How to Edit a Photo with Smart Filters - Photoshop

Hi and welcome to another session of the Mindful Eye digital darkroom. I’m Patti Schulze and in this tutorial I will walk you through editing a photo, converting it to black and white using the third party plug in then creating the Smart Filter to stylize the photo. Warning, if you’re spurious and don’t feel that modifying an image is the right thing to do, stop watching now. I’m taking you on a journey that drastically changes the photograph. Okay, you’re still there and then let’s begin.

Many of you have been or obtain images of the Slot Canyons. In fact it maybe one of the most photograph regions in the United States. I love the place. I love the lines, the color and the texture of the Slot Canyon walls but since there so many images, I hate to even show my images. In fact you’ve probably have this exact same image if you’ve been there before. But I wanted to do a tutorial on using Smart Filters and while going to my images, I look at the images of the Slot Canyons and started playing with this one. In light room, I made some minor adjustments then decided to convert the image to black and white. I could have use the adjustments in light room but I’m going to use the silver effects pro plug in from Nick’s software.

Now disclaimer, I don’t work for Nick’s software. I don’t get to kickback. I just happen to think their plug in is pretty good but before I do that, first, I'm just going to convert this image to eight Bit mode. Now, it took a couple of reasons I’m doing that. First, it’s going to make the process go a little faster on the tutorial but more importantly of something I’m going to do later on is to add a filter to this image and that filter is going to require that I am in eight Bit mode.

Alright, now I’m going to open up the next software Silver Efex Pro plug in inside of Photoshop, it takes a little bit to launch and now you’re going to see that there are couple of already preset options that I can choose for these images and I’ve got one I’ve already kind of made my own little preset for that and it’s got a little soft blue tone to it. And I’m going to use that. I could’ve played with some of the controls here with brightness and contrast and structure.

One of the things I really like about this plug in is the structure ability and it really gives a nice punch to the black and white images. Alright, I’ll just say that that’s what I want. Click okay and let it process that. It could take a few minutes to get that going.

The next thing I’m going to do is, I like this image but it’s a little bit too vertical for me. I’d like to stretch it out a little bit. I don’t know that I would do this normally but I just want to show you a little trick. I’m using the crop tools. I’m going to select the crop tool from the tool bar and just select the image and then I’m going to pull it slightly out to the right side. When I hit the return key, what that’s going to do is increase the canvas size. I could go to the image menu and select increase canvas size but this way I can kind of do it visually.

The next thing, I’m going to select the marquee tool. This is where I’m really going to start distorting this image a little bit and I’m just going to select a slight portion of the right hand side. Now edit Content-Aware Scaling. If you haven’t played with this option in Photoshop CS4, I suggest that you at least try this with one of your images. It does a really good job of figuring out what you want to scale without trying to distort it too much.

So once I have that selected, I’m just going to pull it over to the right and say okay and it does a pretty good job of a scale in it for me. Now, I want to deselect that so just do select deselect and let me just kind of zoom in a little bit for you. And because there is so much texture already on the walls that’s where I scaled right about there, you don’t really see that it’s done anything that could be exactly how it was shot.

Alright, the next thing I want to do is to add a filter to this. So I’m going to go to the layer menu and I’m going to convert this top layer to a smart object. Go to layer, smart objects, convert to smart object and you can see over in the panel that the layer adds up a little extra icon to tell you that it is in fact the smart object.

Now again, here I’m warning, I’m going to really distort this a little bit. So now that it is a smart object, I’m going to add a filter and because I know that these filters required that you’re on eight Bit mode I’ve already done that. If you ever come to these filters and they’re all great out that’s because you’re not in eight bit mode, you’re still on 16 Bit mode. This one, I’m going to select poster images.

Now I would tell you I’ve tried some of these images or these filters on many of my images before in the past especially when you first get Photoshop. I’ve never liked them. I’ve never used them. So I’m really surprise and even attempted to try this but when I did this on the Slot Canyons for this poster image and I know it’s kind of hard to see, we don’t have much room here. I was so surprised at how much extra texture it added to the canyon walls.

Now once I have these poster images, I can make any adjustments. The posterizations kind of the key thing that I want to change, you can see if I have it all the way to the left. Its just really posterizes it but if I just push it all of the way to the right, that’s what gives me that nice little texture there.

Alright, once I click OK, this is really what I wanted to show you is now when you add a filter to your smart object, you felt a lot more control here. You can see that my poster edges are added here. If I double click that because it’s a smart object I can come back and add or change any of the options for that particular filter. I really don’t so I’ll just click OK.

The other thing is the icon here on the far right, if you double click that, now what it gives you the ability to do is change the blending mode and let’s say for example I’ll change it to soft light and I can change the opacity and because it’s kind of a built-in to that smart object and you can make changes at anytime you wan. It won’t affect the actual image itself.

The other advantage to use a smart objects or smart filters in this case is that you can also edit the image. For example, if I saw dust pan or something on the image I can easily just edit that image just by double-clicking on the smart object itself. Now the message is going to come up to say “okay once you do this, you need to make sure you side it” and it opens up the image into a new tab.

Let’s say for example I just want to get rid of that little back right up there. I’ll just use the spot healing tool and just click that a couple of spots there that actually is part of the wall but once I’ve made any changes there now, this is actually changing the image. If I had wanted to do this outside where it didn’t change image, I have to do it a different way. This actually is changing image when I press Save. That’s locking that change back in and then in CS4 because of the way it works it opens up two different tabs. Close that second tab which is the actual image itself and now it returns back to a smart object.

Well that’s it for using smart filters and smart objects. I hope you enjoyed this and we’ll see you next time, thanks.