Blend If.. Noise Reduction and Sharpening in Photoshop

hello like root is here with everyday HDR and HDR insider calm and yes you can hear the excitement in by a voice because I'm super excited that I started using these blend if things not too long ago in a tutorial and I've found some ways to use the blend if options to make your noise reduction and your sharpening no problem in Photoshop I'm talking this is really cool because it's kind of like a hybrid or constantly working organic layer that will change as your image changes for noise reduction and sharpening this is absolutely incredible there's actions here for you but let's take a look at this sharpening layer so here is the group for sharpening and look at how nicely it's sharpened just my mid-tones and it's protected my highlights and protected my shadows so we're going to talk about highlight and shadow protection for your sharpen layers and we're going to talk about mid-tone and highlight protection for noise reduction and there's an action here that does it all for you so I'm just going to jump right in this because you've got a lot to learn ok so a couple weeks ago I did a blend if tutorial where I opened up the layer styles and I showed a really detailed analysis on how to use the blend if options if you wanted to create a color graded image but as I've been playing with this more I found that you can use this same blending principle to really do two things much better noise reduction and sharpening so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ed and close this out for now and I'm going to duplicate this layer so I'm gonna press command or ctrl J to duplicate the layer and what I want to do is do some noise reduction because you can see here that I have quite a bit of noise in that background area it's not too bad but it's enough to be distracting but I don't want to reduce the noise in my mid-tones or in my highlights because there really isn't any noise in the highlights just in that shadow area and typically that's where we're going to see the most noise and how it kind of Fester's there so what I want to do is actually a really strong noise reduction in just the black portions of the photo so I'm gonna go to filter go to noise and I'm going to go to reduce noise so like I said I'm going to pick a pretty high strength here and if we look at the strength of this noise reduction it's really doing a good job of reducing that noise in those dark areas but at the same time still making it look like pixels now the thing about noise reduction is you don't want things to look smooth and blurred together you do want to have a sense of grain there because even in the old film days the image was comprised of well of several little dots of noise all right that was kind of a grain that would build up and create the image very similar to what we have in the digital world so if we go too high with that it's going to look like it's blended and smeared and it actually does look like it's blended and smeared in our mid-tone area so let's just reduce that just a little bit we'll bring that down to about 8 so it really just does our background area we don't really want much of the detail preserved in those black areas so we'll just leave that at about 15% and then color noise can stay about 36% that's fine and we'll press ok now when we do this it's going to be a global noise reduction which means it's applying itself to the entire photograph and that can be a problem just like we saw because if we look at our noise reduction efforts it's taken a lot of detail out of our leaf but it's also doing a great job of reducing the noise in this area here so what we need to do is go into the blend if options so I want to zoom in here so you can see how this works we're going to double click right next to that layer 0 copy there basically what this panel is doing is its allowing me to protect the underlying layer from this adjustment on the above layer and the way I'm going to do that is where it says right here underlying layer now typically I just want this to affect the shadows and not the highlights of the mid-tones so the mid-tones are actually in the 0 to 255 scale at 128 so I'm going to move this down to 128 and you're going to see that as I do that look at the leaf here it's actually starting to protect that leaf so as I move this down to 128 that's going to help protect all of the mid-tones all the way to 128 but when I do that it's going to have a hard edge so I wanna press alt or option and split this and move that down to about that's just 109 I'll work just about 20 pixels so what that's doing is it's protecting all of my highlights and my mid-tones up to about 128 and then splitting it at that 109 mark so that there's a nice feather between where the shadow noises moving into the progression of the 128 and I'll just go ahead and press ok so we see the before and after we still have noise reduction here but it's not affecting our leaf so our leaf still is going to have all of its detail in all of its glory and this is like a hybrid noise reduction layer now I know that it's going to be very difficult for you to remember that so what I did is in this action these are blend if actions you're going to see noise reduction darks only just go ahead and press play when you do that it's going to open up a new window after it opens up that new window it's going to run everything I just did with that noise reduction and then it's going to do the blend if options just like you see here it's at about 100 / 128 so that's okay and we'll move this we'll just drag and drop this by pressing and holding shift right onto our other layer so you can delete this one as design so that it'll open up in a new document and run it flattens your whole image and then it will run the noise reduction so you can bring it in onto your work if you were working or you can just do it right at the beginning get that noise reduction layer and just go ahead and press press on with whatever you're willing to do so now let's go ahead and take a look at how we can do this same principle for sharpening so the images you're looking at in front of you has a lot of highlight a lot of shadow and a lot of mid-tone and the only thing I want to sharpen are the mid-tones and the reason why is because if we sharpen the darks we end up sharpening shadow noise which ends up looking really bad and sometimes in the highlights we can get these really nasty sharpened specular highlights that just look bad also so how do we do this using the blend if options well the first thing I'm going to do is commander ctrl J to duplicate that background layer I'm also going to go to filter go to sharpen and go to unsharp mask so with my unsharp mask I'm going to make that about a 100 and let's to about 124 percent 125 percent and at about 1.2 pixels press okay with this I'm going to go ahead and go to filter go to other and go to high-pass and actually high-pass the unsharp masking it makes a really nice sharpen layer that really brings out all the