Skip to main content

Smart Sharpen Filter

Lesson 7 from: Adobe Photoshop Deep Dive: Creative Cloud

Lesa Snider

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

7. Smart Sharpen Filter

Next Lesson: Blur Gallery Filter

Lesson Info

Smart Sharpen Filter

So let's, go ahead and take a look at another filter that was not new in cc but resigned, so I've got a couple of images for following along if you've purchased the course, we're in a folder number five filters and we're working on images d and e, so we'll go ahead and pop both of those open and photoshopped, and we'll start with this one right here. Another benefit of shooting with that wonderful lin's is that I could get close to things that you physically can't walk close to. So this is in st peter's basilica in roma, and if you've ever wondered what the thing is on the wall at the very far back of the chapel, where in front, you know that the priests and the cardinals and popes and everything stand in front of it? Well, it happens to be a dove, so I could get really close to that with that winds, but as such, it was really low light, so I introduced a lot of noise in this image case, we've got two problems going on a little bit of camera shake, but not too much and noise. If noise ...

is part of the problem in your image, then you can reach for the newly redesigned, smart, sharp and filter okay, so here getting exercise files have completed what I'm in india for this technique for you so for our purposes here we're going to turn the visibility of that one off turn on the original so that's how you should practice with these files so now we're going to activate the single or multiple layers whatever's in your document and we're going to talk to the filter menu and choose convert for smart filters and then go back to the filter menu come down to the sharpened section and we're gonna choose smart, sharpened, smart, sharpened also sports a brand new dialogue box. This thing used to be so convoluted there were multiple tabs appear toward the top one of them was advanced. It was very kind of overwhelming and a little bit frightening as faras oh my gosh, what am I supposed to click on? What tab do I use and so on and so forth? Well, adobe has completely redesigned this filter, which is really, really nice they've also updated the algorithm or the mathematical formula behind this filter so that it doesn't create a cz many sharpening halos isn't used to so sharpening halo. It is really an area that kind of looks pure white around the the areas of high contrast in your image because sharpening which is it really it's photoshopped is looking for areas of high contrast, so we're like pixels meat, dark pixel and all there is to sharpening is footage shot makes the dark pixels a little darker and the lights pixels a little lighter well, if you overdo it, you can get what looks like a white gap or weird colored gap between areas of high contrast so smart sharpened creates fewer of those sharpening halos than it used to it's also better at noise reduction. Now, in fact we have a noise reduction slider in smart sharpen and guess what let's just cruise down here to the bottom right into this dialog box it's very sizable first time ever smart sharpened dialog box has been re sizable so who cares about re sizing dialog box right? Why would you be excited about that? What's the on ly way so you can see the whole image otherwise you're left with a nun re sizable smart sharpened dialog box you kind of image preview that's a postage stamp size so you're constantly moving around within the preview just try try to see a wider swath of your image well with these newly re sizable dialog boxes, we can make the suckers as big as we want in order to see a bigger chunk of our image so that we can make better decisions with those settings that are on the right hand side so that's really, really handy so that re sizable part is new the preview is not new but the re sizable dialog box is new it's also been completely redesigned very easy to use most often times or from the factory rather when you first open it's going to look like that so what have we got here? We've got a sharpening amount radius is you telling photo shop how why that area is that you want it to be lightning and darkening along the edges that controls how wide your sharpening halos khun get for example if I pump that up to the right then we're going to start to see bigger sharpening halos around everything looks pretty bad pretty fast so if you want just a narrow band of sharpening then you would be somewhere down around oh I probably wouldn't go over four pixels depending upon the embassy's I'm downsize these images quite a bit so they're not high resolution so let's come back down to the defaults to think is around two hundred percent and I want to show you the difference between the new math actually let's just reset all these settings to the default which will be another handy tip for you see the cancel bend down there towards the bottom of the dialogue if I press and hold option on a matter altana pc changes teresa so you can get back to the default settings of any dialogue box in any of adobes applications that's the keyboard shortcut for you option are all on a pc so I'm going to scoot over in my image preview to the area that's really nasty noise riddled here and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn on the old way this filter works you could appreciate the noise reduction that you can have in the better results so the way you get back to the old way of using the this filter is to click a little gear icon at the top right? And we're going to turn on use legacy so that's going to make it work with the old math of c s six and prior so keep your eyes peeled on this area over here that's where most the noises visible so I'm gonna turn it on and I'll take it a second to think about it see how there's more noise now than there used to be so now we'll turn it off it less in just a little bit I'm going take my noise reduction down to zero c can really appreciate it so now let's go backto legacy it popped up just a little bit the noise in this area so much better at not adding noise to the image when you're using this this method for sharpening and again you've got this handy noise reduction sliders he confined to an even more so that is new in c s six another great thing about this filter that I must show you on another image and then we'll discuss exactly when you should use which one for what is that if you're dealing with soft subjects like this cute little italian flower girl and winning, then the smart sharp