Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Use Filters in Adobe Photoshop

1 Photoshop's filter menu 2 is where you're gonna find a lot 3 of both creative and utilitarian features. 4 So in there, they have both things 5 that utilize artificial intelligence 6 to help you speed up a workflow 7 of, let's say, retouching faces, 8 or colorizing photographs, 9 and then also you're going to find filters that, 10 when you first take a look at them, 11 you might think it's not very useful, but later on, 12 when you have a challenge in Photoshop 13 and you need to accomplish something, 14 you might find the most mundane filter 15 to be one of the most useful. 16 So, let's dive in and take a look 17 at what's available in Photoshop's filter menu. 18 We'll start with this image. 19 What I would like to accomplish is to smooth out some 20 of these fine details that are in the skin. 21 So, to do so, I'll come up to the filter menu 22 and I'm gonna choose the choice right here 23 called neural filters. 24 Neural filters are ones 25 that use artificial intelligence 26 to a...

nalyze your image, 27 and do more sophisticated effects. 28 When this first comes up, 29 you will find a list of the various neural filters here 30 and you'll find that some of them, 31 when you first install Photoshop, 32 instead of having this little switch here to turn it on, 33 you'll instead find a cloud icon. 34 And if that's the case, 35 you'll have to click on the cloud icon 36 to actually download that filter so it can be used, 37 and once it's been downloaded 38 then it will look like mine do 39 with these little switches. 40 Then you'll find some of these filters 41 have the word beta next to it. 42 Those are filters 43 that Adobe isn't completely proud of yet, 44 and they plan on changing, 45 and improving before they take off 46 that beta badge. 47 Well let's use the top neural filter up here 48 it's called skin smoothing. 49 And if we turn it on, 50 then up here it'll show me if it's found a face 51 within my photographs. 52 In this filter will only work if it can identify 53 and find a face. 54 That usually means the face 55 must be looking towards the camera, 56 so it can see two eyes, a mouth, and a nose. 57 Then it'll recognize where a face is. 58 And even with default settings, 59 it's already doing a good amount of work. 60 If you want to see before and after, 61 go to the lower right of your picture, 62 and just outside the image, you'll find this icon. 63 If you click it, 64 it will show you the original version 65 of the picture before you applied the filter. 66 Click it a second time, 67 and you'll see the effect of the filter, 68 and you can see that it's smoothing 69 the image quite a bit. 70 Now it depends on the picture as far 71 as how effective these are going to be, 72 and oftentimes I find that the setting called 73 smoothness doesn't really 74 do a really noticeable difference in your image, 75 but it can change the contrast a bit. 76 where if I end up bringing it down, 77 I'm gonna get more contrast in here, 78 and if I bring it higher there'll be less, 79 but it's often so subtle 80 that it wouldn't make too much of a difference. 81 Otherwise, the main control is up here called blur, 82 and so if I'd like to smooth the skin more, 83 I'm gonna bring that higher 84 and it can take in a moment update, 85 but it should end up with a slightly smoother result. 86 Now with these sliders usually in some of the filters, 87 you can double-click on them 88 to reset them to default settings. 89 Let me try that with this one. 90 You see it's currently set to 82. 91 I'm gonna double-click on it, 92 and you see how it popped back to the middle. 93 Well, don't do that with the smoothness slider. 94 There's a bug in here. 95 You see how it popped back to the middle 96 but there's a bug in here. 97 Look at the results now. 98 Look at how it looks ridiculously soft. 99 All I gotta do is grab that slider again 100 and just move it a little bit 101 and it'll pop back to working normally. 102 The same is true for working down 103 here under smoothness. 104 If I were to crank this as high as it possibly goes, 105 the image still looks fine, 106 but watch what happens regardless 107 of where I have this if I double, click on the slider. 108 It's going to instead of moving it back 109 to the default setting, like it should, 110 it's going to move it up to plus 50, 111 and it's going to give a result 112 that you wouldn't usually get by moving it to plus 50. 113 So, there is a bug in this particular filter 114 that I wanted to let you know of 115 because if you run into it, 116 you might think you've done something wrong. 117 Just don't double-click on these sliders; otherwise, 118 you're going to end up with weird results. 119 So, I'm going to just bring that up 120 get that nice smooth skin, then down here at the bottom, 121 it wants to know what kind of result I would like. 122 And if I click there, 123 I could have it directly modify the layer that was active, 124 but I don't want to do that 125 because I might not want to apply this smoothing 126 across the entire area of skin, 127 or I can say I would like a new layer, 128 or a new layer with a mask on. 129 And I can also have a new document 130 and something known as a smart filter, 131 which would convert the layer 132 into what's known as a smart object. 133 We'll talk about those a little bit later. 134 For now, I'm going to say I want a new layer 135 that's masked. 