I'm gonna go ahead and sharpen it. If I make a layer, a stamp above this, it's gonna take all of my noise reduction settings, smash them together with my background, and allow me to do sharpening on top of my noise reduction, and my background. Because this has Blend If in it, I'm gonna need to make a stamp above it. I don't wanna sharpen this layer. I don't wanna make a copy of the background, and put it up here and sharpen it, because then what am I doing? I'm sharpening noise that existed in this background layer. So if I Press Control or Command + Shift, Alt or Option + E, Control + Shift + E, or Command + Option + Shift + E on a Mac, your fingers turn into like a little pitchfork claw-looking thing. We're gonna call this Sharpen. I used to do a lot of different ways of sharpening. I used to do something called a High-pass Sharp, in w...

hich I still do high-pass sharpening quite often. But really now, under Filter, under Sharpen, there is a Smart Sharpen. And the new Smart Sharpen is awesome. Unsharp Mask was one of the things I used to, sounds counter-intuitive, Unsharp Mask. How would you unsharpen something? But, Unsharp Mask was something that we used to use a lot in the past. Smart Sharpen, it's relatively new, I'm not sure when Photoshop snuck it in there, but it's a really powerful tool for sharpening our images. So if we just drop down the amount, drop down the noise reduction. You see it has a noise reduction built inside this as well. Typically how this works is that the amount is how intense it's gonna be, and the radius is how many pixels around it you want to grab to increase that intensity. So if we bring your amount all the way up, look at the preview here. And we bring our radius all the way up. It's gonna be really bad. It's taking those edges. Sharpening is an illusion, really is what sharpening is. Sharpening is taking areas that are detailed in your photograph, and it's adding contrast to those details to boost them up. It's, of anything you're not actually sharpening anything. It's not like you take a knife and you sharpen that knife. What you're doing here is, you're just increasing the contrast between the lights and the darks on the details to give the illusion of sharpening, okay? It appears more sharp to us because of that. So if we drop this radius down, that's a pretty decent sharpen actually, on some of those areas. Still a little too much, we'll bring that radius down, and then bring that amount down. Down here you have shadows and highlights, where you can actually feather the amount of sharpening that's happening between those areas of highlights and shadows, which is really cool. If we bring this radius up. We'll bring it up to a really uncomfortable amount, and we look at the fade amount on the highlights, this slider is going to fade, especially in the highlight areas, where that sharpening takes place. If that fade amount is low, it's gonna be very high contrast. Look at these little, look right in here specifically. As we bring that fade amount up, see how it starts to add some tone in there, so it's not just a bright white, punchy adjustment for our sharpening. If we were to do the same thing, but look in some of our shadows, it's gonna fade that amount of sharpening into the shadows as well. Tonal Width is how far that is going to go, the higher you put that, the more of that highlight area it's going to select to allow that fade to go in. So you're looking at the highlights and shadows essentially, of those detail areas to bring in that amount of sharpening. And that is quite a bit of an amount of sharpening if we look right back in here. Again, I wouldn't likely take my radius that high anyway. But in order to see what's happening, any time you wanna see what any sliders are gonna do within Photoshop, like these ones right here. If you get this set to the perfect setting up here, and then you come down here, you're probably not gonna see a difference at all. If you do, it's gonna be very subtle, and then you're gonna ask yourself, well why would I even use these things? If it's so subtle, why would I use it? Take these settings up to their max, then come down here and start modifying these settings to see what's happening with the interaction between this set of sliders, with this set of sliders. That's always a good practice when you're doing anything in Photoshop. If you wanna see what's happening, and how it's making affect of something, bump all the sliders up to max, and then start pulling them individually and independently down to see what's happening with that one adjustment. Especially if you wanna work your way through something like Adobe Camera Raw. That's beautiful advice. So bring the Tonal Width up a little bit on our (mumbles) our shadows, that looks pretty good there. Now, look what's happening here. We reduced the noise in our shadow areas, but now it's getting really sharp. We have a noise reduction slider in here that will help us reduce the noise in those shadow areas. It's not always quite as precise as we want it to, because it's also working globally on the entire image. So it might be counter-intuitive to do that. If we drop this down, just Press Okay, and guess what we can do now? We can do Blend If on this, and protect the shadow areas from getting sharpened. Here, what did we protect? We protect the highlight areas from getting the noise reduced. Here, we can click on this, and if we Press Alt or Option. Actually, let's Turn On our Color Overlay. Go back to our Blend Options. Now we're protecting all those shadow areas from getting any of that sharpening. If we Press Alt or Option, Split and Feather This. So we get it tapered down to here, basically anything that's Magenta is gonna get that sharpening. That's the baseline that I'm setting. If I Press Alt or Option, Feather this over, now I'm allowing that sharpen to slowly transition into other areas of the photograph, while still protecting and maintaining those shadow areas that needed that noise reduction in the very beginning of all this. So if we zoom on down here, that's gonna be sharpened. We'll just Press Okay, because we can always turn that Color Overlay off. So now if we look at this image. Here's the before, here's the after on the sharpening. Before and the after with the noise reduction underneath. The sharpening is a little heavy, and that's okay. If it's heavy, just come to Opacity, and drop the opacity a little bit. Maybe you want 50% of that sharpening. Just drop that opacity a little bit, and you're good to go. I would actually prefer it to be a little bit on the heavy side, then on the light side there, because I can always come back and feather that in with Blend If. I could always use opacity to clean up that area. If I start too low and build up, it's gonna create artifacting. If I start high and work my way down, it's not gonna artifact. Because if I were to try and sharpen this again with the same sharpening settings, it's gonna look not so good. So there is the overall before, and the overall after, which you can't see anything when you're looking at this, but if we zoom in. Overall before, overall after. It's very subtle, but it's important. And when you print this, it's gonna look beautiful.

