Lessons
Class Introduction
03:41 2Finding Hidden Filters
11:58 3Halftone Pattern
07:06 4Liquify
07:06 5Lens Flare
02:30 6Flames
05:16 7Variations of the Blur Tool
10:29 8Field Blur
04:33Lesson Info
Variations of the Blur Tool
Let's take a look at blurring things. And why that, um, could be some handy, and we'll start here with this. So this is the image where we're going to make, like, pixie dust and a little she's like, Please help me. She's like making a wish to her little fairy godmother. I want to know Photoshopped. I want to know everything in photo shop. So we're gonna bestow that upon her. Her fairy godmother will come and Sprinkle some Photoshopped pixie dust. So how are we going to do that? Okay, well, our first step is going to be to duplicate the background layer. So I'm just pressing command or control, James. And this is like a super old trick, like one of the first things I ever did. A photo shop, like, 100 years ago. Um, and we are now just gonna blur this. So from the filter menu, we're gonna choose blur, and there's all kinds of blurs. There's blur. And then there's all kinds of blurs. And then there's Blur gallery, and there's even more types of blurs, so they all have their own purpose. W...
e're not going to go through every single one of them just know that they're pretty awesome. And if you're looking for just like a general Blur, then what you want is the Gaussian Blur. And here's a little Photoshopped trivia. Where did this name come from? It's the name of the person who created the algorithm that the Blur uses. So I'm told. So it's just good. I would like to think of like Ghazi Ambler as, like General Blur. So it's just kind of Ah, General Blur. So well, just blur this a bit. Maybe a like so 20 pixels. Um, and now that's not terribly useful. In this current state, we have a blurred image. But if we come up here and change the blend mode to something like Overlay now, we've taken our image from this to this, so it's a little more dreamy. We're closer to the dreamy fairy godmother is coming thing. Okay, so on our next step, we're gonna add, um, let's rename this layer. I guess what? We're thinking of it just so we can keep things straight. Glowy. Okay, um, let's add a layer of some mystical color to just add to the fairy godmother nous that's happening. So I'm going to create a blank layer, and I'm gonna grab my Grady int tool. And if you've never used the great and tool or or not used it much, then it probably just looks like this. So these air the default radiance. The 1st 2 presets here are dynamic, meaning that they draw from your foreground and background swatches. So if you have two colors here that you want to use, you'll see them pop up. The 1st 1 is your foreground to background, and the 2nd 1 is foreground to transparency. So if you change these, these will change. But one of my favorites, of course, if we clicked the gear menu, it's like hidden surprise. There's all kinds of other things here, and one of my favorite ones is pastels, and they're just so pretty. So I like this one here that's like pink to purple. So I'm gonna click on that, and I mean, it's select these air, the different styles of Grady INTs that we can apply. So I'm gonna choose this one here, which is a radial radiant so I can give, um so it's like radiating from her right, so they just draw different radiance like a linear Grady. It would just be like this or like this. So the way that you use the tools, you click and drag with it. And then you get just a fill of color that transitions from in this case, yellow to pink to purple. So I want radio now I can't see. So throw that away and do this again, and I'm going to click on her because it's going to start wherever I click. It's going to start with this color here on the left. So I'm gonna click and just drag outwards like that. Maybe maybe I want to try again and drag a little further come like that and then I'm just gonna change the blend mode to something like soft light. So just kind of help colorize the image and give it a different feel. So we're getting close, OK? Next thing we're gonna dio is, um, create the Ferry Moonbeam I don't know how you would call it creative, very moonbeam. So to do that, I'm gonna click to add another blank layer and I'm gonna grab my polygonal lasso selection tool And I mean that click to make the beam so this tool works like Spider Man's web. So you click and you lay down an anchor point and then you can move down and click to make another anchor point. And I can't decide if it should, like, go like this. Or maybe yeah, we'll follow, I guess, kind of her shape. And then to close the shape and complete the selection, you return back to the beginning and, you know, here at the beginning, when you see that little circle appeared to the bottom right of your cursor and then it will turn into a selection So we could, uh, feather the selection and then fill it with the moonbeam, or we could just fill it and then blur it, which I tend to like that option. So what I'm gonna do is select a desired moonbeam color, I guess like a pastel yellow sounds good on. Then I'm just gonna, um so that's my active foreground color so I can use on a Mac. It's alter or option delete, and it will fill the selection with that color on a PC. I believe it would be controlled elite for a foreground color. That's the one keyboard shortcut that's actually different on a PC, and it screws me up every dime. Uh, but simple enough. Okay, so now we have it, um, filled over here, and we can then blur this if we want to. We can convert this to a smart object in case we want un blur it later or blur it less or something. So I'm going to right click on the layer and choose Convert to Smart Object. And then we can come up and choose filter, blur Gaussian blur, and we can decide how blurred we want to make it. And then we'll change the blend mode to maybe a soft light. And maybe we adjust capacity a little bit, so it's subtle. It's subtle. Let's see, Let's go through all the blood modes and just see if there's another one. That's, um, if you color burn, I'll just stick with softly, I think. OK, so that's looking pretty good. Now we're ready to add some very dust, so on a new blank layer and we'll get our paintbrush and I'm gonna use a soft, round brush and I'm gonna go up here to my brush panel options, and we'll go in and adjust the spacing and adjust the scattering. And no, I believe that Adjust the scattering and the count and the size we want the size dinner quite a bit and something like that. Okay, so then we'll go back and choose a nice light color again. We'll call this fairy dust. We'll make our brush. Tiny. No, we need we need to just a little more than that. We need more scattering. We're just kind of putting some fairy dust all around. There we go. And then we're gonna apply an outer glow to this. So we'll go to the effects panel and shoes outer glow and do some of that great. And then I'm going to duplicate this three times 123 by just pressing Commander Control J. And I'm going to select the three copies and merge them all together by pressing Commander Control E. And then I'm gonna blur those so filter again blur Gaussian blur. There we are. And then we can fade this down a little bit. So there you have it, some fairy dust, and I'll group them in a folder and then I'm actually gonna I don't like that. It's on her face. So I'm gonna put him in a folder and then get my paintbrush and mask, get a normal brush mask at off her face a little bit, okay? And then we have this little thing, this glowy image that started with this and got us here with some blurring.
Ratings and Reviews
Amy Vaughn
Khara is knowledgeable, creative and has a fun and easy to understand teaching style. This class goes over some of the default Photoshop filters and offers ideas about how to use them for creative effects. My favorite new thing I learned was about displacement maps, but I'm looking forward to trying more of these out.
user-f2dcf6
I have been using Photoshop for many years. Although I've made use of filters now and again, I never spent time learning about them. I appreciate how clearly Khara explains filter settings and the examples she provides.
Student Work
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