G'day, I'm Melissa Shanhun, Founder of Digital Scrapbooking
HQ.com and today I'm here with you in Photoshop. Elements 2021
for the ABC's of PSE. Today's Letter of the day is the letter
R for the Blur tool in Photoshop elements. So here we
are with the photo of me. This is completely straight out of
the camera, UN retouched and I'm going to show you how you
can use the Blur Sharpen and Smudge tools to do a little bit
of retouching of this photo. I've got a couple of resin.
About the amount of shininess on my face, I know that the
dewy look is in, but if you're like me and you're a bit of a
oily girl, you don't always love the shine on the cheek,
the chins and the nose. so let's fix that using our Blur
Blur tool now with our Blur tool, we can increase the size
of the brush by using our keyboard shortcuts of open
bracket or close brackets. The square brackets on the keyboard
or we can use this slider. We can, of course change the brush
up. Talk all about brushes in our ABC's of PSE B video so you
can go back and watch that here and then I can just paint over
or it's kind of scribble over anything. that's bothering me
like the really shiny parts. It doesn't totally get rid of that
highlight, but it does Blur it out. Same with some
imperfections. When you've got freckles and moles and pimples
you've got to decide. Which ones are beauty spots and which
ones are less so so I'm just going to blur out some of those
spots. Now. If I zoom in, I'm going to show you how I would
use the Sharpen tool. I'm going to use that on my eyes. I'm
going to get about the size a bit larger than my eye here and
you can see the strength is only at 50%, so I can go over a
couple of times increasing the sharpness of my eyes that
gives. A lovely look if I just revert the image, let's have a
look. here's before we sharpened and here's after
pretty great results. you can see that we look a lot more
sparkly now. if you want to we can add a new layer and then we
can click on the sample all layers and we can actually do
our retouching on a separate layer so that it's less
destructive. So when you use these tools, the original layer
will be changed unless you spend. Specifically create a
new layer for it and same with the Blur tool we can you know
Blur out here sample all layers and we can blur out anything.
We want blurred on my face here, which is mostly just the
shiny marks and a couple of spots and then finally we have
our Smudge tool. Now I wouldn't usually use a smudge tool on
our face, but we do have some interesting artwork in the
background here. This particular brown drip isn't my
favorite so what I can. Do with the Smudge tool again, I can
change the size. Click sample all layers again. We can just
you know push this one away Smudge it up a bit. of course,
you know, probably the easiest thing to do would be to just
pick a background color and you know paint over it with our
brush, but we are showing you how to use the smudge tool here
you can use the smudge tool to you know, add some more
artistic drips to this background. If we'd like you
know, maybe we decided that no they needed more drips in their
artwork. That's how we can use our Smudge tool here. so now
you can. The before and the after we have added, we have
retouched my face and we've changed the background paint
quite a bit too much. If you see what we've done to the
blanket here, but hopefully that gives you an introduction
to how you can use the Blur Sharpen and Smudge tools in
Photoshop elements. If you've learned something new, give me
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