136 I'll click OK, and now if you look in the layers panel, 137 we have the original image underneath 138 and we have the smoothed version on top. 139 I can turn off that top layer to see before, 140 turn it back on to see after, and over here's a mask. 141 This is determining which area the filter is applying to, 142 and I can view the contents 143 of the mask by holding down the option key 144 on the Mac Alt and Windows and click. 145 And it can sometimes look a little odd, 146 but this is how it's isolating the little areas 147 where it thought there was detail. 148 It's only the areas in here 149 that are white where the effect is being applied. 150 Any area that's black is not getting smooth, 151 and that's why the lips remain nice and crisp. 152 So did the eyes, and so did things like the eyebrows. 153 And I can option-click on that again to hide it, 154 and I can also paint on it. 155 So, if there's an area that I didn't want to change, 156 then I could remove it from the mask 157 by painting with black. 158 But let's turn that off. 159 There's before, and there's after. 160 I like that after look. 161 Then let's take this image 162 which was taken in terrible lighting. 163 Look at the shadows on that face 164 and let's see if we can relight the face. 165 I'm gonna do that once again 166 by going to the filter menu and choosing neural filters. 167 Just be careful; don't choose the one up here 168 that means apply the very last filter you applied 169 with identical settings, 170 and I'm not looking to do that. 171 You want to choose the one down here. 172 In general, anytime you find a menu choice 173 that has three periods after it, 174 it means it's going to ask you for settings, 175 and if you don't find three periods, 176 it most of the time means 177 it's not going to ask for settings. 178 So that's why I want to choose this version. 179 That's where you actually get to the list instead 180 of applying the last settings. 181 And with this, I'm not looking to smooth the skin. 182 Instead, I want to relight it, and to do that, 183 I'm gonna turn on this setting known 184 as smart portrait. 185 And now in this case, 186 I'm somewhat surprised it found a face 187 because he's not looking directly at the camera, 188 and his eyes are squinted almost all the way close. 189 And so this I wouldn't be surprised 190 if it wouldn't have been able to find a face, 191 but I'm happy that it did. 192 Now what this filter is designed to do 193 is we have many different things we could change. 194 We can come in here, 195 and thicken someone's hair, 196 we can make them have a bigger smile, 197 that type of thing, but there is an issue 198 with applying any of these settings 199 and that is it will only be able to apply them 200 within this rectangular area 201 where it has defined this, 202 and that means if I attempt to smooth the skin 203 it's not gonna smooth this little part of his ear. 204 It's not such a big deal 205 when it comes to this particular image, 206 but if you have somebody with very long flowing hair, 207 usually this box will not extend all the way down 208 to their hair 209 that might be going beyond their shoulders. 210 And one of the choices in here 211 you'll see is hair thickness. 212 Therefore, if you thicken the hair, 213 it wouldn't be able to affect what's outside that box. 214 But if you just want to see what it does, 215 I'll bring up hair thickness, 216 and let's see what it does to my buddy Rich's hair here. 217 In this particular filter, 218 it can take a little time to apply 219 because it does need to upload part of the image 220 to the internet. 221 It gets processed on the cloud, 222 and then it comes back down. 223 And in this case, 224 I can see some thickening of the hair here, 225 but you can see that based 226 on this little box that's here, 227 it's kind of indented from the box 228 where it stopped applying. 229 So, things that would not apply to the face, 230 instead they would apply to hair or other things 231 that go beyond the face aren't all that useful in here. 232 So, let's close that up. 233 And what I actually want to use 234 is this area called global. 235 Because in global is where I find choice called 236 light direction. 237 If I wanted it to look as if the light source 238 was on the left side of the photograph instead 239 of the right, 240 all I need to do is grab this slider 241 and move it this direction, and let go. 242 And now look at that it added a nice highlight 243 on the edge and brightened up the side of his face. 244 But unfortunately, this rectangle, 245 which usually defines the limits 246 of where the adjustment is, 247 it's not currently going all the way out to the edge of it. 248 Just like when I attempted to thicken his hair, 249 there was a big indent between where it stopped 250 and this edge. 251 We're getting the same thing right here, 252 where his chin is. 253 And so, I wish they would refine this. 254 If they would allow me to change the size of this box 255 and would allow the filter to go literally all the way out 256 to the edge, it would be more useful. 257 Now, other things you could do in here, 258 there is a choice called head direction. 259 If I wanted it to look as if he was looking towards 260 the camera, I could grab this 261 and attempt to move it this way, 262 but the results aren't always going to look very natural. 263 So, I'm gonna double click on that to reset it back, 264 but I do find this light direction to be one 265 of the most useful choices. 