High Pass

Those of you who pay attention to this site may recall that, several months ago, I solicited your suggestions for future episodes of my weekly Deke's Techniques. Well, today's episode marks the first answer to such a suggestion, one posted by dekeOnline member henrymatt. Many more are to come. (Incidentally, I'm still very much interested in your wants, hopes, and desires on this topic. Please post any suggestions you may have to that same page. Don't be a lurker; feed my Frankenstein!)

In this week's video, I show you how to create synthetic wood grain, altogether from scratch, inside Photoshop. If you watch the video---which is is as entertaining as it is educational---you'll note that I never once mention dekeOnline member henrymatt. And that's because, miraculous as it may sound, I just so happened to answer his question before he asked it! So please don't take offense, dekeOnline member henrymatt. I cannot help that my many powers include reading your mind.

Here's the official description from my buddy Colleen at lynda.com: Read more » 

This week's movie says goodbye to the text effects and hello to photography techniques. Specifically, I show you a quick method for smoothing over skin details in a portrait shot. I start by inverting a layer of High Pass to "unsharpen" the image. (Credit Katrin Eismann for suggesting this trick to me in Martini Hour 059, "In Which We Attempt 20 Photoshop Tips in One Martini Hour.") For my tastes, that results in too much smoothing. So I set the High Pass layer inside an anti-edge mask of my own design. Read more » 

About a dozen years ago, I engaged in the only cosmetic surgery of my life (so far!), LASIK. It corrected my far vision. But now that my aging crystalline lens is as impliable as a piece of beef jerky, I require reading glasses. And there's not a thing Photoshop can do about it.

Photoshop is similarly incapable of correcting a photograph that was captured or digitized out of focus. Consider the following examples. In the first, the image is simulated to be out of focus using Photoshop's powerful (but not Top 40) Lens Blur filter. In the second, I slather on a heaping helping of the Smart Sharpen filter with little evidence of positive transformation, not to mention lots of clipped highlights and shadows.

Compare that to the same image as it was actually captured by Jason Stitt of the Fotolia image library. With accurate focus at its disposal, the Smart Sharpen filter is capable of rendering tactile detail, even with a tiny Radius value (the number after the slash below).

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