Lessons
Photoshop Playbook
02:27 2Adobe Bridge: Camera Raw
08:04 3Quick Select & Refine Edge in Photoshop
05:33 4Sharpening in Photoshop
09:40 5Correcting Distortion in Photoshop
07:36 6Black and White Conversions in Photoshop
08:45 7Content Aware in Photoshop
11:02 8Depth of Field Modifications in Photoshop
13:33Lesson Info
Sharpening in Photoshop
very controversial subject is sharpening. Talk about sharpening for just a minute. Sharpening exists in a lot of different places in the app, like a lot of things and Photoshopped. There's a bit of a history lesson with sharpening. You'll see old in Stan Shih ations of sharpening and knew it exists in camera raw. So again, I've trained my J pegs to open through camera. So that's where we are, where we start off here. But what I want to tell you here is this is not somewhere you want to do a lot of sharpening. Um, a little bit of sharpening is okay on some cameras, you'll see it set to 25% by default. Trust us on the defaults. They're set up for a reason. But doing a bunch of sharpening in camera raw the advantages. You can go back and change it later, but I'm gonna show you a couple of tricks in Photoshopped that are better way of doing it. Same goes for light room. Don't do a whole bunch of sharpening their You could do some sharpening, but if you're trying to do sharpening to give th...
e illusion of focus or to recover something that's not necessarily where you want to do it. Now. This is a strange analogy, but it's when I've been using for years, and it at least makes sense to some people. Um, my mom, uh, uses salt very aggressive. I don't know why I don't know what happened. I don't know what happened to her or taste buds, but she salts things that one should never solved. She salts like Chinese food pizza, things that just do not need salt. Um, and I mention this because sharpening is the same sort of deal. Most people behave like rational, normal human beings, and they sharpen a little bit here and there. Every once in a while, you come across someone's book that it looks great, but it's just super, super crunchy. If you know someone like this, you owe it to them to intervene and have a sharpening intervention, as I've tried to do with my mom, was salt. If you are one of those people, just ah less is more. Don't over sharp. Having said that, when we do sharpen, we want to make sure we do it 100%. But again, I am not gonna sharpen here. It's one of the few things I'm not gonna do aggressively in here. I'm gonna open into Photoshopped. There's a good chance when you're opening your files in the photo shop. They're not coming in as smart objects I've set. Camerata is a smart object, which means if I want to make an adjustment back in camera raw, I could go back there. But I'm gonna flatten this so you get an image that probably looks like the one you came in with. If you double click on the zoom tool, you're going to get a 100% preview. This is off of that crazy new Sony, a seven to very, very high resolution file. Um, selective focus. We're gonna use this to sharpen the thing to remember about. Sharpening is it's just, uh, sharpening, you know, it's really a bit of an illusion. It's it's contrast. It's localized contrast. And so it's not going to buy back focus. You can sort of trick the eyes and make it look like it, but we're not gonna We're not gonna be able to introduce something that's not there, but we could do a couple of tricks. Okay, so what to do and what not to do. Uh, when it comes to sharpening, you have undoubtedly heard of UN shark mask on Sharp Mask has been there forever, and it's got a weird name. It's not the best way to sharpen and Photoshopped just not been there a long time. Everybody knows it, but that's not the way to do it. Uh, other things that have been there a long time that you most certainly don't want to use. And this all begs the question. What wise it in there? We'll get to that in a second sharpened, sharpened edges sharp and more. Keep away from those unless you have a really good reason for using them. Some of these operations are destructive, and people use them to bring out artifacts or particular look in the image. Everything in photo shops there for a reason. When we think about pulling something out, invariably someone steps up and says, but I use that create noise that I then usedto wash through and over painted. Okay, we won't take it out. Sorry, um, unsure Mass was the way to go for a long time, and that's why it's in there. There's nothing wrong with it, but there's a better way to go, which is smart. Sharpen now, before I show you smart, sharpen the thing you want to do before applying. This is coming here and convert to a smart filter so we make it smart. Smart, sharpen. Essentially, what that's doing is it's turning it into a filter layer. Now, as I mentioned the fourth quick select, I think the name gets in the way with some of these things people see smart sharpen. They see on sharp mask on sharp mask is the weirder name. That must be the better one. Smart sharpens the way to go 100%. We're gonna come down to sharpen, going