266 I'm gonna come in here and choose new layer mask, 267 and I'll click OK. 268 Now you can see that my result is up here on this layer, 269 and it has a mask. 270 If I turn off the eyeball for the layer, 271 you can see before and after. 272 And I noticed that it brightened this side of the face, 273 but it also darkened this side. 274 I actually don't want it to darken. 275 It also added kind of a shadow here. 276 So, if I turn this off and on, you'll see that. 277 So, I'm just going to work on the mask. 278 I'm going to grab my paintbrush, 279 and I'm going to paint with black. 280 I'm going to make sure I have a soft edge brush, 281 and I'm going to remove the shading 282 that it added over here on the side of the face. 283 But one of the previous lessons 284 that I talked about was with blending modes. 285 And I see I have a blending mode set here. 286 I'm gonna set it to normal 287 because if it's set to lighten, 288 it will not be able to put black in that mask. 289 Now I'm going to paint to remove 290 that darkening effect that it's adding from one side 291 of the face. 292 I'm also going to paint down here 293 because that line on the chin 294 just isn't going to look right. 295 And so, I'll let it darken in there. 296 So, it brings it back to the previous brightness. 297 But now let's see what it did. 298 I'll end up hiding this. 299 There's the original, and here's the end result. 300 And I wouldn't have had to have moved the slider 301 as far as I did. 302 It would have been a little bit mellower 303 of a result if I moved it a little bit less. 304 But you can see how that can be helpful 305 to kind of relight faces that have poor lighting. 306 Then sometimes I don't like the way skin tones 307 are rendered in a picture. 308 And this would be an instance of that. 309 This is my wife, Karen. 310 And in here, 311 we're getting kind of mixed light. 312 Some light is coming in from this window, 313 and then other light is from within the room itself. 314 And we got kind of this two-tone look 315 where her skin in here almost 316 has a green resemblance. 317 And I want to see if I can fix that. 318 Well, let me first show you the filter I want to use 319 and what it was really designed for. 320 I'll just open a full-color image, 321 and I'm going to pull all the color out. 322 I'll do that by just coming over here 323 and choosing desaturate. 324 That's one way of pulling the color out. 325 Then let's see if Photoshop can invent colors 326 that might look right for this photo. 327 I'll choose filter, 328 neural filters, and then over here, 329 one of the choices is colorize. 330 If I turn on colorize, 331 then it just added all of that color. 332 None of it is from the original picture 333 because I pulled all the color out of that image 334 to begin with. 335 So, if it can create this kind of natural-looking skin, 336 if I ever have skin I don't like, 337 then I might use this even on a color photo. 338 I'm gonna click Cancel here 339 because I didn't need to colorize that picture. 340 It was already color. 341 And let's try it here, though. 342 I'm just gonna choose filter, neural filters. 343 We'll just turn on colorize so it attempts 344 to add the color. 345 And if you start with a color photograph, 346 it acts as if you removed all the color to begin with, 347 as if you were starting with a black and white. 348 You don't have to do that step of choosing desaturate. 349 And as long as you have this checkbox turned on called 350 auto color image, 351 it should give you a result that looks okay. 352 You can fine tune the results. 353 Here you have some sliders 354 where you could shift things in one direction 355 or another. 356 Well, I don't need to adjust any of this. 357 So, I'm just going to tell it to create a brand new layer, 358 and I'll click OK. 359 So now underneath, 360 I have the original image with the colors I didn't like, 361 and on top, I have the colorized version from the filter. 362 I don't like a lot of what the colorized version did. 363 If you look, for instance, 364 the color of my wife's lens that's here took 365 on the color of this wood 366 and that type of thing. 367 But what I can do is add a layer mask. 368 And there's a trick when you're adding a layer mask. 369 If you hold down the option key, 370 that's Alt in Windows, 371 it's going to start off with a layer mask full of black. 372 And that's going to effectively hide this layer. 373 Then I can come in and paint with white. 374 And I'll paint with a soft-edged brush. 375 And I'm only going to put it in 376 where I want to have that change in my image, 377 where I really didn't like those colors. 378 Maybe put it in a little bit like that. 379 But I'm not going to cover up her eyes. 380 I'm not going to also get it on her camera. 381 And I can also blend the color version 382 that it ended up creating with my original, 383 so that I can let some of that original color 384 show through just to give it a little bit more variation, 385 and not look quite as much 386 like a colorized black-and-white movie. 387 And I can do that by just lowering the opacity 388 of the layer. 389 So, once I'm done painting, 390 now I'll take the opacity of my layer. 391 I'll first drag way to the left to get it 392 to go all the way to zero. 393 Then I'm going to slowly bring it up as I look 394 at the image and decide exactly how much do I want. 395 And I'm thinking right around there. 396 I like it right around 65% for this particular picture. 