Class Description

Adobe® Photoshop® CC® is a valuable tool for photographers, but it can also be intimidating. In this all-inclusive 20 lesson course, you’ll go from opening the program for the first time to creating images that really stand out. Join Blake Rudis, Photoshop® expert and founder of f64 Academy, as he shows you how to maximize your use of Photoshop®. Topics covered will include:

Week 1
• Class Introduction & Bridge, Adobe Camera Raw, Setup Interface, Cropping and Layers
Week 2
• Layer Tools, Masks, Selections, Clean-Up Tools and Shapes & Text
Week 3
• Smart Objects , Transforming, Actions, Filters and Editing Video
Week 4
• Custom Creative Effects, Natural Retouching, Portrait Workflow, Landscape Workflow, and Composite Workflow

Don’t let the many aspects of Photoshop® prevent you from maximizing your use of this amazing app. Blake will help you develop the confidence to use your imagination and create the images that you will be proud to share with your clients.

Software Used: Adobe® Photoshop® CC® 2018

Lessons

FOR ON-DEMAND ACCESS

Reviews

a Creativelive Student

Amazing course, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a beginner's course for photographers. The problem isn't Blake's explanations; they're top. The problem is the vast scope of this course and the order in which the topics are presented. Take layers for example. When I was first learning Photoshop (back when we learned from books), I found I learned little or nothing from, for example, books that covered layers before they covered how to improve/process photographs. These books taught me how to organize, move, and link layers before they showed me what a layer was actually for. Those books tended to teach me everything there is to know about layers (types of layers, how to organize them, how to move them, how to move them two at a time, how to move them two at a time even if there are other layers between the two you're interested in, useful troubleshooting tips, etc. ) all before I even know (from a photographer's point of view) what it is the things actually do. The examples of organizing, linking, and moving mean everything for graphic designers from Day One, but for photographers not so much. Blake does the same thing as those books. Topics he covers extremely early demand a lot of theoretical imagination for a photographer who doesn't already know quite a bit about what he is talking about. Learning about abstract things first and concrete things later only makes PS that much harder to understand. If you AREN'T a beginner, however, this course is amazing. I thought it would be like an Army Bootcamp, taking you from zero and building you into a fit, competent Photoshop grunt. Now I think it's more like Army Bootcamp for high school varsity jocks. It isn't going to take you from the beginning, but the amount you'll get out of it is nonetheless more than your brain can imagine. I've been using PS for years to improve my photographs, and even to create the odd artistic composite or two. The amount I've learned in the first week is amazing, and every day I learn something -- more like many things -- which I immediately implement to improve my productivity and/or widen the horizons of what I can achieve. If you ARE a photographer who's a Photoshop beginner, I'd take very seriously the advice Blake gives in the introduction: Watch one lesson, and practice the skills and principles you learn in that one lesson for two weeks. THEN watch the next lesson. You can't do that of course without buying the course, so it's up to you to decide whether you'd like to learn Photoshop and master Photoshop all from the same course. Learning it first and mastering it later will cost more money, but I think you'll understand everything better and have a much more enjoyable ride in the process. As for me? I'm going to have to find the money to buy this course. There is simply way too much content in each lesson for me to try to take on all at once, but on the other hand I don't want to miss anything at all that he has to share.

Esther Gambrell

WOW!!! I've been purchasing CL classes for several years now and have watched HOURS of "How-To Photoshop" classes, but this is the first one I've actually purchased because of the AWESOME BONUS content!!! SERIOUSLY??!!?!? A PLUG-IN??? But not only that, Blake is SO easy to understand, and he breaks down concepts in different ways to connect with different people's learning styles. I REALLY appreciated this approach because I am a LEFT-BRAINED creative that has an engineering background, so I really connected to what Blake was saying. THANK YOU FOR THAT! There are TONS of Photoshop courses out there, but I found this one to be the most helpful in they way Blake teaches concepts so that you know WHY you're doing what your doing. I feel like he taught me how to fish with Photoshop to feed me for a lifetime instead of just giving me a fish to feed me for one day. This is the BEST overall PS course out there!!! Thank you!!!!

Sonya Messier

I'm been using Bridge, Adobe Raw and Photoshop for 12 years. I thought I knew those programs until I started to follow Blake and do this Photoshop CC Bootcamp. This course is AMAZING. I love the way Blake teach, brakes down concepts and tools... excellent teaching qualities! I'm half way in this course and I change all my workflow already. Much better results and better use of what Adobe offer me. This course is an investment! When I will be done, I will listen it again. Great job and congratulations on your success Blake!

1,500+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

Adobe® Photoshop® CC® Bootcamp

Sharpening with Filters

Class Description

Lessons

a Creativelive Student

Esther Gambrell

Sonya Messier