Macho Makeover Part 3

Sharpening, Layer Inventory, Iris Jitter, Layer Style, Color Overlay, Group Layers, Layer Analyzation

Now the next thing that I want to do is add some sharpening and I usually save that for the last step. Sharpening is going to put contrast around the edges of things. We have already increased the contrast, and it looks a little sharper than it did at the beginning. Let us come down here and just zoom out on this. Let us come down here to the beginning and alter option, click on that visibility icon in the view column and then we turn it back on. So it does look a little bit sharper just because of the nature of some of these layers and the blending modes that we have added so far.

Now what we are going to do, highlight the very top layer, the gradient map, we are going to make what is called a Merged Composite Layer. And I am going to give you a series of shortcut keys to use. And you will get used to this, doing this finger aerobics. Then hold down your Shift, Ctrl Alt key, keep those pressed down and hit the letter E. so you have got three modifier keys and the letter E.

Now if you are in a Macintosh, you would hold down Shift, Command Option and the letter E. and it produces a layer at the top that it is a composite picture of everything, the combination of everything you see beneath it but it is still going to leave these in place. And so, this is just going to be our sharpening layer. So I am going to call it Sharpen. We have not done anything yet. I need to take inventory here and I am going to name this Gradient Map and this is for that Riviera gold and the selected color, this was for the lips, tone them down, and this one, I have got to turn this off. I am trying to determine what this was for. Let us investigate. Double click here. What did we do here? We did not do any settings in the master. I think this was the one where we targeted the reds, yes indeed.

So this is how I read the layers pallet and how you should learn how to do it too. Click on these things and you can tell what you did. But to save yourself time, if you name the layer, and we put here, desaturate reds. And okay, so we have marked our layers pallet here. Now turn that Sharpen Layer on which is just the composite. And what we are going to do, the steps to this, there is basically let us see, one, two, three steps to this, minimally.

The first step is to disaturate the layer. And we are not going to add an Adjustment Layer to do this. We are actually going to do it directly to the layer. So you can go under the Image Menu with that layer highlighted and go to adjustments, and come over here to the Hue Saturation Command. When this box opens up, just take that saturation slider, move it all the way to the left so that we are making a gray scale image. We could also have used the shortcut Shift Ctrl U on a PC, or Shift Command U on a Macintosh.

The second step is we are going to change the blending mode to one of the contrast blending modes. So, from normal, we are going to come down here. I am just going to start it off at overlay, and I may change this after we apply the sharpening. But basically, over light, soft light, hard light, vivid light, linear light, just about there, pin light and hard mix probably are not going to do it for you. But I am going to set it to overlay right now and it is going to going to get real dark. Now, I am going to go under the Filter Menu to the other command, and over to where it says High Pass. Now when the High Pass Filter Dialogue Box opens up, you can actually if you have set the blending mode first, you are going to be able to see the sharpening effects on your image and I would suggest zooming in at a 100% or 50% at least, this is a very high resonance image.

It is a 25% right now. I am just going to press Ctrl Plus a couple of times until I at least get to 50 and then my spacebar so I can move the position of these important areas. And I have got it at six pixels here and that looks good to me. I am going to check preview off and on. That does not really do much good in this case becau