397 But that's a trick that I use frequently 398 whenever I have a color photograph of a person, 399 and there's just something about their skin tones 400 that I really don't like. 401 Then I'll try to use that colorize filter 402 and blend it in with the original colors of the image 403 if needed. 404 I took this picture in Iceland, 405 and the sculpture here is nice and crisp, 406 but the building is just the littlest bit soft. 407 So, what I'd like to do here is soften the building more. 408 Make it look as if I used a different aperture setting 409 or a different lens 410 that would cause this to get knocked out of focus. 411 To do so, I'll head back up to the filter menu, 412 and again, we're going to use a neural filter. 413 And this time we're going to try a choice down here 414 called depth blur. 415 Now there's a good reason why it says beta next to it 416 as you'll learn in a few minutes. 417 And that's because the quality of the results 418 is not always stellar, 419 but I'll show you how to improve them. 420 So, let's turn this on, and what it wants me to do 421 is up here is a miniature preview of my picture, 422 and it doesn't know which area of the picture 423 should remain sharp. 424 So, I'm just gonna move my mouse into the image, 425 and I'm going to click on where I'd like it to be sharp, 426 and that's gonna set this focal distance, 427 which is how far into the image should it be sharp. 428 Then we also have a focal range. 429 And that means what should be the depth of field. 430 How much, how deep should it go? 431 And I could bring that up a little bit higher 432 if I'd like to get, let's say, 433 if this elbow was out of focus, 434 it might suddenly become in focus. 435 Then here we have blur strength, 436 so if I want this area of the background 437 to become more blurry, I'm going to crank that up. 438 Now, when I do this, 439 if you start being a little bit critical 440 of the image, especially if you zoom up on the image, 441 you'll notice some problems. 442 When I zoom up here, 443 you'll see the edge of the building that was right here, 444 gets this blur, but then suddenly 445 it gets sharp right there. 446 And if I look over here, 447 you might notice something a little bit odd there. 448 And if I look at the image itself, 449 it looks very jaggy on the edge, right on the nose, 450 and I don't know that it should. 451 I mean, look at the jagginess back there. 452 I also see a little hint of that kind 453 of notches coming down that way. 454 So, I find that this filter is not great, 455 but it can produce something that's very useful. 456 So, I'm going to ignore all of these settings, 457 and all I'm going to do is scroll down to the bottom, 458 where I find a checkbox called output depth map only. 459 When I click on that, 460 this is going to look completely different, 461 and it's going to show me 462 what it thought was near the camera. 463 That's the dark stuff. 464 It's going to show me what it thought 465 was a little further away. 466 That will be something a bit lighter, 467 and it'll show me 468 what it thought was a little further away. 469 That will be something a bit lighter. 470 And it'll show me what it thought was far away. 471 And that will be the white stuff. 472 And this is what it's using to figure out how much area 473 should be blurred. 474 So, this wasn't being blurred at all. 475 This was being blurred at full strength. 476 And this was being blurred a medium amount. 477 Well, if you zoom up in here, 478 you'll find right there is the reason 479 why that little area looked odd. 480 And here you can see the jaggies. 481 So, what I can do is if I choose output depth map only 482 and I click OK, 483 then I'm gonna get a brand-new layer on top 484 of my original picture that contains this. 485 Well, now what I want to do is modify this 486 and fix the problems that there are with it. 487 One way I could do that potentially is to use 488 the remove tool, and that's going to do retouching, 489 and I'm just going to act as if I wanted to remove 490 that little area of blackness there, 491 because the remove tool is usually pretty good 492 at keeping straight lines straight 493 and smooth curves relatively smooth. 494 Now I sometimes need to go over it more than once 495 to get it to touch up, 496 but I can do the same thing over here, 497 where you see that little jump kind 498 of going a little higher than it should. 499 I don't think the building jumped up at that point. 500 And so certain areas you could fix in that way, 501 but then we have to figure out 502 how to fix this jagginess. 503 To do that, I'm going to use another filter. 504 This is a filter that is a very old filter. 505 It's been in Photoshop for a very long time. 506 A lot of people just never use it 507 because they don't see a use for it. 508 But right now, this is a good use. 509 I'm going to choose the filter called median. 510 Median ends up rounding the corners 511 on any sharp edges. 512 Well, these jaggies right here 513 are all little 90-degree edges. 514 So, if I go up here and choose median, 515 then I can get it to smooth out those edges. 516 If you bring it way down, 517 you'll probably still see some of the jaggies. 518 And then I'm just going to bring this up to try 519 to find the lowest setting that's satisfactory, 520 that just gives me a satisfactory result of smoothing 521 that edge. 522 And probably around three starts to look fine, 523 although you could bring it up a little higher, four, five, 524 somewhere in there. 