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Over here we have some very interesting tools called the blur, the sharpen and the smudge tool. Let's start off with the blur tool. Now, the way the blur tool works is it will soften an area by averaging pixels. So what happens is we'll take a dark blue and a light blue and kind of average that out to give you a little blurring. So I'm going to zoom in on this person's face and I'm going to use this tool and I'm going to increase the size of the brush. As you see here, I have a 45-pixel brush and I'm going to leave the strength at 50 percent so it's not going to be too powerful and I'm simply going to move my mouse a couple of times and as you see, it look at those pixels and averages them out and it slowly but surely blurs them. So slowly but surely, you can get rid of a lot of a lot of the quality of the detail in the image. You can do all kinds of special effects. For example, maybe a ghost or somebody in fog or that kind of thing. Or somebody who's an angel and you could really blur that effect out so you can see what it is but you can't tell completely. Now, the exact opposite of that is pretty much the sharpen tool, which I don't recommend too much because it can go a little too far, which I'm going to demonstrate to you. Now, sharpen works in the exact opposite way. Instead of blurring and averaging, what it does is it increases the contrast of the adjacent pixels. So I'm going to move over to this gentleman here and I'm going to use the sharpen tool and it, if you go a little bit at a time, you can already see we have some damage going on here. So what it tries to do is it gets rid of the blurry effect and tries to give you a little bit more focus. As you see, I did here on this little highlight. Watch this. See this? It's a little blurry. I'm going to make one pass and as I go again, it makes the highlight a little bit more clear. But, if I go too far, look what happens. So if you can, avoid it. Don't use this tool too much. Let me revert and go away from that tool. And go to something that's a little bit more fun. Wait for that revert to go through. Another tool that's really fun to use, by the way, is the smudge tool. So what happens with the smudge tool is Photoshop will pretty much look at the area that you clicked in and then take those pixels and move them around and smudge them. So it's like putting your finger in wet paint or wet anything and moving it around and getting that effect. So I'm going to click and drag my mouse and as you can see, I can smudge those pixels. So you can do all kinds of cool stuff like that. You can get some crazy hair effects going so you can make somebody's hair look like they're on fire. Let me zoom out a little bit. And what you can also do is, you know, just push those pixels out. Give somebody, like, horns or whatever you want to do. And all kind of very interesting effects. Uh, be careful though, because the smudge tool takes a little bit of processing power, so if you go crazy and you just leave your mouse and you just spin it around and around and around and around, expect to wait a little while for the computer to figure out exactly where those pixels are going to wind up. So once again, the, the blur tool allows you to soften, uh, an area. The, uh, sharpen tool will increase the contrast, but I think it goes way too far. And the smudge tool is for fun, when you want to take an image and just move things around. It's like a mini liquefy. It's like the filter menu and liquefy. It's like a mini version of that, where you can take the pixels and based on the size of your brush, uh, control exactly what you're doing with the image. So you can do all kinds of really, really interesting effects.
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS3 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 33782 |
| ISBN: | 1-933736-98-4 |
| Release Date: | 2007-08-02 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 161 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |