Effects Section Pro Panel

hey guys in this video i want to go over the effects section of the panel so we basically have our astrophotography effects at the top color effects in the middle and then user actions here at the bottom and then we have our blue buttons that appear on every page except for finish because these are frequently used tools here so let's start with the astrophotography so at the top you're going to see a stack for noise reduction so this is what you would use to stack your foreground shots for noise reduction so basically all you need to do is select all your layers and then click stack noise reduce and it's going to do its thing and basically figure out what's noise and eliminate it from the combination of all the different layers now alternatively if you're doing this for the sky you're going to need to use the align and stack method so this time you would select all of your photos and you click align in stack and it's going to ask you to crop out the foreground because this will help with making sure that it's aligning the stars otherwise you're going to wind up with some alignment from the foreground as well so basically you just crop the foreground out like so and make sure that you have delete crop pixels checked or else this is going to not crop out the foreground actually and just click check and then it's going to do its thing and combine all the different layers align them and do the noise reduction for you so i did just cut out that whole process because it does take a few minutes guys so be patient especially depending on the speed of your computer but basically it's gonna combine the photos reduce the noise and then put them on a new layer and if you zoom in i'm not sure if you're gonna be able to see this on the computer but you can see now that we have a very very clean milky way photo because this combined multiple milky way shots and then did the noise reduction so this is a great opportunity to show you another action on the panel and that's going to be sharp stars so sharpen stars actually will sharpen the highlights but not the shadows so this is really nice to bring back a little bit more detail to the sky now without actually affecting the shadows and increasing the noise so if we click ok this is going to sharpen the stars if i turn that off and on you can see a slight sharpness increase in the stars but no increase in noise all right moving on we have the reduced light pollution filter so the way this works is once you click the button it's going to make this reduced light pollution group here with an inverted mask and then you're just going to paint this effect in with a white brush on this black mask so depending on the strength you want to apply it maybe we'll just do this at 70 opacity and you're going to be able to see that we just effectively removed this light pollution by just painting it in here and you're going to want to be careful to not paint over the core itself because you might take out some of the colors that are in the core this is mostly just for artificial light kind of on the horizon all right moving on we have a day to night filter so this is kind of a touchy subject obviously but this is going to help with composites if you're into that kind of thing this will help sell a daytime photo to look more like a nighttime photo for instance if you're dropping milky way in so you simply just click the button there and it's going to make your group here with the day to night so it's going to change the look and the tones in the image and then additionally we have a aurora filter if you hold down shift you're going to see aurora filter here over the aurora pop and basically that's going to tone an image to add aurora to if you would like so this works best on blue hour shots but pro tip you can actually just stack it right on top of the day-to-night filter and it will combine the two effects and you wind up with a blue hour tone photo and then some aurora tones in that as well so really cool feature in adobe photoshop 2021 they have the sky replacement filter now so if you wanted to you could essentially just stamp these together here or further make some adjustments and then go up to edit and then sky replacement and choose your sky so i already have this aurora shot pre-loaded here and basically it's going to throw the aurora in and because we just toned this photo to look like a night image and an aurora image this blends perfectly moving on to some more of the milky way focused actions here we have a really popular feature amongst astrophotographers and this is reduced stars so when you click reduce stars it's essentially going to reduce some of the brightest stars and it's going to make the emphasis more on the core or the galaxy or whatever you're photographing so you can run it once or a couple times to get your desired effect and if i turn that off and on you can see the difference already let's just run it one more time for good measure and i should mention this is a tracked shot at 20 millimeters so i really like to use this effect on track shots because the core is so pronounced so if i turn off every layer except for the original you can see the effect from two rounds of the star reduction so really cool if you just want to take away some of those brightest stars if you're if they're kind of distracting towards other elements in your astro shots and one thing to note is it does put it on a brand new layer so if you want to continue working you're just going to have to stamp up um you can also reduce the effect of course by just changing the opacity so let's stamp this up and then i'm going to show you some enhanced milky way core options so if we just click it on the regular way it's going to do enhanced milky way core if you do shift and click it's going to add core contrast so enhanced milky way looks like this so if i turn this off and on you can see that it's added some contrast and some color and if you want to you can even expand this and then adjust the different parameters individually the warm effect is from this color look up here so you could always turn that off if you wanted to or you could even go to your properties and then change which lut it is so maybe you want to do a cooler effect you could do winter or something else you could play around with this and you can also adjust the overall opacity of the group just by changing this as well to turn that off and on so i'm just going to delete this so i can show you the core contrast feature so hold down shift and then click core contrast and you'll wind up with the core contrast action here so it's going to ask you the strength that you want by default set 45 for the unsharp mask so just click ok and this is the effect from the core contrast now so you can see it's very strong effect you can also dial the opacity back of this group as well or if you expand the group then you'll see the brightness and contrast layers separate so you can take away the brightness if you want or reduce it you can take away the contrast if you want or reduce that separately as well so that's really handy alright so another handy feature is this star glow here so i approach this a little bit differently but basically it's going to create a solid color layer set to white so this is going to be if you want to paint in white stars so you just select your brush and then you're going to paint with white on this inverted layer mask to basically add the star glow so the way that i do this is i zoom in and i make my brushes big as a star and i don't want to set this to 100 opacity 100 flow so maybe i'll just do like 50 each and essentially i'm just going to start painting small and i'm going to use my bracket keys the right bracket to make the brush