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Artistic Filters

Lesson 11 from: Demystifying the Photoshop Filter Menu

Matt Kloskowski

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Lesson Info

11. Artistic Filters

Lesson Info

Artistic Filters

So Stylize, there again more just stylistic changes for your photo. Diffuse is a way to add a glow. We saw what Emboss did before, it gives it a raised, sunken type of look. Extrude, if you really wanna go there, gives you an extrusion. (laughs) Find Edges, kinda neat artistic-wise. Let's see here, Oil Paint, Oil Paint is really, really cool, though. I do have to say. So Oil Paint gives you... Here you gotta zoom in to really see what it's doing. That's pretty darn cool. Like there's ways to do oil paintings inside of Photoshop, they would take hours and hours and hours. That's pretty neat. Print it on a canvas, look like an artist. (students laughing) Oh yeah, I painted that. Oh, that's an oil painting. Oh really, I didn't know you did that. Yeah. You don't have to go any further than that, you didn't lie. If you wanna feel better about it, grab the brush tool, do a quick brush stroke. So yeah, I painted, I painted with the brush tool. But Oil Paint's pretty cool. Solarize, nothin' go...

od to see here. (laughs) Let's see here, tiles. I feel like I just have to show you, just so... That's what you get. Trace Contour, again, if you want kinda of like a line drawing of the photo, you could go that way. Then Wind, Wind just gives you a windy, the winds were strong that day. (students laughing) So nothing good there. Let's see here, Video we're gonna skip over Video. Those are for videos. Other, (sighs) Other... Just let me show you Custom, if I show you Custom, you'll beg me to leave. (students laughing) You can create your own custom filter. I have no idea what you put into all those numbers here. We can type numbers in. 10, 20, no not 1020. 20, five. Apparently 10 means white. So I'll do one. Nope, apparently anything in that box means bad. (students laughing) Apparently it all means white, so, that's your own filter. I can honestly say never have I ever seen it used. High Pass is, you've heard people call High Pass sharpening. So what you do is, you make a copy of your layer, Command or Control+J, Filter, Other, High Pass. You can't really give somebody a formula, you can basically say, you're gonna move this slider until you see, not that, not that, something right in between. Edges, what you're looking for is edges, because you're sharpening. So it's called High Pass sharpening. So when you see some edges start to take place, but you don't see glows, click OK, and then if you didn't know, Overlay and Soft Light will hide neutral gray. This is all neutral gray, so if I change this to Overlay, and I zoom in, that's High Pass Sharpening. Kinda, remember how I said shake reduction, kinda doesn't look any better or worse than shake reduction, does it? But that's High Pass sharpening. Again, it's a different sharpening technique. Some people swear by it, go for it. It's not bad, it's not better, it's just personal. Some people see things differently than others. So that's High Pass. The only other one in here worth taking a look at is actually, it can have it's merits is, jump over here, Filters, oh Other. So one of the things that we do, if we're gonna do a composite, we could take our Quick Selection tool, and I'm not gonna do the whole thing here, just for the sake of time. But we could take our Quick Selection tool, we can make a real quick selection of something, then Option or Alt+click to refine it. I'll go into Select and Mask. Looks good enough for our purposes, 'cause all I'm trying to do is get myself to a layer mask, okay, and take a look through the edge here, and what you'll sometimes see is a little, you see the fringe down there? See if we see it, oh, down here, perfect. So that is, that's kinda your dead giveaway that you have done a selection. If you're gonna do a composite, and you're gonna move somebody into a different photo, that's kinda your dead giveaway. So you got this little fringe over here, it's just a dead giveaway, so we click on the layer mask, we go Filter, Other, Minimum and Maximum. Minimum, think of it this way, will go in. So what we have is a fringe, and we actually want that, we wanna go in. On the layer mask, so what what happens, by one pixel, so just goes in and out. All right, then Maximum does the opposite. Maximum would be if you went too far in on your selection or whatever it was, then you'd go to Maximum, and it could go outward. So, Minimum and Maximum, again, usually I use them on a layer mask, and it'll just go one pixel in or one pixel out, it'll keep you from having to take your brush on the layer mask, and painstakingly trace along the whole thing. All right, let's see here, Other, looks good there. All