sharpening especially when we use these blend of options so we'll press okay now if you see here with that high-pass we've got some color if we press command or control shift you that will desaturate it so we don't get any color cast on our high-pass sharpen layer and we can go to the blending options and change this to soft light so now if you look we have just added that sharpening to all of our highlights and all of our shadows and like I said before look at these highlights the highlights get these really defined edges on them and then let's look at some shadow areas the shadow noise really gets amplified in there too so let's go ahead and zoom out a little bit and we're going to do is just double click right here on that layer one which is going to be our sharpened layer and here you're going to see the exact same thing our blend if options and what do I want to protect well this time I want to protect all of my shadows and all of my highlights and leave the mid-tones alone so how do we do that well this is how we do it we're going to go right down here and see zero is black so everything right now in black and nothing is really being protected right now but as we move this over that's telling us that we're going to be protecting everything up to about pixel point and 76 or so that'll work and then we'll split that and move that up to about a hundred so that we get that nice kind of blurred edge instead of those hard edge look and then we'll go ahead and bring the highlights over so we're protecting the highlights up to about I don't know 188 that works and then split that until about 160 so it looks right here from 76 to 168 all of that is protected and 128 being right in the middle as your mid-tones we've got a nice clean spread of what's being protected there so we'll go ahead and press ok so now if we move in and zoom in here real quick and go back to what we had before that's how nasty sharpened it was before but look how clean this sharpening is now another thing that you can do to a sharpen layer is you can add a curves adjustment layer to it so I'll put a curves adjustment layer here press alt or option and this is basically like a sharpening intensity layer okay because what it's doing is its allowing us to modify the the lights and darks that are present right here on that sharpen layer that hype a sharpened layer so let's go ahead and turn that curves adjustment layer on the one thing you want to do here is put a point right in the middle and that will help protect our mid-tones because the way this works is it if we were to make any adjustments that's way move this up in the mid-tones here and then let's look at our high pass sharp sharpen layer there you see how the whole image gets lighter as we adjust our mid-tones the thing about a soft light blend mode is that soft light allows everything that's 50% gray to remain untouched and then heighten anything that's below 128 pixels or above 128 pixels or above 50% gray or below 50% gray so what it does it makes your lights lighter your darks darker but it protects them so that your lights never get white and your darks never get black so it's a really interesting blending option there so when we add this curves adjustment layer on there if by chance our mid-tones change then we've just changed in everything that we did with our sharpening layer so what you can do is you can actually modify the dark areas and you can say okay do I want those darker areas to have more or less if it looks like it's turning 50% gray it's going to be less sharpening in those areas if it looks like it's going to be more than 50% grays and be more sharpening in those areas and we can see that by moving this up and down you see how the intensity of our sharpening gets a little bit darker as we move that down it actually starts to bring out some of the shadows a little bit better as we bring that out so I usually call this an intensity layer and then the highlights you can bring those up to make them lighter or bring them down to make them kind of fade away a little bit and that's going to be your intensity of your sharpness layer so let's go ahead and zoom out real quick and let's just take a smaller zoom in portion here so we can see exactly what we did here we add that High Pass sharpen it did it globally but then we dodged the certain areas using the blend if options and then we added an intensity layer on there just in really kind of fine tune and again you're probably not going to remember this and there's nothing wrong with that so what I did was I made a sharpening mids only again when you press play it's going to recreate a new document it's going to do all the sharpening settings that we just did and then it's going to leave you with this it's going to say adjust the intensity curve so it's going to leave you want to leave a point at the midpoint just like we showed before and then adjust your black and white points independently so you can achieve the desired sharpness press Continue so your sharpening layer is already done and accomplished for you now you just have to change that intensity if by chance you get done doing your intensity it's still too much if let's zoom in a little bit if you go right here to this group it's now put into a group that's the action does you can drop the opacity on that sharpening layer now you can move that right on top of what you're doing before make sure you press and hold shift as you move that group on top of your other work and you're free to go the beauty of your sharpening layer being on a high pass that has the blending options set is that if anything changes underneath that group so if I were to add another curves adjustment layer and make things darker make things lighter it's going to hybrid lis protect that stuff so it's constantly working it's not like we made a mask for it and the mask changes when our highlights and shadows change this is a brilliant way to use the blend if options for noise reduction and sharpening so you can download that action at everyday HDR there's a link if you're on YouTube it will take you to everyday HDR so you can download that action and you can come back and refer to this whenever you'd like and follow along again my name is blake crudest with everyday HDR an HDR insider and this was how to use those blend if options to really kind of punch up your your sharpening but protect your highlights and your shadows and then how to use the noise reduction so that you're only reducing the noise on the shadows and not on your mid-tones or your highlights if you liked this please comment share I'm sure that there's somebody else that needs to know this information so go ahead and spread the word I'm sure they'll thank you for it thank you very much for stopping by you

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 71,200

Keywords: Blend if in Photoshop, Noise Reduction, Blake Rudis, Sharpening, Organic Sharpening, Organic Noise Reduction

Id: E0PqWW-exIg

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 12 2015