The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers part 36 pps

Step Three: Now, choose a medium-sized, soft-edged brush from the Brush Picker in the Options Bar, and then simply take the Sharpen tool and paint over just the areas you want to appear

Step Three:

Now, choose a medium-sized, soft-edged

brush from the Brush Picker in the Options

Bar, and then simply take the Sharpen tool

and paint over just the areas you want

to appear sharp (this is really handy for

portraits like this, because you can avoid

areas you want to remain soft, like skin,

but then super-sharpen areas you want to

be really nice and crisp, like her belt) Since

this tool is doing a lot of math behind the

scenes, depending on how much you paint,

you might have to wait a moment or two

before the final sharpening is revealed Back

in the CS4 version of this book, I used to

teach a more complex version of this idea

of “painting with sharpness,” because we

couldn’t use the Sharpen tool back then—

it would just ruin your image Instead, we

had to super-sharpen a duplicate layer,

hide it behind a black layer mask, and paint

the sharpening back in where we wanted it

Step Four:

Here’s a before/after of the image after

painting over areas that you’d normally

sharpen, like her clothes, hair, and belt,

while avoiding all areas of flesh tone

Note: One of the tricks the pros use to

get incredibly sharp-looking photos is

to apply their sharpening once, and then

go back and spot sharpen only those

areas in the photo that can hold a lot

of sharpening (for example, areas that

contain chrome, metal, steel, buttons on

clothing, jewelry, or even your subject’s

eyes in some cases) So, first apply the

regular Unsharp Mask filter to the entire

image, then go back with the Sharpen

tool and paint over just those areas that

can really take a lot of sharpening It makes

the whole photo look that much sharper,

even though you just super-sharpened a

few key areas

Although it hasn’t caught on like many of us hoped, the Smart Sharpen filter offers some of the most advanced sharpening available in Photoshop CS5 (along with the newly updated Sharpen tool), because within it is a special sharpening algorithm that’s better than the one found in the ever popular Unsharp Mask filter—you just have to know where to turn it on Because Unsharp Mask is still so popular (old habits are hard to break), I find that I generally switch to Smart Sharpen when I run into a photo that’s visibly out of focus

When to Use the

Smart Sharpen

Filter Instead

Step One:

Go under the Filter menu, under Sharpen,

and choose Smart Sharpen This filter

is in Basic mode by default, so there are

only two sliders: Amount controls the

amount of sharpening (I know, “duh!”)

and Radius determines how many pixels

the sharpening will affect The default

Amount setting of 100% seems too high

to me for everyday use, so I usually find

myself lowering it to between 60% and

70% The Radius is set at 1 by default,

and I rarely change that, but for this image,

I raised it to 2

Step Two:

Below the Radius slider is the Remove

pop-up menu (shown here), which lists

the three types of blurs you can reduce

Gaussian Blur (the default) applies the

same sharpening you get using the regular

Unsharp Mask filter Motion Blur is

use-less, unless you can accurately determine

the angle of blur in your image (which

I’ve yet to be able to do even once) The

third one is the one I recommend: Lens

Blur This uses a sharpening algorithm

created by Adobe’s engineers that’s

bet-ter at detecting edges, so it creates fewer

color halos than you’d get with the other

choices, and overall I think it gives you

better sharpening for most images

Continued

Step Three:

The only downside to choosing Lens Blur

is that it makes the filter take a little

longer to “do its thing.” (That’s why it’s

not the default choice, even though it

provides better-quality sharpening.) After

you choose Lens Blur, go to the bottom

of the dialog and you’ll see a checkbox for

More Accurate It gives you (according to

Adobe) more accurate sharpening by

applying multiple iterations of the

sharp-ening I leave More Accurate turned on

nearly all the time (After all, who wants

“less accurate” sharpening?) Note: If you’re

working on a large file, the More Accurate

option can cause the filter to process

slower, so it’s up to you if it’s worth the

wait (I think it is) By the way, the use

of the More Accurate checkbox is one

of those topics that Photoshop users

debate back and forth in online forums

For regular everyday sharpening it might

be overkill, but again, the reason I use

Smart Sharpen is because the photo

is visibly blurry, slightly out of focus,

or needs major sharpening to save

So I leave this on all the time

Step Four:

If you find yourself applying a setting

such as this over and over again, you can

save these settings and add them to the

Settings pop-up menu at the top of the

dialog by clicking on the floppy disk icon

to the right of the pop-up menu (Why

a floppy disk icon? I have no idea.) This

brings up a dialog for you to name your

saved settings, and then click OK Now,

the next time you’re in the Smart Sharpen

filter dialog and you want to instantly call

up your saved settings, just choose it from

the Settings pop-up menu (as shown here)

Step Five:

If you click the Advanced radio button, it

reveals two additional tabs with controls

for reducing the sharpening in just the

shadow or just the highlight areas that

are applied to the settings you chose back

in the Basic section That’s why in the

Shadow and Highlight tabs, the top slider

says “Fade Amount” rather than just

“Amount.” As you drag the Fade Amount

slider to the right, you’re reducing the

amount of sharpening already applied,

which can help reduce any halos in the

highlights (Note: Without increasing the

amount of fade, you can’t tweak the

Tonal Width and Radius amounts They

only kick in when you increase the Fade

Amount.) Thankfully, I rarely have had to

use these Advanced controls, so 99% of

my work in Smart Sharpen is done using

the Basic controls

Continued

Step One:

Open a photo that needs some extreme sharpening, like this photo taken at an airshow Duplicate the Background layer

by pressing Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J), as

shown here

Step Two:

Go under the Filter menu, under Other,

and choose High Pass You use this filter

to accentuate the edges in the photo, and making those edges stand out can really give the impression of mega-sharpening

I start by dragging the Radius slider all the way to the left (everything turns gray onscreen), then I start dragging it over to the right For non-HDR images, I don’t drag it all that far—I just drag until I see the edges of objects in the photos appear clearly, and then I stop The farther you drag, the more intense the sharpening will

be, but if you drag too far, you start to get these huge glows and the effect starts to fall apart, so don’t get carried away Now, click OK to apply the sharpening

I don’t normally include the same technique twice in the same book,

but if you read the HDR chapter, I included High Pass sharpening there too,

because it’s become kind of synonymous with HDR processing Of course, what

I’m concerned about is that you skipped over the HDR chapter altogether, and

came here to the sharpening chapter, and you’d be wondering why the very

popular High Pass sharpening technique (which creates extreme sharpening)

wasn’t included in the book Well, it’s so good, it is covered twice :)

High Pass Sharpening

Step Three:

In the Layers panel, change the layer

blend mode of this layer from Normal to

Hard Light This removes the gray color

from the layer, but leaves the edges

accen-tuated, making the entire photo appear

much sharper (as seen here) If the

sharp-ening seems too intense, you can control

the amount of the effect by lowering the

layer’s Opacity in the Layers panel

Step Four:

If you want even more sharpening,

dupli-cate the High Pass layer to double-up the

sharpening If that’s too much, lower the

Opacity of the top layer One problem with

High Pass sharpening is that you might get

a glow along some edges (like the one along

the bottom of the plane in Step Three) The

trick to getting rid of that is to: (1) press

Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E) to merge the

two High Pass layers, (2) click the Add Layer

Mask button at the bottom of the panel,

(3) get the Brush tool (B), and with a small

soft-edged brush and your Foreground color

set to black, (4) paint right along the edge,

revealing the original, unsharpened edge

with no glow A before/after is below

Before

For more sharpening, duplicate the layer

Merge the two layers and add a layer mask

After

If you wind up doing all your edits from right within Camera Raw, and then

you save straight to a JPEG or TIFF right from Camera Raw, as well (skipping

the jump to Photoshop altogether), you’ll still want to sharpen your image for

how the image will be viewed (onscreen, in print, etc.) This is called “output

sharpening” (the sharpening you do in Camera Raw’s Detail panel is called

“input sharpening,” because it’s designed to replace the sharpening that would

have been done in your camera if you had shot in JPEG or TIFF mode)

Step One:

Before we do this output sharpening, it’s important to note that this sharpening only kicks in if you’re going to save your image from right here within Camera Raw

by clicking the Save Image button in the bottom-left corner of the Camera Raw window If you click the Open Image or Done button, the output sharpening is not applied Okay, now that you know, you find output sharpening by clicking on the line

of text (which looks like a Web link) below the Preview area (it’s circled here in red)

Step Two:

First, choose how you want this image sharpened from the Sharpen For pop-up menu near the bottom: For Screen is for images you’re going to post on the Web, email to a client, or present in a slide show

If the image is going to be printed, choose whether you’ll be printing to Glossy Paper

or Matte Paper Lastly, choose the amount

of sharpening you want from the Amount pop-up menu Camera Raw will do the math based on the image’s resolution, your paper choice, and amount choice (I never choose Low, by the way) to calculate the exact right amount of output sharpening

Note: When you click OK, sharpening stays

on from now on To turn it off, choose

None from the Sharpen For pop-up menu.

