Have you ever seen those ugly blocky, pixelated artifacts that completely ruin your old JPEG images?
In this video, I'm going to teach you how to use a powerful Photoshop filter to
instantly remove compression artifacts from your JPEG images.
Hi, I'm Jesus Ramirez, from the Photoshop Training Channel.
This is going to be a fun and informational tutorial, so make sure that you stick around
til the very end so that you catch all the tips and tricks in this video.
If you're new to the channel, be sure to click on that subscribe button now so that you don't
miss any future Photoshop tutorials.
Okay, let's get right to it.
This is the image that I'm going to work with, it's a photo of Frida the cat.
Everybody say hi to Frida. I'm a really big cat person and you probably have noticed that
I use a lot of cats in my tutorials.
But anyway, if you want to follow along with this image, I'll place a link to it right
below in the description.
First, let me just explain the problem.
I'm going to press the Z key on the keyboard to select the zoom tool and I'm going to zoom
in so that you can see the artifacts that were created by the JPEG compression on this image.
I'm sure that you can see the blocks that create the pixelation on this image, this
is caused by saving a JPEG with low quality settings or by saving a JPEG over-and-over again;
Since every time you save a JPEG you compress it just a little more. I'm sure that you have
seen this before and if you want to fix this in Photoshop, let me show you what to do.
First, go into the background and make sure you unlock it and right-click and convert
it into a smart object. We're going to apply several filters and we want to have the ability
to edit them.
A smart object is a container that can hold one or more layers and it allows you to apply
adjustments, distortions, filters and transformations non-destructively, which means you can always
come back and edit them.
Go into Filter and go down into the noise option and select, Reduce Noise.
This will bring up this window, where Photoshop will immediately apply a blur to smooth out any noise.
And notice the preview box here, make sure that you enable it so that you can actually
see this happening on your actual image.
By the way, here's a quick keyboard shortcut that you may not know.
On any window that has the preview checkbox, if you press the P key on the keyboard you
will enable or disable that checkbox, so that's P for preview.
So use that keyboard shortcut and then you can see like a quick before and after as your
working on any window in Photoshop that has the preview checkbox.
You can then use the sliders found in this window to control how the algorithm blurs
the image to remove any noise.
First, you have the strength slider, this slider allows you to control the amount of
luminance noise reduction applied to the image channels.
I know that sounds confusing, but basically you're blurring the image on all the channels
at the same time.
If you are an advanced user and you want to use channels, you can use the Advanced Option
and from here, you can adjust the blur per channel basis.
So you're only blurring the red channel or only blurring the green channel, or only blurring
the blue channel and what type of strength and preserved detail amount you have.
But in this case we don't need to do all of that, we're just going to stick with the basic,
so we're only going to deal with all the channels at the same time.
So you can use this slider to control the amount of blurriness that happens with the
noise reduction.
Then you have the preserve Detail slider, which controls how much detail you keep, especially
in areas that have hair or textured objects.
In this case, we have fur, so you have to use this slider accordingly to see how it
affects the rest of the image.
Obviously, you can't bump it up too much because you'll actually make the pixelation stronger
and you can't come down too low because the image will be very blurry.
So you have to play around with the settings and see what gives you a good result in your
image. So in this image, maybe a setting of about 15 will work.
You could also zoom in on this window to see different parts of the image. So I'll zoom
in more and I can look at the image and see how these settings are affecting it.
Another very common problem with images that have been compressed too much is that colors
will tend to bleed, like you can see colors bleeding throughout the image.
And actually, you can't really see it now because it's already been reduced, but if
you look at the reduce color noise, I have a pretty high setting, but if I bring that
down to zero, you'll see that the noise comes back. You can see a lot of noise in these
areas. See that? So make sure that you adjust the reduce color noise accordingly to remove
that extra colored noise. See that, that's before and after. It just smooths out these
blotches of color.