bigger as i go so i'll click and then hit the bracket click hit the bracket click and continue to do this as i'm expanding the bracket and maybe i'll skip a couple to make it even bigger and if i zoom back out now you can see if i turn that off and on we just added some star glow so if you want to add glow for instance to a colored star this is really cool then you can simply just create a new star glow layer and this is really cool you're just going to double click on this color layer and you can sample in the image and sample the star that you want to paint the color over or the star glow and then select your layer mask again and we're using the white brush on the black mask and we'll do it the same way we'll just start as big as the star itself and then just slowly expand and now you can see that we're painting the star glow in with color instead of white so this is handy if you're working with a star shot with a lot of different color stars so like this one's orange here so i would make a new star glow layer for this color and you can repeat the process on every star that's this color and then just double click select the star color here click ok and then repeat the process select the layer mask and just click and expand so if i turn those off and turn them back on you can see we add some really nice star glow so next up we have aurora pop so this is going to be the standard click of the button without holding shift and basically this is just going to add a little bit of pop to your aurora so this can be a little bit strong too sometimes as well so you can adjust the opacity of the group if you need to tone it back and then lastly we have star trails so if you have your layers open for star trails for example this is about 20 shots and as i turn on every individual layer you can see all my different star trail layers here so you basically just need to open up your layers as a stack so you can either do that from tools and then open stack or you can open them as layers from lightroom and then all you do is click star trails and it's going to select the layers do the blending for you and then stamp the visible layers on top of your bottom layer which is going to be your foreground shop and you wind up with your perfect star trails here and of course i have some planes so i need to edit those out and then lastly we have the fake trails action so if you hold down shift you'll see fake trails so basically you can open up a sky layer a single sky shot and you can create star trails from just one shot so the way this works is first off we need to have our rulers visible because we need to make some guides so if you don't have your ruler visible you can go to view and then rulers or it's just command or control r and then you just need to make your intersection with the guides so we'll just drag these lines over here like so and we are setting the intersection for the rotation so this is going to look like star trails are rotating around this star here and one thing to note you do need to turn off the lock layer here so that it's going to be able to run the action and you'll just hold down shift over star trails and click fake trails and enter the number of times you want the action to repeat so we'll do a hundred times because it's going to make some really nice full star trails here and we'll click ok and i skip forward in this step so that you could see the end result here because it will take a couple minutes to complete so if i hit command h or control h we can hide those rulers here and then you can see that we've created star trails essentially just from one sky image so the higher the number that you put in that box for the value the more pronounced the star trails will be or more complete so 100 times gave us this result here but if you wanted to enter it in even more to get fuller star trails you could do so alright so next up we have color effects so under the color effects section here we have saturate and desaturate drop down so this is really handy if you want to desaturate a specific color or saturate a specific color or saturate or desaturate all so for example if i desaturate blue you're going to see we just removed blue from the image here and if it's too strong you can also just dial back the opacity of the layer as well so if we wanted to saturate the blues for example then i would just go to saturate and then click blues and you can see this is extreme because the blues are already kind of saturated so not the effect i want but let's say that i want to saturate the reds and then also the yellows just to increase the tones in the sky a little bit you can see that now it's a little bit warmer and looks a little bit better so next up we have selective color so this is going to be an adjustment layer here where you can make adjustments to your colors then we also have color balance layer and then also photo filter so by default this will give you a warming filter but if you hold down shift it's going to give you a cooling filter then we also have hue and saturation so typical human saturation adjustment and if you hold down shift this will actually colorize which is kind of a cool effect where you can colorize the entire image based off of the hue we also have something called gradient map so this is really handy i use this a lot in my editing and basically if you if you sample some colors in the image maybe two of the prominent colors and then you make a gradient map here it's gonna make this gradient map and set it to soft light and this is really cool for color grading usually it's pretty strong by default at 100 so you want to dial this back but it really does help kind of tie the colors in the image together in harmony and for reduced cast i'll show you this actually on this milky way shot here because it's really designed for astro and mine so it'll bring up a curves layer here you're just going to select somewhere neutral somewhere in the sky and it's going to correct a color cast for you so if we were to do that for instance on this milky way image it would probably take some of the blue out and make it more natural and finally in the last section we have user actions so if you have your own actions that you've created and that are part of your typical workflow i have some great news for you you can actually add them as buttons here under user actions so to do that all you're going to do is hold down option or alt and then click on the button and this will pop up here with your actions list with a drop down so you can select which folder of actions you want to select from then you can go to the second drop down and then pick your action and then just click assign primary action and it will assign that action to the button and rename it so one cool thing is that you can actually assign two actions to every button and to do so you just hold down option or alt to open up this assign action again and then select your second action and then instead of just doing a regular click on this button here you're going to do a shift click so shift click is going to assign the secondary action and now your button is going to have this action here so when you click it it's going to apply it and your shift click is going to apply this secondary action and those two actions were not intended for this type of photo but you get the idea so this is handy if you have your own actions and you can basically assign up to 10 actions with these buttons using the primary and secondary function hope you guys found that helpful let me know if you have any questions at all for any of those processes

Channel: John Weatherby

Views: 4,857

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Id: Z2o_6R0tc80

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021