Output Sharpening

in Camera Raw

Photoshop Killer Tips

Content-Aware Fill Tips

If you selected an image and tried

Content-Aware Fill on it, but you’re

not happy with the results, try one of

these two tips: (1) Press Command-Z

(PC: Ctrl-Z) to Undo the Fill, then try

Content-Aware Fill again It’s somewhat

random in choosing the area it samples

to fill its area from, so simply trying it

again might do the trick (this works

more often than you might think) (2)

Try to expand your selection a little

bit Once you’ve put a selection around

what you want to remove, then go

under the Select menu, under Modify,

and choose Expand, and try expanding

your selection by 3 or 4 pixels, and try

Content-Aware Fill again It just might

do the trick

If One of Your Tools

Starts Acting Weird

chances are something has changed

in the options for that tool (up in the

Options Bar) that may not be obvious

by just looking at the Options Bar In

that case, you can reset the tool to its

factory defaults by Right-clicking directly

on the little down-facing arrow next

to the tool’s icon at the far left side of

the Options Bar, and a pop-up menu

will appear where you can choose to

reset your current tool, or all your tools

Merge to HDR Pro Can Make Killer B&W Images

I know that when you say “HDR” most folks picture those surreal, super-vibrant images that you see all over the Web, which is why you may not think of Merge

to HDR Pro as a choice for creating black-and-white images, but it actually does a pretty amazing job (and although most of the built-in presets that come with Merge to HDR Pro kinda stink, the Monochromatic (B&W) presets aren’t half bad Give this a try the next time you shoot a bracketed image

When You’re Making Selections Near the Edge of Your

Document

When you’re making a selection (with the Polygonal Lasso or regular Lasso tool), and you reach the edge

of your document window, you don’t have to release and start over—just press-and-hold the Spacebar, and your Lasso tool temporarily switches

to the Hand tool, so you can move over enough to complete your selec-tion, then release the Spacebar and

it switches you back to the Lasso tool, and (here’s what’s so cool) your selection-in-process has been frozen

in place, so now you can pick right

up where you were

Are You Using All Your RAM?

A lot of folks are wondering what all the fuss is about the whole 64-bit version of Photoshop Well, it’s all

Giving Your Raw Image to Someone Else (Along with Your Edits)

If you’ve edited a photo in Camera Raw, and you give the RAW file to a client, they won’t see the edits you’ve made to the file, unless: (a) you include the sepa-rate XMP file along with your RAW file (it should be found right beside the RAW file

in your image folder), or (2) you save the file in DNG format in the Format pop-up menu in Camera Raw’s Save Options dia-log (DNG is Adobe’s open-source format

for RAW images, and it embeds your edits in the DNG file)

Photoshop Killer Tips

about RAM Running Photoshop

in 32-bit mode means it you can

only access 4GB of RAM, no

mat-ter how many gigs of RAM you have

installed in your computer If you run

CS5 in 64-bit (which is new on the

Mac in CS5), you can literally assign

hundreds of gigs of RAM (which is

only necessary if you’re working on

really, really huge files, by the way, but

it’s nice to know it’s there) Anyway,

that’s the deal If you work with big

files and need to use more RAM to

keep those big files moving along,

then you need to make sure you’re

running 64-bit mode (on a Mac, click

on the Photoshop icon, then press

Command-I and turn off the Open

in 32-bit Mode checkbox)

Retouching Tip for Liquify

If you’re using the Liquify filter to do

some retouching on a portrait, you

can make sure you don’t accidentally

move an area you don’t want to affect

by freezing it, and there are freeze tools

in Liquify, but it’s easier to just put a selection around the area you want to adjust first, then bring up the Liquify filter, and any area outside your selected area is automatically frozen (You’ll see a rectangle with your selection in it in the Preview area, and the areas outside your selection will be masked in red.)

Bringing Back Picture Package

Back in Photoshop CS4, Adobe removed some plug-in features for Photoshop, like the Picture Package plug-in (for putting multiple photos on the same page, like two 4x6s and 8 wallet-size), and the Contact Sheet II plug-in, and they removed the Extract Filter, and

a few more If you miss these guys, you can bring them back, as Adobe has made then downloadable from their website Just go to www.adobe .com and, in the Search field, type in

“Optional Plug-ins for CS5,” and you’ll find them in two seconds

Keeping Your Camera Settings to Yourself

If you’re posting an image on the Web, or sending an image to a client, you might not want to have all your camera settings, and camera serial number, included in the image where anyone can view it (after all, does your client really need to know you shot this at f/5.6 at 800 ISO?) So, to keep your camera settings to yourself, just press

Command-A (PC: Ctrl-A) to select

your entire image, then copy it into

memory Now press Command-N (PC:

Ctrl-N) and Photoshop will automatically

create a new document that is the exact size, resolution, and color mode as the image you copied into memory Next, paste your image into this new blank

document Now press Command-E (PC:

Ctrl-E) to flatten the image, and you can

send this file anywhere without having your camera data in the file However,

I would go under the File menu and

choose File Info, then click on the

Description tab, and I’d enter my copy-right info in the Copycopy-right section

Photo by Scott Kelby Exposure: 1/125 sec | Focal Length: 24mm | Aperture Value: ƒ/6.3