525 I'll use five. 526 And I'm going to click OK. 527 Now, that can cause issues in some areas. 528 It looks great around here 529 because that's where we used to have all those jaggies, 530 but you're going to find a spot like this. 531 It also rounded that little crisp corner that used 532 to be there. 533 And if I come in here to right there, if I choose Undo, 534 that used to be more of a crisp little V shape, 535 whereas afterwards it became a little bit rounded 536 because it will round off any sharp edges. 537 So, if you want to fix those kinds of areas, we can. 538 To do so, we're not going to use a filter though. 539 What we're going to do instead is use 540 what's known as a history brush. 541 If you go to the window menu, 542 there's a choice in here called history, 543 and this panel will list everything you've done 544 to the picture from the time you opened it 545 to whatever you've done after that, 546 and if you were to click on a previous step, 547 it would do the exact same thing as undo in fact, 548 if I just type Command + Z to undo, 549 you'll see it going backwards in this list each time 550 I type Command + Z. 551 If you add Shift to the normal undo keyboard shortcut, 552 it reapplies each step. 553 So, what I want to do is the equivalent to stepping back 554 to here, but I want to do it using a brush 555 so that I don't have to bring the entire image back. 556 Instead, I can paint it in only where I want it. 557 So, I'll have clicked on this bottom-most choice here, 558 so I'm at the point I was at 559 when we started to discuss this. 560 And then all I'm going to do is click on this little square 561 to the left of the previous step. 562 That little icon is the icon for the history brush, 563 and if you look over here in your tools panel, 564 you'll find the same icon right here. 565 So now what I'm doing is if I click on my image, 566 I'm gonna paint 567 with what the image looked like before I applied 568 the median filter, and therefore, 569 I could come down here and click right like that 570 and fix that area. 571 I could come over here, 572 and maybe that got messed up, so I fix it. 573 But I got to choose undo in some spots 574 because it is going to bring also back that jagginess 575 that we had before applying that median filter. 576 So, I'm only going to apply this in small areas 577 where it might really be messed up. 578 If that got rounded, I might click there. 579 In this image, 580 I don't know that it needs all that much correction. 581 I think that's gonna be good enough. 582 There is one other area in here 583 that I don't think looks right, 584 and that is if these shades of gray represent 585 how far away various objects are from the camera, 586 this area right here, the gap in his arm, 587 if you look at the original photograph, 588 you're looking through 589 to a wall that is the exact same wall as this one. 590 So that means the distance that this is from the camera 591 is identical to here. 592 But when I look at what we have, this is a lot darker. 593 That means this isn't going to be blurred 594 as much as this. 595 So, let's fix that. 596 Let's get this area to be the same brightness as that. 597 How are we going to do it? 598 Well, I'll just go to the original image, 599 and I'm going to come up here 600 to that object selection tool, 601 and then I'm going to hover over my image and see 602 if it recognizes the shape. 603 It looks like it does because it puts a pink outline 604 around it, and I'll just click. 605 That should give me a selection of that object. 606 Well, I don't want to change that object. 607 I want to change everything except for that. 608 So, I'll go to the select menu and choose inverse. 609 Therefore, I should have everything except 610 for the statue. 611 Now let's go and work on that layer, 612 and let's grab the paintbrush. 613 When you're in the paintbrush, 614 you can choose a shade of gray to paint with 615 right out of your image 616 by holding down the option key. 617 For the length of time, you hold down option, 618 which is Alt, and Windows, you get the eyedropper. 619 And I'm just going to click right here 620 to choose that shade. 621 Then, if I have everything except 622 for the statue selected, 623 that means I can't change the statue. 624 And the only other thing I need to do 625 is in my layers panel, 626 I got to make sure that layer up top is active. 627 Then I'll paint right here to fix that. 628 I don't need the selection anymore, so let's deselect. 629 All right, now, I think I've fixed most of the issues 630 that we had with this particular image. 631 But how can I now blur the photograph using this? 632 Well, I can. 633 Only thing I need to do is get this 634 so it's not sitting in a layer. 635 Instead, it needs to be stored somewhere else. 636 So, I'm gonna copy this. 637 I first go to the select menu and choose All. 638 Then I come up here to edit, and I choose copy. 639 After I do that, I can hide that layer. 640 I actually don't need it anymore. 641 And I'll go down to the background. 642 And the place I need to put that thing that I just copied 643 is the channels panel. 644 Let's go to the window menu 645 and let's choose channels. 646 And in here, I'm just going 647 to hit the little plus sign down here 648 at the bottom to create a brand-new channel. 649 Then I'm gonna choose paste. 650 I'm gonna have that grayscale image in a channel. 651 You're more than welcome to click on the name 652 of the channel twice and rename it. 653 And I'm just going to call it depth mask. 654 Because that's what we officially call these things. 655 And then finally, once I got it into a channel to get back 656 to the full-color image, 657 you always click on the top most channel right 658 on the name. 659 All right, we got everything set up. 660 I don't need that selection anymore, so I'll deselect, 661 and now let's figure out how to blur it. 662 I'll go to the filter menu, 663 and I'm not going to choose neural filters, 664 because the filter we used will not allow me 665 to feed it one of these grayscale things 666 that I've modified. 667 But if I come down here to the choice called blur, 668 there is a choice in here that will let me feed it. 669 And that is the one called lens blur. 670 So, I'll choose lens blur. 671 All right, this comes up. 672 And you remember when we were in the neural filter, 673 how I could click on the image to choose 674 what's going to be sharp? 675 Well, we got the same thing. 676 This little icon here is automatically turned on. 677 It allows me to go on top of the image 678 and click where I want it to be sharp. 679 And it is. 680 Up above that, there's an area called source. 681 And this means where is that depth map, 682 that grayscale image that tells it the different depths 683 in the photo. 684 And it automatically chooses the very first channel 685 that is in your channels panel that you've created. 686 Remember, I called mine depth map, mask, 687 I should say. 688 And so now it's using that. 689 Then we have, just like in the neural filter, 690 we have a blur focal distance. 691 That means how much do 692 we want to be sharp before it starts blurring. 693 And sometimes you need to bring that up 694 if something like this little elbow happened 695 to not be sharp. 696 And then we have radius. 697 That's how much blurring we want. 698 And now you'll notice that it's doing a much better job. 699 If I zoom up on this, 700 you notice the edge of the building 701 no longer looks weird here. 702 You notice the back of the head no longer looks jagged. 703 Same with the nose. 704 Instead, all that stuff's working out just fine. 705 That's because we modified the depth map 706 that Photoshop created with its neural filter. 707 And once we modified it, in order to be able to blur, 708 we needed to use a different filter 709 that's called Lens Blur. 710 Now, there's all sorts of other settings in here 711 that you can use if you'd like. 712 For instance, once you've blurred an area, 713 oftentimes it will look too smooth compared 714 to the sharp area. 715 And that's because the sharp area probably 716 has a little hint of noise in it. 717 And so here, you could bring this up a little bit 718 and have it add noise. 719 Although I find this noise to be, 720 how would I say, not the most sophisticated, 721 high-quality noise. 722 You could instead use the Camera Raw filter, 723 which has a grain feature under the effects area 724 that has a lot more control. 725 But this is close enough for showing you 726 how to improve that particular filter. 727 I'm gonna close this image. 728 Let me just show you one other example. 729 I'm not actually going to go through 730 that same process again. 731 I'm just going to show you just another example 732 of the kind of image it would mess up on. 733 So, let's take this one. 734 Let's go to Neural Filters. 735 And let's go to that thing that was called depth blur. 736 And I'm not going to mess with it 737 because it almost always messes up. 738 Instead, output depth map only. 739 Click OK. 740 So, now here's that thing we can start with. 741 We don't have to start from scratch, 742 but let's look at how it's messed up. 743 I'm gonna turn off the eyeball in this layer, 744 and this is my wife Karen doing a handstand. 745 Well, if you look, do you see that there are gaps here 746 between her legs where I can see the road? 747 Yet, if I look at the depth map 748 that that filter would have used, there is no gap. 749 Also, in here, do you see this area 750 where you can see the road? 751 Now, also in here, you see this area 752 where you can see the road? 753 Well, if I look at the depth map, 754 that looks darker than the area out here. 755 So, I would have to end up fixing it. 756 To fix it, I just click here. 757 I go to that tool again, 758 the one that is called the object selection tool, 759 and I see if it can select current. 760 And if and when it does, I see, 761 did it get those gaps in between her legs? 762 And if it didn't, like right here, it missed a spot. 763 I could hold down Shift to add or option to take away. 764 And I could trace around that to see 765 if I can convince it to include those areas. 766 And let's just say good enough. 767 Then I don't want to change where my wife Karen is. 768 I want to change everything else. 769 So, I choose inverse to get the opposite. 770 And now let's go and work on the mask that it created. 771 I'll just come over here and use the clone stamp tool, 772 which copies from one area, 773 to apply it somewhere else. 774 And I'm going to option click right here 775 to say copy from there. 