and filter allows you to tone down or fade out the sharpening in your shadows and highlights which is incredible so that might be another reason you would use the smart sharp and filter is if you knew that you didn't want global sharpening you wanted to kind of dial it back on certain parts of your image without masking then you could reach for the smart sharpened filter so again I'm going to turn off the layer that I created for you and we're going to turn on the original we're going to click to activate it or the multiple layers we're going to go to the fields from in you convert for smart filters and then back it to the filter menu down to sharpen and smart sharp in get this nice big preview now you'll notice the shadows and highlights area down here so let's go ahead and click its flippy triangle to expand it and we see that we've got all these wonderful controls now these controls have been in smart sharpened filter for several versions but they were hidden in the dialog box behind these other tabs called advance in love it's scary you know to get to you but now they're right here much more discoverable so if we decided that well in the highlights, we really don't want all of the highlights to be sharpened. We want to dial back the sharpening of those highlights just did it, then we can use this fate amount, slider, you know, move around. We can see a few more of the highlights in the preview here as we increase that fayed amount if I increased it all the way to one hundred percent than I would not be getting any sharpening in the fifty percent total range of highlights, so the farther you drag this to the right if I drag it all the way to one hundred percent, I don't have any sharpening going on in my highlights. So the tonal with let she tell the program, which highlights are we talking about the super super super super violence or kind of middle range highlights or etcetera? So that's, how you can dial back the amount of sharpening that supplied tio either the shadows or the high lives. So if you're dealing with portrait's and you don't want to do a lot of masking for your sharpening and the smart, sharp and filter might be a great choice for you to use as a matter of course, because it doesn't give you that extra control now I have the same options here for the shadows, but nothing is gonna happen in this section unless I change the amount so even though we've got an entry in the tonal within radius field, nothing is happening there because the amount is set to zero so so if you don't want to do any fading of those areas, just make sure that both fade amount sliders air set to zero but if you've got an entry here in the fate amount field, then there is some fading of your your highlights that are happening or whatever section that isthe so we can just do a quick before and after so there's before and there's the after so we've got quite a bit of sharpening going on in those highlight areas, but if we go down a little bit her up a little bit on the fate amount rather then we've got a little bit less and again you can use the tonal wit to control exactly which highlights or which shadows are being affected you know, one hundred percent meaning all of them and lower values meaning less and less and less and less and less of those areas. And again, if you want to change the blend mode of just the sharpening itself so that you're sure not to introduce any kind of color shifts at all, then you would just double click the little icon to the right of the filter in the layers panel and then come up here to the blend mode and choose luminosity and then click ok and if you wanted to dial back on the sharpening let's say oh a little bit too much then you could do it right here in the opacity fields he might change that sharpening tio eighty percent or so or what have you click okay or you could just double click the filter itself in your layers panel and you would pop open the smart sharpened dialog box again so that you can see all of your changes and that you can correct them there but if you do change the filters blending options just remember that you have changed them because they stay changed until you changing back so if we drop the opacity here in the blending options and we forget that we've done that and then we go back into the filter self and try to adjust things you may get unexpected results or it may look like the filter is not working but that's just because you change the opacity of the blending options of the filter itself and again we're going to go into filters and way more depth tomorrow any questions on smart, sharp? Well, I'm not sure if I see many about smart sharpening I think that's pretty clear to people we do have a few questions from earlier if you don't mind okay, yeah absolutely so this one's it was back from when you were talking about the crop tool so sue mac just said, I noticed that lisa didn't change the resolution size when she enlarged for printing. Does she need to change it? Usually ah, when went to the enlarged is yeah, sure, I was just doing a basic demo. Ok, so if you needed to have higher resolution at that larger size than you would change the resolution field as well. Great questions for that's clear. Yeah. Cool and cool. And speaking of really cool, really cool from new york city asked in the box inside the camera shake preview be rotated the area of interest. Yes, I don't believe so. Okay, I'm not sure what that would get you if you needed to rotate it, then you just make the box larger to encompass the area that you were trying to catch by rotating it right? And I think people are still sort of figuring out that feature because it's so new, right? Oh, yeah. We've never had it before. E. I was just gonna go to the audience and here. Do you guys have any questions before we go to break? I keep having questions. You keep answering them, so I'm gonna go with no, ok, cool that's, my superpower.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Creative Cloud 1
Creative Cloud 2
Keynote
Creative Cloud 3

Ratings and Reviews

Michelle B
 

I have purchased all of Lesas Deep dive classes and have learned so much. She makes it easy to understand and she gives you examples and goes through them more than once so you understand. This is the class that not only shows you how to but what you can do. She gives you ideas and she is a joy to watch and listen to. I can say enough good things about Lesas classes and I am so glad to have them in my tool box to refer back to anytime I am stumped on how to fix problem in Photoshop. Thank you Lesa!!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES