Lessons

Lesson Info

The Little Stuff: Scaling, Defringe, Noise Reduction

Sometimes I need to add space to a document or scale a document up or down in the process of doing so sometimes they need to keep track of how big it used to be a couple instances of that first I want to add guides to the edge of this picture I'm going to do that by first showing my rulers I usually show my rulers with the keyboard shortcut it's command are for ruler on the mac control on windows and then you can click on the ruler and drag out a guide and these guys were usually snap to the edge of your documents. So here I'm just going to try to get it to remember where the edge of the document wass by pulling down guides the touch each edge then let's say that I'm going to use this image which right now I believe is eight and a half by eleven let me go double check in image size it's inches eight and half by eleven but let's say I was going to print this on a printing press on a date in half by eleven final size sheet. Well, if you actually have your image print all the way to the e...

dge of the sheet of paper and you printed on a printing press instead of your desktop printer they actually printed on a larger sheet of paper than that uh and then they trim away the excess and what she need is this area of your image to extend beyond that, you need a little bit extra beyond the edge it's known as a bleed, and so here I'm going to create some bleed the guides that air there will remind me where the edges of the trim isthe, meaning the final sighs of that image once it's printed. So I'll go to the image menu, I will choose canvas size, and I'm just going to say, make this about a quarter an inch bigger, so I'll type in if I click on relative, I can tell it how much to add, and so I'm gonna add a half an inch and both sides that means half an inch vertically, half an inch horizontally, therefore a quarter inch on both sides, quarter inch plus a quarter inch, half and relative means instead of typing in the exact size that I want to end up with, I'm saying compared to what we started with, add or take away this much when I click okay, you see my little extra space now that extra space happened to off automatically filled with gray and that's only because of the way this document was constructed, the bottom most layers what's known as a solid color layer. And a solid color layer just the way it works is it fills the entire document all the way out to the edges. If that wasn't the case, I might need to take that background and scale it up so it would fill that area now let's, talk about a few issues here first off, when you're pulling out a guide, you could get that guy to go just about anywhere in your document, but sometimes I want to get a very specific areas we'll check this out if I hold down the shift key when I pull out a guide, its going to snap to the tick marks that are in my ruler so let's say I zoom out enough where the tick marks in my ruler are more like almost quarter inch tick marks, I think come out here, pull out a guide hold downshift in the guide itself is snapping to those little tick marks, and that can make it a little easier to make sure that this is three inches or four inches in that kind of thing. Just a nice tip to know about if you want to get fancy when you're pulling out a guide, hold on the option key colton windows it's going to switch directions so if you have a vertical guy that you want a horizontal optional dude for you but let's say I got the guys where I need him to be that represents my eight and half by eleven sheet of paper now let's see what happens if I scale this image if I come over here and choose image size and I'm going to make this image let's say four hundred percent of its original size click on okay let's see what happens to our guides you remember our guides were at where it in half by eleven used to be well after we zoom up there still where they used to be relative to the document as a hole it's not that there are a quarter inch from the edge anymore there let's say that this is I don't know three percent of the way across the document originally it's still three percent of the way across the document I can have influence over that if I choose undue I'm going to go up to the view menu before I scale my image and I'm going to choose lock guides lot guides is going to make sure that those guides now stay in the exact same position regardless of the document gets larger or smaller. Therefore if I come over here and choose image size again, get it four hundred percent just like we did before it's gonna look a little different because when it's done those guys are going to be in the same position relative to the ruler mean they're still going to show you eight and a half by eleven between them if I show my guide said if you can tell but up here can you see that that would be a quarter of incheon, approximately it's, about eight and a half inches wide, that kind of thing. So just so you know, if you ever going to scale an image and you want to think about what's gonna happen to your guides if you're going ad space to your document with campus eyes, anything like that, you want to control it. Think about do you need to lock those guides to keep them in the same spot relative to the rulers? Or do you want them to move along with the document getting larger or smaller? But locking your guides is how you can control that here's a feature bacon ha! Well, uh, got a little distracted there. Um just want to show you feature that has been photoshopped forever and just want to explain what it does cause a lot of people ask, what the heck is this feature do that? I never use s o I'm going to take this, which is just some text typed on a white background and there are no layers. So this would be let's say, I got this off a website or something downloaded a graphic and it's permanent like this? Well, I'm gonna grab my magic wand tool to just do a very simple selection with my magic wand tool to select on ly the areas that are solid white I have the tolerance up here at the top of my screen set to zero the defense thirty two which would select not just the shade you clicked on but things a little brighter and darker than it but it's going to click out here it just selected the areas surrounding the word banking but it didn't select inside of the letter b or inside the letter o those kinds of things I could hold down the shift key and click on those areas or I could go to the select menu and there's a choice called similar in similar means grab things that are the same colors throughout the rest of the documents I'll just use similar now I have all the areas that are white selected but I don't really want the background instead I want the text itself I'll go to the select menu and choose inverse to get the opposite I have my word bacon selected and so everything that is not solid white is selected I'm gonna copy that let's create a new document to put it in and I'm just going to make this document a little bigger than I need I'm going to fill that document with black my foreground colors black so option delete should do that and now I'm gonna paste it in now if you look closely at this not that close that closely you might be able to tell that on the very edge of the text it doesn't smoothly fade out to the black instead I can see the little bitty remnants of the old white background around the edges well if you ever have that on a just a couple pixels on the edge usually it's only one or two pixels words going toe do it uh then there's a feature and photo shop that's been there forever I just want to show you what it does that is if I go to the layer menu the very bottom choice under the layer menu is called matting and in there we can remove a black mat or a white man by matt it means old background like a matte painting like hollywood would use for an old background kind of thing but if I choose the color of the old background remove white matt for instance when I choose that let go it should do a lot of cleanup on the edge of that image it won't be ableto handle any pixels that are how would I say it that are completely solid white but if they're just have a hint of white in it it's going to clean it up if I choose undo you'll see before choose undo again and you'll see after you see a little bit of the cleanup it's doing on the edge so you have the choice of trying to remove a white matte, which means a fringe white or black matt, if it was originally on a black background or you have a choice of de fringe, if you use d friendship is going to try to get rid of any color. And you can tell it how far in towards the from the edge of the pics from the edge of the content of that layer it should go. So if I try one pixel that did a better job of getting those little solid white areas out of there is still the tiniest hint right here. So if I choose on do I could instead, when I choose d french type in two pixels and then it might be able to tackle that area, what is doing when you choose things like de fringe? Is this just taking the colors that are one pixel or two pixels inside the object in pushing them out into the the edge? That's there this is only gonna work with, like one or two pixels on the edge of your picture. That's why we're working on such a low resolution image mainly used when you have something from a website that you have to re purpose. It was originally on let's say a fluorescent green background and you're redesigning the website you don't have another copy of that graphic and you need to put it on different colored background this is how you can clean up the edge now let's look at a technique that could be used for reducing noise we have noise reduction controls in both camera and and filters within photo shop but there's a specialty technique you can use for when those things just don't work well enough so what you could do is instead of just using a single image, you could take a series of images where did you leave the exposure exactly the same composition camera's on a tripod you just take more than one shot that's what I've done here I'm gonna take these images and I'm going to combine them together in photo shop I'm just going to choose tools photo shop load files into photoshopped layers looks like I won't run one right below it I'm not sure what photo shop is doing at the moment I'm gonna type command period to see if I can stop it okay, I did if you ever have photoshopped doing something that you don't know what you did, you accidentally chose the wrong choice try hitting either the escape key on your keyboard or type command period that would be controlled period on windows and that's in general a cancel command so if it's something let's say, it would take an hour for to do it on, you want to cancel it, try command period so load files into fighter shop players this time I'll try to let go on the right command that's going to stack all these images in a single photo shopped file, and the idea here is that noise in an image varies between different photographs, so that if I inspect let's, say, five different pictures where with identical composition, the noise little specks will be in a different position in each shot. If I take enough pictures like here, I don't know how many shots I have, but I might have about a dozen that photo shop could kind of average that out where it can see what's consistent between all these photographs in making throw away whatever's varying between the photos. So if it's, the noise that's varying between each shot that's what it's hopefully going to cancel out. So in case you can't tell, I'm going to zoom up here real close to this image can tell it's noisy this was shot I can't remember the settings, but I could go look real quick I'll just look at one of these images this was shot at I s o thirty two hundred. On a I think on a cannon like five d or something can five d those a pretty clean image so I had to shoot it s o thirty two hundred and this is a set a ten second exposure oh is that a tenth? I'm not sure how it does that, but but pretty much trying to do shoot this one it was really dark out and caused the camera to really brighten up our otherwise really dark scene so here I've loaded these into layers what I need to do is if I was on a tripod and I'm just hitting the button on my camera I might accidentally move the camera each time I hit the button if I use the cable release priced a pretty consistent but in this case I don't remember if I used to cable release if I didn't what I want to do is select all these layers just go up to the select menu, choose all layers and then go to the