776 That would be alt clicking in Windows, 777 and then I'll move right over here to put 778 that exact same shade in the gap 779 that was in there between her legs, 780 and therefore it thinks that that part of the road 781 is at the same distance as this. 782 Then, if this happens to look a little bit too dark, 783 I'll copy from right over here 784 and move straight over and then I'll paint that in. 785 And it went too far. 786 It bumped her arm, which made this come in. 787 So, I'll just choose undo. 788 I'll just do that again and not paint as far over 789 to the side. 790 There we go. 791 And then I could deselect, 792 and now we have a more accurate mask. 793 And therefore, I could use the lens blur filter, 794 just like we did on that other image, 795 to now blur the background on this. 796 But sometimes you might find 797 that these edges on these masks 798 are a little bit too wide. 799 Let's see if that's the case here. 800 I'm just gonna try to get the selection that I had back. 801 And look, right there, 802 it doesn't look to be quite as accurate. 803 Right there, it dips down. 804 Right here, it's off. 805 That is, if the selection matches my picture. 806 And if it does match my picture, 807 I'd also want to change that. 808 Otherwise, you'd find the edge 809 of my wife's pant being blurred, 810 or part of the background over here not being blurred. 811 So, you do need to look at things like that. 812 And you would often see those 813 when you're in that depth blur filter, neural filter. 814 You'd be able to see it and therefore you'd know 815 you'd need to fix it. 816 But that's as far as I'm going to push that image. 817 Now let's look at how I can take an image like this one, 818 and make it look a bit like it was captured 819 using a long exposure. 820 Well if I did a long exposure here, 821 then the wind in this area might end up moving 822 those clouds a bit in the upper atmosphere, 823 and we would get some motion blur to it. 824 So, let's see how that could be accomplished. 825 I'm going to open that image. 826 And first, let's talk about the filter I want to use. 827 I'm going to eventually go to the filter menu. 828 I'll come down here to blur gallery 829 and there's a choice called path blur. 830 And that's where you can get it to blur your image 831 in a particular direction by drawing a path. 832 Well, I could draw this little path 833 by dragging these ends over here, 834 so it's straight down at the bottom. 835 But then up here, 836 I would want it to be a bit more curved, 837 because that's kind of what the distortion on clouds 838 can look like when you've done a long exposure. 839 And what you can do is just move your mouse up here 840 and click. 841 Then you can drag to put out a secondary line. 842 And you can grab this little dot in the middle 843 to start adding a slight curvature to it. 844 Then I might add a third line up here 845 and add even more curvature to it. 846 Over here on the right then, 847 we simply have a speed control 848 and I could bring it up higher to get more 849 of that motion blur. 850 But here's the problem. 851 Notice that it's not only motion blurring our sky, 852 it's doing the same thing to the edge of these rocks. 853 So, I'm going to click Cancel. 854 And we're going to prep this image. 855 What I'll do is I'm going to duplicate this layer 856 by dragging it down to the New Layer icon. 857 And in one of those, for now I'll use the top one, 858 I just want to retouch out the edge 859 of these stone areas. 860 I might be able to use the object selection tool 861 and just kind of trace around this outer edge. 862 Hopefully, it will be able to locate it. 863 And then, 864 like that, do the same thing on the other side. 865 Then I could either use the remove tool, 866 or if I stay in that object selection tool, there's a trick, 867 and that is you can right-click, 868 and there is a choice within this menu that is called 869 delete and fill selection, 870 and that would try to remove whatever it is 871 you had selected. 872 We're not going to end up seeing those areas 873 that we just retouched out. 874 We've only done that to prevent the blur 875 from pushing them in different directions, 876 but it's going to be fine even 877 if this doesn't look perfect 878 because we're going to go back here to this layer, 879 and we're only going to eventually 880 have the blur effect, the sky area. 881 How can we do that? 882 Well, we'll just go to the select menu 883 and say select sky. 884 That should be able to isolate the sky, 885 and then I'm going to hide that area. 886 I can hide it with a layer mask, 887 and if you click the layer mask icon, 888 usually you keep what's visible. 889 If you hold Option when you click Alt and Windows, 890 you'll hide it. 891 So I'm just going to put this layer on top, 892 and now I'll turn on the layer that's underneath, 893 and now I can blur the layer that's underneath. 894 It's supplying the sky and the layer 895 that's underneath does not have these rocks in them. 896 So when I blur, 897 we're not gonna see the edges mess up. 898 So let's try filter, blur gallery, path blur. 899 Just extend this out 900 so we know it's nice and straight and add two more. 901 One maybe a third of the way up. 902 Give it a slight arc and then one up near the top, 903 and give it a more aggressive arc. 904 That and then on the right side, we have speed. 905 Bring it up until you like the amount 906 of blur that you're getting in your clouds. 907 And then finally, up here at the top, click OK. 908 So, let's look at what we have. 909 I'll simply hide the top layer. 910 Underneath is this. 911 It has all sorts of things blurred. 912 But the only place where we're seeing this is 913 where the sky was in the original picture. 