Next we have a Sharpening slider to sharpen the detail. Let me zoom out a little bit so
that we can see how that works. If I increase it to 100%, you'll see that the image gets
much sharper but it creates other issues and of course if I reduce it to 0%, the image
might be a little too soft.
So again, adjust this slider accordingly so that you can get a good result on your image.
Notice that I'm not really giving you what percentages to use
because it just wouldn't be valuable to you.
The values depend on the image that you have. So,
you can use the values that I use as a starting point if you like,
but at the end you'll have to use whatever values work best for your image.
So this is going to be a very important checkbox, remove JPEG artifact. This will remove these
lines that you see here. The algorithm will try to determine what artifacts are created
by the JPEG compression.
So watch what happens as soon as I check this checkbox here.
See how it smoothed out all those lines?
So now we don't really see any of that JPEG compression, which is great and is exactly
what we want.
Next, I'm going to press OK to apply these adjustments and I'll pan over to this area.
In the Layers panel, you'll see the Smart Filters. If I click on this eye icon you'll
see the before and I'll click again so you can see the after. So as you can see, it's
a massive improvement.
I'll double click on a Hand tool to fit the image to screen and now I'm going to apply
another filter to further enhance this image.
I'm going to go into Filter > Camera Raw Filter. With the Camera Raw Filter, I can do so many
cool things to this photo.
For example, I can maybe make the shadows a little bit darker and increase the contrast
just to hide some of those imperfections.
I can also increase the texture to make the fur standout a little bit. And I can increase
clarity, which is contrast on edge pixels.
And the image is a little desaturated, so I can use either the Saturation slider or
the Vibrance slider to add saturation.
The difference is that Saturation just bumps up the saturation in all pixels equally, while
Vibrance only increases the saturation of pixels that don't have a lot of saturation
and it also protects skin tones.
So it's a great slider to use, especially in portraits.
In this case I can bump it up, I really want these colors to standout.
And I'm not getting the oranges that I really want behind the cat.
So what you can do in a situation like this is go into the HSL tab, which allows you to
control the hue, saturation and lightness of individual colors.
For example, with the oranges, you can slide this slider to control the luminance because
we're in the luminance tab.
Or you could switch over into the saturation tab and control the saturation of the oranges
which will make the orange behind the cat pop.
Next, I'm going to go into the detail tab and I'm going to increase the sharpening.
When I sharpen, I do an overall sharpen in the image and usually that's not the best
thing to do.
That's why we have the Masking slider. With the masking slider, Photoshop will find the
edges of the image and only apply the sharpening to those edges. But if I simply drag on the
slider, you really can't tell what's going on.
If you want a visual representation of what's going on, you can hold the Alt key on Windows,
that's the Option key on the Mac, and click.
Everything will turn white.
So you can think of this as a Layer Mask, white reveals, black conceals.
If I drag to the right, you'll notice that Photoshop will start finding edges and we
only get white on those edges, so that means that the effect will only be on the white
areas that you see.
So maybe we just want the effect on the cat, not so much on the background, so this might
be a good setting here and I can just release.
Before and after, a subtle effect but I think it works.
And finally, I'm going to zoom in just to show you one other thing.
We were blurring the background to try to remove the pixelation, so that means that
we have a lot of soft pixels.
So I'm going to go into the effects tab and just increase the grain just a little bit.
It helps the image regain some of that film quality. It doesn't look so computer-generated
because of the blur, so I think that adding grain always helps.
I'm going to press OK and these are my results.
Let me zoom in so that you can see.
I'm going to click on this eye icon to hide the Smart Filters. Before, notice all the
artifacts that are found in the image caused by the JPEG compression.
And here's the after, notice how they're all gone and you can't even see them. The image
looks much, much better.
So I hope that this technique helps you out with your old images.
Let me know down in the comments below if you're familiar with this technique and if
you have found some success with it.
And of course, if you're new to the Photoshop Training Channel,
then don't forget to click on that SUBSCRIBE and notification button so that you don't
miss any new tutorials.
Thank you so much for watching! I'll talk to you again in the next video.