edit menu and I'm going to find a choice called otto a line layers I'll just choose that and leave it set to auto click okay now these are high res pictures this file is four hundred and seventy three megabytes and size of the moment which means it could take some time for it to align these but it's looking at each individual layer trying to align it with the layers that are underneath to get this to look right that just made sure they're aligned now what I'm gonna do is something special I need to get photoshopped to think about all these layers together intern or do that I need to go to the layer menu and convert this into a smart object therefore all these letters are going to look a ziff their merge together into one piece and so in a moment my layers panel you'll see it looks like one layer and then here's a feature that used to be only available in the extended version of photo shop but if you bought photo shop is part of a sweet like the adobe creative suite where you got illustrator and design you probably got the extended version with it or if you have photoshopped cc the new subscription model you have this feature as well what I'm going to do is choose layer choose smart objects in on lee when you have a smart object that contains multiple images that looked the same should you be able to go over here and choose stack mode I'm gonna choose stack mode and I'm going to choose a choice called median it'll take it a while because now it's analyzing every one of those images that aaron that smart object what is doing this saying what's different about all these pictures it's trying to figure out really what's consistent about all of them and that's what he's trying to keep any variation it notices between the layers it's trying to discard so if I zoom up on the image now, I'm going to choose undo so you can see what it looked like before I changed the stack mode and then I'll just type undo again and you'll see the after so this was before do you see all the noise in this is after now I could've had a sharper picture or whatever, but this just happens to be the only example I have to experiment with, but you can see there's quite a bit less noise before I'm sorry this is after compared to before, so if you ever know for sure you're going to have to shoot in a really dark environment where you can't use lighting, you're in a cave or something and they won't let use lights or something instead of taking one shot and either ah, hi, I also are an extremely long exposure want take a dozen shots and just use the cable release they don't move the camera, then you could use this technique to try to minimize the noise you have in your picture and you can get it to reduce it's the noise even more than I have here, you'd simply need to take more shots, more shots you have, the more it's going to be able to reduce or eliminate the noise so just remember that I ended up putting all those layers into a smart object and then the way I chose the option I just used was under here smart objects stack mode, median and if this doesn't show up, then you have an older version of photo shop and it's not the extended version but if you bought photo shop is part of a suite where you got illustrator and in design and other programs with it, you'll have the extended version or if you have photoshopped cc the new subscription model, you'll have it but some of you won't know when you're done with that you can take this image, which is a big image this is thirty six point eight megabytes it tells me at the bottom edge of my picture, but when you're completely done just flat in the image that's going to combine all those layers together and then you can save it out in any file format you'd like in your file size would go down dramatically because instead of having whatever it was a dozen pictures embedded within that image you'll just have one. It'll be a normal file size so mary from costa rica would like to know any tips on how to use the other stacking options I've seen medium used to remove tourists and now noise, but I haven't seen anyone used the other options you can experiment with them but overall let's see, there are I can't remember if it's a minimum and maximum or something similar in wording you could think of it is grabbing likea brightest and darkest stuff from relative photos, but I find that I mainly use it for noise in for getting rid of tourists. Yeah, it's just the amount of time it takes to experiment with exit takes a little time for it to process on due that I haven't devoted enough time to experiment with it to really come up with really good uses for the others their used a lot in the scientists, scientific community and medical imaging, that kind of stuff, but they don't always have is many he completely straightforward uses so I don't have a collection of uses for those okay, cool well, I'm mary, thanks for mentioning the tourist thing. I'm going to put that put that to good use. Yeah, if you ever have a scene where there's just always tourists there, you know you have here in seattle the yeah pike's place market there's cars move around all the time. People moving around all the time take thirty photographs with your camera stationery so that the only thing that is consistent is the buildings that are there in the streets that are there cars going by are changing in each shot, people are moving in each shot and do the exact same technique, and you will find that oftentimes it'll get rid of all the tourists because it'll say the building is what's consistent. These people moving around are are not that comes up with for like a good demo, oftentimes, because people will use idealistic pictures. The problem is, if a particular party, your photograph is covered by let's, say, a person or a car, the in the majority of shots and there's only let's, say one clean shot of the road or building photo shops not smart enough to know that that road or building is what it should be kept. Instead, it's going kind of average everything you saw, and you'll end up with this blurry car slash person blob. So there's a lot of great demos that you see about removing people from photos in sometimes it's great, especially if you take like seventy pictures to do it with. But on a day to day basis, it's not as practical, is it as many other features are.