Lessons
Lesson Info
Filter Gallery
Now let's do some creative effects to an image. If you look at this particular image, and I zoom up, you can see how painterly and textured it looks. Well I could use something like the oil paint filter, but if you saw with that filter, it looks more like brush strokes, this doesn't. This feels more like canvas or something else that has a bit of texture. Let me show you how it was created. In my Layers panel, you'll see that this is a smart object because it has that icon in the corner, and it has some smart filters applied, and down here it says Blur Gallery, or not Blur Gallery, that's what we used last, Filter Gallery. I'm gonna double click on the words Filter Gallery, and that's gonna bring this up. In the Filter Gallery is something you can choose from the Filter menu. When you do, this appears. And it's kind of a weird interface because it's the only filter that lets you build effects up as if you're using layers without actually bein' in the Layers panel, so it's kind of odd. ...
But, over here on the right side there are whole categories of filters, artistic, brush strokes, distort, sketch, stylize, and texture. And if you expand them, you get previews of what a lot of those effects will look like, if you applied it to a generic picture of a sailboat. But the previews are so small that it's not as useful as you might think. Then if you click on one of these, let's say this one called Underpainting, it's gonna apply it to your picture and just to the right of that, you're gonna get the settings for that particular filter, and you can experiment with them and see how it affects your picture. Well in here you can build up more than one of these filters, like stack one on top of the other, and that's what I've done to create this effect. To stack one on top of the other, you go to the lower right, and in the lower right you're gonna find a little plus sign, and that plus sign indicates that you're going to create a new filter on top of one that's already been applied. If I click that, watch the list up here. You see another one was added to the top, now we have two that are called Rough Pastels. Once I've done that to create a new one up here, I could choose which filter it is where I actually got to apply. And of course once I clicked on it, I would see the settings for it above, and I can dial 'em in. If I want to add even another one on top of that, I hit that plus sign again and I get another new entry in that list. And then I could go again in here and choose another one and slowly build up an effect. So I've already done that. I'm gonna choose undo a few times until it gets me back to my original, and I just want to show you how this particular effect was built up so you can see that these filters sometimes look basic, where you're kinda goin', "I wish this had a lot more to it," but if you build them up by applying more than one, then you can create a much more sophisticated effect. So I'm gonna zoom up on this so you can see the fine detail, and over here in the list on the right side, I'm going to turn off the eyeballs on everything so therefore you can see the original picture untouched. Then I'll turn on the bottom most choice, which would be the very first filter that I ended up applying. And when I turned that on, this was the end result. It was a filter called Sponge. And you can see the settings right above that were applied for the Sponge filter. You can choose a brush size, and how smooth the end result is, that type of thing. Well on top of that, I wanted to change the overall look of this, and there is a filter called Plastic Wrap which I find adds little highlights to an image. And so the next thing I did was apply the Plastic Wrap filter, and when I did, you can see these little additions of kinda whiteish accents that are in here. If I turn it off and back on again, you can get a sense for what Plastic Wrap is doing. And if you wanna see it more, you could bring up highlight strength and you see that actually shininess that it's adding. I just have that dialed down so it's more subtle. After that I applied another effect known as Poster Edges and that gave it a little more depth and shadowy feeling. On top of that I went for watercolor which broke it up further. And then finally I applied Rough Pastels which really gave it more of the texture of, I don't know if I'd say canvas, but something like a material that it might've been used on. And so I can end up building this up, and all I did was experiment with one of these filters to begin with, once I got it the way I wanted, I hit the plus sign at the bottom, and I tried a different filter, and I slowly built up the effect, and when I'm done, I can just click OK to apply it. Well what's nice, and let's see, I don't think I have an image lined up for this, but if I were to choose a different picture, open it, and then drag that picture over to that other file, I'm using the Move tool by the way to do so, this is a little lower res so it's smaller, but if I take that layer and I convert it to a Smart Object, then I could take this thing called Filter Gallery, and see if, oh I gotta click on Smart Filters. See if I can drag it up there, and if it won't let me, which it won't, darn it, I thought it would, what I could do instead, no there it is. It allowed me to drag it up there. I can apply it to a different layer so that, oh and I applied it three times because I option dragged it 'cause option dragging usually means to move a copy, and I was just impatient in that it took it a while to update because it was applying multiple filters and so in this case it ended up applying those filters three times to the image, and therefore it looks absurd. That was me bein' impatient thinking it should do things almost immediately. But now you can see the appearance has been applied here. So if you ever apply things with Smart Filters, and it's just a list sitting below a layer, know that you can go to a different layer, you just need to make sure that layer's been converted to a Smart Object, and you can drag the list of filters to that other layer to transfer them there. And if you hold the option key, which is Alt in Windows, when you do it, then it's going to move a copy. And with this image I noticed that there's a picture of a bus in here, and I find that there's not enough detail in that bus. Well that's when I would do the same thing I did to that red car where I duplicated the layer, I went back into the filter settings, and I fine tune them to get more detail to show up. And then I add a layer mask to that, and I paint it in so I can control where we get the additional detail. And if I did, I'd be able to get this same painterly look, but I could get more detail where the bus is. Not gonna do it here 'cause we did it with a previous image, but I just wanted to let you know that that could work.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Barbara
Great class. Clear instruction. (There is a typo, however, on the title of the last section where it should say combining, not combing.)