Do you ever jack up the clarity of your photos,
but then you're not quite happy with the way
it makes your pores look or how it emphasizes
other dust and debris? If so, I've got a quick method
to show you in Photoshop that will allow you
to keep a lot of the detail of that clarity
without some of the unwanted effects.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
Capital day to you, everybody. I'm Gerald Undone
and let's jump right into Photoshop.
Okay, so I've got two examples for you today.
The first one is of skin. This is my face here
and I don't have the clarity set quite high
and as you can see, my pores are
really kind of standing out in this photo,
as well as some other weird skin stuff
going on up here, but I like the way that the clarity
made other parts of this image look,
so I don't want to get rid of it and there's a difference between
masking out the clarity, you know, when you first add it
and doing this effect because when you mask it out,
you don't get any of the impact on the colour
or on the way that the contrast is applied,
so this is going to allow you to keep most of that look,
but just get rid of some of the things you don't want.
So, let's start of by taking a layer over here
and going to "Filter" and choose "Convert for Smart Filters".
This is going to let us make adjustments afterwards
if we want. Then, we're going to go back into "Filter",
then choose "Noise" and "Dust & Scratches".
Now, I'm going to set these things to their lowest settings
so that I can show you how you kind of choose
how to set them. So, this is the image here
and what you're gonna do first is increase the radius
until you find that the stuff that you're trying to get rid of
is mostly gone. Don't worry about other aspects.
Don't worry about the sharpness of the eye or that hair
or anything. Only look at the spot that you don't like.
So, in this case, we're just looking at the pores
and we're just gonna increase it until the pore are mostly gone.
Then, we're gonna go over to threshold
and we're going to increase the threshold
until we get most of the detail back,
but without bringing those pores back as well.
So, let's just bring up the threshold slowly
and as you can see, now you're getting
some of that grain and detail back,
and we'll go up a little bit more.
Now, the pores are starting to come back there
around 32, so let's drop it back down a bit more.
And this, we'll do a strong version of this
so we can really demonstrate it, but let's put it down,
I don't know, let's say about 20.
So, that's pretty strong. So,that's with a 6 radius
and a 20 threshold. And now, all we have to do
is go over to this mask here that's part of the smart filter
and as you can see, you can turn the "Dust & Scratches"
on and off, but we can also go int mask and press "Ctrl"
or "Command+I", which will invert the mask so
that's not applied anywhere and bring up your brush tool
and set the flow to something like 25%
and we're just going to brush in.
Make sure you have a white brush selected.
You can press "D" to make it black and white,
and then press "X" to make sure the white one is up.
And then, we're just going to go in and flow over
the areas that we want to get rid of at 25%
and with the flow at 25%, you can go over it a couple times.
So, let's start with the pores here
and we're just gonna kinda blend those areas in
a little bit like that and maybe up here in the nose
a little bit with that skin.
Maybe get a little bit of this spot
and then over here. And you just apply it, you know,
to taste. Just look at it and do it.
You can change the brush size
and get some smaller details. Don't overdo it
but hit the areas you want and now,
we can zoom out a little bit and have a better idea
and if you turn the "Dust & Scratches" on and off now,
we can see basically all we did. So, that's off.
We just hit these areas with the pores,
and then back on, and you can see them go away.
And if you find that you did too much,
then the advantage of the smart filter
is that you can double click on "Dust & Scratches",
which brings it back up and we could increase
the threshold a little bit more if we wanted to...
you know, bring it back in a little bit and
make our changes not so...
not so extreme. So, let's set it to 24 this time.
Now, if we just turn the entire smart filter off,
that's what it was before and that's what it is now.
And so, this lets us keep the consistency of the clarity
across the entire image,
but get rid of some of the pore effects.
I mean, this is a great, easy solution to do it
and it beats trying to go over and trying to fix
all the small details
and speaking of fixing small details,
let's look at something else like dust and debris.
So, I have this photo here and, you know,
I like some of the aspects of this brushed aluminum,
but say I wanted to increase the clarity of this photo.
We're gonna see some unwanted stuff happen down here
where there's dust and some debris among the brushing.
So, let's go into "Filter" and we'll use
a "Camera Raw Filter" just so we can increase
the clarity here. Let's just jack it all the way up
so we can use it as a test. Press "OK".
So, now we can see what happened.
Every little piece of dust really pops now.
You can really see this band of debris on the bottom
of the transmitter here and my pants have all kinds of
little specs all over them and even the fabric of the pant
is pretty emphasized now, but maybe you like that part,
but maybe you don't like this dirty section over here.
It's going to be the same idea. "Filter", we're going to go
back into "Convert for Smart Filters" and then
"Filter" and then "Noise", "Dust & Scratches".
Now, this is using our previous settings,
so it's already pretty strong, but again,
you can go over it the same way.
So, we'll just increase the radius a little bit until...
so you can see those dust marks go away right away.
At one, they're there, at two, they're mostly gone
and at three, they're definitely gone.
And then, we'll increase the threshold
just to bring it back...
to where we'd find it mostly satisfying.
Again, we don't want to go too extreme,
so probably something like 24 and the same idea again.
Let's invert the mask so that it's not applying anywhere.
Bring up a brush, have it on white
and set the flow to about 25%.
And now, if we just go in here, we can brush
over these areas as many times as we want
to thicken it up and just remove some of that
unwanted emphasis and it works in small areas too
if we just hit these spots on the pants.
It's faster than going through and,
you know, clone stamping or...
using, like, a spot removal tool.
And, we can just hit these areas as well
and it doesn't completely delete any information
or replace information with other sections.
It keeps it honest. It's just subdued.
And again, you can always adjust
the "Dust & Scratch" filter afterwards
if you want to increase or decrease it.
So,before, it looked kind of dirty and its got all kinds
of junk all over it, and then after,
all the junk is gone. It looks a lot cleaner.
And then, when you zoom out a little bit,
say maybe you want to frame it up like this, off, on,
you're not distracted by this weird band
of junk down here.
So, that's pretty much it. It's really simple.
It's really easy to do. The whole point of this is that
that way you don't have to mask out your clarity completely
because I do find that it creates sort of an uneven look
with the contrast and the colours
because clarity heavily affects,
you know, the way that your image is saturated
and how light seems to be bouncing off of it.
So, this way, you get to keep a consistent look,
but remove some of the stuff that you don't want.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found this video
helpful or entertaining, and if you did,
make sure you leave it the old thumbs up,
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Alright... I'm done.