right, so there's one last thing that I left for the end. I said last, but not least, but no it is least. So let's go, let's find a photo we can have fun with. So Filter, Filter Gallery. These are all purely artistic filters, okay? You get this whole little section inside of here. You will see some repeat like Distort, but these are all purely just art. There's nothing more to it. It's pretty much WYSIWYG. You can look at them, you can kinda get an idea for what they do. Filter Gallery's kinda cool, because you can apply. So I could go over here and I could apply the Colored Pencil filter. Let's not. Let's go back to, let's go to Paint Daubs, how's that one? Something a little bit colorful. See if that does anything. All right, let's go to Plastic Wrap. Plastic Wrap, there we go. Plastic Wrap's kinda neat if you ever wanna create like a watery, smooth, kinda glossy type of a texture. So now it looks like it's wrapped in plastic wrap. But here's what's cool, is it's actually a little mini layers panel. So now I can create a new effect, and I can apply something else to it. I can apply Watercolor. Then I can create another one, and I can go and maybe do Glass. It's really starting to look good isn't it? Or Ocean Ripple. So I'm stacking all these on top of each other. Then you've even got a layer stacking order, where you can swap them. Turn them on and off, whatnot. But, that's all that is, guys. That's all this whole thing is inside of here, is artistic type of a filter, so I'm not gonna run through every single one of them. Again, they all have a little, kind of a WYSIWYG preview inside of it. Brush strokes, there's a few under Distort. There's a few under Sketch. Half-Tone Pattern. There's a few under Stylize, Glowing Edges. Then there's some under Texture, too. So. Again, you can stack them on top of each other. See a whole list of them inside of there as well. Then you can even load, with the Texture one, you can actually load a texture file if you have one. All right. Guys, that is the Photoshop filter menu, in all of its painstaking detail. When you reduced the image size to edit it faster, I was like, oh, I didn't know I could do that, because I'm constantly applying something and then sit, Wait. wait, for it to load, and then go on to the next thing. If you reduce that image size, can you edit fully the image, and then save it and resize without ruining any quality? (sighs) Not really. So, yeah, I only do it when I know it's an image I don't need very, very big. If you made the image a Smart Object, you could technically reduce it, and then re-enlarge it, and if it were just filters, everything would work fine. But the second you did anything on another layer, other than the Smart Object, then it wouldn't work. But if it was just one layer, and you were just doing filters, yeah you could make it a Smart Object, make it smaller, apply your filters, and then make it bigger again. That would work, but as you start adding layers to it, those layers won't scale back up. For artistic filters, can you use just like a fragment, on the pictures, not on the whole pictures? I'm sorry, I didn't hear. I mean in artistic filters, so can we use only a fragment on pictures, not whole pictures? So can you use only part of like a, Yes. an artistic filter on part of the thing, like from the Filter Gallery we were just in. Yeah, would it mean I make new layers for each one, or? So what I would do is press Command or Control+J to copy your photo, and then come up here and do your filter. So let's say I do Glowing Edges. Now it's on a copy, and then you can do like a layer mask, and brush with black. Or use your Eraser tool if you're not familiar with layer masks. Either way, you could, if you did it on a layer mask, that way you could get rid of whatever you wanted. When you were making the map, and then you said you had to crop it to get rid of all those extra pixels, would flattening it have done the same thing, or is there a reason you crop it? Would flattening have done the same thing? I'm not sure, that's a good question, though. We can try it, here let's do this. I don't have that same image, but, so I can extend, hit Enter, Layer, Flatten Image, and then let's take a look at the, yeah, I actually think it would. Would have been easy, I think I'm gonna do that next time. Yeah, just go into Layer, Flatten Image, will get rid of it too. So if you go to MattK.com, you can always find me there. Just the MattK.com, I do all my training, and do free videos just about every week on there, and presets and all that fun stuff, so, best place to go. All right.

Ratings and Reviews

Deborah Bailey
 

I've always wondered what all the filters were in Photoshop. This class showed how they work, and which ones are helpful to use. I learned a lot and I recommend this class.

Student Work

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