to smart sharpen and what's unique about it. We get this nice big preview. Um, we can move that preview around. I can have a 200% preview. Uh, right here. I consume in really close on this. Let's back it up to 100% around something that's in focus. It seems obvious, but you want to make sure you want to do that. When you come in here, you won't see the shadow and highlights. Um, but a few things that air that are unique here. One, um, what we're removing in Sharp Mask is combating Ghazi and Blur that made a lot of sense 25 years ago. Now what we're combating largely is lens blur before shooting digital, so it's set to lens blur by default, and that's just more appropriate for what we're sharpening. The controls are very similar. You've got amount radius, which effects how wide it supplied and reduce noise. Reduce noise is great because a lot of time when you're sharpening your creating noise and you can reduce that right here. So a couple things that are unique about this you can change your target to remove lens blur, which it does by default. You can combat the sharpening effects in just the shadows or the highlights. And probably the coolest thing about this is you can save. Whatever you do is a preset, so you can come in here and save that. Now let's just do something ridiculous. Let's assume it's my mom doing the sharpening here, and it's ah and applied way too strong. We click OK, we go to show that to anyone other than her, and as soon as they see it on this huge 120 meg file, they're going to say, Well, that's awful. That's way, way too short. Now, if you were using, um, flat file, you'd be stuck with that. You have a couple history states, and you could back up. But the benefit to using a smart filter is that it's edible. This is an enormous file, so that takes a second. We look at that that's way overcooked. Um, if we looked at it from here, it might look OK, But again, you want to make sure you zoom in there. If we look at it 100% which is how we should look at it. It's way overcooked, but what's great about a smart filter is becoming here. We double click on this, and it's just like a layer when I come back in here and I stayed 372% craziness, 7.2 uh, lunacy. Let's go ahead and change that. It's going to apply the change, their on right that back. Think of smart filters as filter layers. Okay, there is one other workflow. Let's go ahead and let that apply again. The only reason it's taking so long as I perhaps foolishly decided to shoot some demo files with that new camera. 42 megapixels. Their big even is J. Pegs. All right, so let's do a couple things. Let's, um, let's just flatten this out. Let's just work with what we've got and let's move back a little and say, OK, this is the file we have. But let's say we want to do something a little more extreme. Let's say we want to use sharpening to try to correct um, focus again. It's a slippery slope. Um, but what do you want to dio? Is first Duke the layer? So you want to use this nondestructive of workflow as possible? Any sort of brush based tool is inherently destructive. So the way we're going to sneak around it here is by duping the layer, it's gonna give us another working version of it of the file. Any time you're looking sharpening, you do want to be 100% with filing this. It's kind of crazy because it's in so close, so I'm actually gonna move back a little just so you guys can see a little more of the image. There is a tool for sharpening. That works incredibly well, and it's called the sharpened tool. It's been in there since the dawn of time. You probably don't use it because the first time you used it, it did something like this. And you said I don't need artifacts, so I'm never gonna use that again. Well, several versions back, we license this really powerful technology that's in here, and it's called Protect Detail. It's just on by default. And what's great about this is even with this turned up to 100% I can overcook this file. I'm gonna start sharpening areas that are sharpened and are not, and I'm really landed on heavy hair and you can see that it's gonna sharpen this. But it's not going to introduce artifacts if you need to do selective sharpening. The way to do it used to be that you duped the layer, you sharpen the whole thing, and then you erased what you didn't need. But the way to do it is to dupe the layer and just apply it where you need it again. I overcooked it for the sake of you guys seeing what I'm doing. Uh, smart sharpen for global sharpening and the sharpened tool with an additional layer for localized sharpening. Use a layer based workflow whenever you can. Don't use on sharp mask. All right, were camera. I know this this. I'm sure there's comments firing off somewhere and people are getting excited about this. It polarizes people.
Ratings and Reviews
Mike Thompson
I think this class was well worth it. I like that you are sharing this info, like the "secrets" so I can try them and have acquaintances ask, "how did you do that". It was great. Thanks!
user 12004e
Lots of good tips. Gets to some deeper aspects of the programs.