What if I told you that you can make your images sharper by blurring them?
Sounds crazy, right? But it's true!
In this tutorial, I'll show you a simple technique to enhance the details and contrast of your photos using 2 blur filters in Photoshop.
And you'll learn how to upscale your photos using AI, and enhance them even more with the HDR effect with a click.
Just keep watching to the end, to create your own PSD file that you can create once and use forever!
Let's start by creating a new document.
Set the document width to 3000px, Height to 2000px, with 8-Bit RGB Color Mode.
Then click Create.
Now, let's import our image. You can download these images for FREE from the video description below.
After importing your image, convert it to a smart object again to avoid any errors later on.
Rename this layer to "Before", so we can compare it with the final result.
Now press CTRL+J to duplicate it.
This is the layer we'll apply the effect on, so let's rename it to "HDR".
Then Change its blending mode to Vivid Light.
Add an Invert adjustment layer above it, and clip mask it to the "HDR" layer.
Using Invert with the vivid light blend mode will create this greyish result.
we're gonna select our layer and apply the "Surface Blur" filter from here.
By increasing both Radius and Threshold, the image details will start to pop up like that.
You can play with the sliders to control how much details you want.
And this is the result I'm looking for! Don't worry about these spots they will be fixed later.
Don't worry about these spots they will be fixed later.
Finally, let's duplicate the "Before" layer. and while selecting the duplicated layer, I'll head up to the Filter gallery.
Choose the Diffuse Glow filter from the Distort folder and set the values to 0, 4, and 19.
This will boost the highlights of our image, making them even brighter.
Highlights if you don't know, are the brightest areas in the image.
And this way; Highlights will become even more brighter.
So what we did right here: we made a grey map for the details, with darker shadows and brighter highlights, to achieve a High Dynamic Range within our image. which is also known as "HDR".
Now let's group our layers, and then change the group blending mode to "Overlay".
This will finally create this perfect HDR effect.
And here is the before & after.
We can add an extra layer of toning to make our image even more stunning.
Simply Let's take a duplicated layer using CTRL+J from the "Before" Layer. then drag it to the very top like that.
and from the filters menu, let's apply the second blur filter, which is "Gaussian Blur".
I'll simply set the radius to 30Px, and click OK.
Then I'll add a "Black & White" layer to desaturate my image.
Don't forget to clip mask it.
Also, add an "Invert" adjustment layer and clip mask it as well.
This invert layer will reverse the colors to their opposite, for example this white spot will be inverted to black after using invert.
Now let's hold the SHIFT Key then group the 3 layers.
Give a name to the group, and change its Blending Mode to "Overlay".
This will create an extra HDR tone to our effect.
We can adjust its intensity by lowering the group opacity like this.
I usually keep it below 50%.
And here is our final result!
Don't forget to save your project for any later use.
Just give it any name and click SAVE.
AND NOW LET'S MOVE ON TO THE NEXT STEP...
To apply this effect on any other image, just double-click on any smart object thumbnail to open it.
And once you're inside the smart object, import your new image there.
Press CTRL+S to save it, then get back to your main document.
And here we go! the effect is completely applied on a new image with a single press of a button!
In some rare scenarios due to image quality, You may see these halos in the resulted image.
And to fix it, you'll simply need to double-click the Surface Blur Filter of the HDR layer to open it.
And lower the Radius and Threshold values until it's gone. Then click OK.
Here is the before and after.
And here is a quick comparison between using the regular Sharpen Filter and our HDR Effect.
Now Let's have another quick example.
Just open the smart object by double-clicking its thumbnail.
Add your image inside it. And Press CTRL+S.
Go back to the main document and see how the effect is applied automatically.
You can adjust the HDR intensity by changing the Surface Blur Filter values as before.
You can also adjust the tone by changing the HDR Tone group opacity like this.
And here is the result!
What if you have a very low-quality image like this one?
This image is only 1300px by 900px, which is a very poor quality.
You might say that we should upscale it by just changing it's dimensions, or even by using adobe's neural filters.
It may sound an interesting idea! but after testing these methods versus some other free AI image upscalers.
I found that those new AI image upscalers are way better than what adobe can do.
So Let's try one of them.
We'll simply need to upload our low-quality image from here.
and set the scale to 3 or 4, then click submit.
you can find some AI free websites links in the video description below.
Now let's download the output image & open it with Photoshop.
AI Image Upscalers just increase the image quality by adding more pixels and filling in the missing information, producing very high-quality and detailed images.
As you can see, This image is now more than 5000px, with very high-quality details.
Now let's apply the HDR effect using our premium photoshop action.
I will run the action from here and wait a few seconds.
You can join us on Patreon and download this amazing HDR Effect action and all our YouTube project files.
After running the action, here is the final result!
In some images, You may find your highlights area is way too bright just like that.
To restore it, you'll simply need to disable the filter of the "Highlights" layer.
And to optimize the output image even more, I will also increase the HDR layer's Surface Bur values to make it sharper.
And Finally, I'll increase the Tone group opacity to make it more vivid.
Now let's drag the old low-quality image over here to compare between both of them.
I'll just resize it to see the difference.
Here is our old low-quality image
And here is the upscaled High Quality sharp image
Just Look and see how detailed and high quality our image is!
That's it for today!
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something new.
Don't forget to check out this tutorial next, where I'll show you how to vectorize your photos using Photoshop and export them to Illustrator.
It's a very cool technique that you don't want to miss!
Thanks for watching & See you soon!