914 And that's because if I turn on the top layer, 915 it has a mask that's hiding only the sky. 916 And therefore, it's only where the sky is that it reveals 917 what's underneath. 918 If I disable the mask by shift-clicking on it, 919 there's our original sky, 920 and there it is with that hint of motion blur. 921 Now, let's stylize a picture to make it look like more 922 of a, I don't know, pastel painting or something similar. 923 To do so, I'm going to go to the filter menu. 924 We're gonna again use neural filters 925 because they're the most sophisticated. 926 The ones down here are much more basic. 927 I'll still use them on occasion, and I'll share with you 928 when I do on the other lessons. 929 But let's head in here 930 and this time I'm going to try one that is called 931 Style Transfer. 932 If I turn that on, 933 now we have some example images here. 934 And if I click on one of them, 935 then it's gonna try to make my picture look like 936 that picture. 937 And in here, you can choose image styles, 938 and you can find things like this one that makes it 939 look like little waves, 940 or I think there's one in here that will make it 941 look like the Matrix, 942 and all sorts of others. 943 You can also feed it your own by choosing custom, 944 and then in here you can put in your own picture. 945 I'm not gonna do that though, 946 I'm gonna end up using what we have here, 947 and just click in between these 948 until I find something that gives me a little bit 949 of a painterly look or like charcoal look. 950 And let's just say I want to use this one. 951 Now, down here, we have some controls. 952 We have how much detail we would like to see. 953 If I bring that down, you're going to see 954 that we have less detail, 955 more generalized in the way the image looks. 956 Well, I want a good amount of detail. 957 Then we have strength. 958 And if I bring that really high, 959 we're not gonna see as much 960 of my original picture showing through. 961 And if I bring it really low, it'll still stylize it, 962 but we're gonna make it look a lot more like 963 that original picture. 964 And so I'm gonna bring that down until it looks 965 a lot more like the original. 966 And I could tweak anything else I wanted here. 967 I'm just going to tell it to create a new layer, 968 and I'll click OK. 969 But I'm not satisfied with the result. 970 It looks too much like that look. 971 I want some crisp detail to be in there. 972 Well, the original picture is sitting right underneath. 973 So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate 974 that original picture by dragging it down 975 to the new layer icon, and I'm gonna put it on top. 976 Then let's look at a more basic filter. 977 Another basic one that's been in Photoshop 978 for decades is filter, stylize, find edges. 979 Let's use that. 980 That drew some black lines 981 around the edges of things, but I see some purples 982 and other colors in there. 983 To get rid of those colors, 984 let's adjust the image and choose desaturate. 985 That way, all the colors will be removed. 986 Now, I want to get this to print on top 987 of what's underneath. 988 And I'll do that by changing the blending mode 989 in here to multiply. 990 Multiply prints like ink. 991 Any area that's white will disappear 992 and any area darker is going to print on top. 993 And then look at what that does in here 994 for where the siding of the building was, 995 and around the windows and doors. 996 If I turn it off, they're lacking a lot of detail. 997 Turn it on and things like this railing suddenly 998 have a huge amount of detail. 999 Then I don't like what it's doing to the water. 1000 It's adding way too much detail. 1001 So, I'm gonna add a layer mask. 1002 And in fact, I'll hold option 1003 when I do that's all to windows 1004 to get a black layer mask. 1005 Therefore, it's not applying anywhere. 1006 I'll then grab my paintbrush, 1007 and I'm just gonna paint it in wherever 1008 I think it's helpful. 1009 And I kind of liked it on most of the building. 1010 So I might paint it in there, 1011 get it on the railing that's here in other areas 1012 to mix these together. 1013 And I should avoid that little triangular area 1014 because that's where it darkens up the water. 1015 And now I'm getting kind of a mix of them. 1016 So here I'll turn it off and on, 1017 and you can see how much the find edges 1018 is bringing in. 1019 If I find I don't like the colors that it brought in, 1020 then I take the original image, 1021 which that's at the bottom, and I put it on top. 1022 And I can set its blending mode here 1023 to the choice called color. 1024 That means use the colors from the original picture, 1025 but use the brightness from what's underneath. 1026 Instead of using color, you could also try using hue. 1027 Hue means just the basic color, 1028 but use it as colorful as the original sketch was. 1029 But in this case, I think color is what I like. 1030 I can always turn off the eyeball and turn it back on. 1031 And if there's something I like much better 1032 in the version without that, I add a layer mask. 1033 Maybe the water looks too generic here, 1034 and I liked it more there. 1035 Well, add a layer mask. 1036 And just paint with black 1037 wherever you didn't like this color addition. 1038 And so, I could come in there and paint it all in. 1039 And that should get you started with filters. 1040 There are a bunch more and there's an endless variety 1041 of things you can do with them, 1042 but at least now you have something 1043 to get started with.