From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

689 Sharpening your very soft molecules

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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689 Sharpening your very soft molecules

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- [Deke] In this movie, we're going to take those soft molecules that we created in the previous movie, and we're going to sharpen them up to create these more deeply carved transitions so that each molecule is more clearly defined from its neighbor. Alright, so I'll go ahead and switch over to my image so far, and I'll double-click on the background item down here at the bottom of the Layers panel to bring up the New Layer dialog box. And I'll call this guy molecules, as you might expect, and I'll click OK. Now we're going to be sharpening our molecules using a dynamic smart filter. And so armed with Rectangular Marquee Tool, go ahead and right-click inside the image window and choose Convert to Smart Object. Then you want to go up to the Filter menu, choose Sharpen, and choose Unsharp Mask. You can go with Smart Sharpen, but it's going to take longer, and it's not really going to do you any additional good. And so Unsharp Mask is the way to go. Now, we're working with very soft transitions, and so I'm going to crank the Amount value all the way up to its maximum of 500%, and notice even then we're really not making much of a difference. If I turn off the Preview checkbox, this is before, and this is after. So looks pretty much the same, which is why I'm going to crank the Radius value not up to 10 pixels, which is definitely going to give us some more sharply defined edges, but I'm going to take this value all the way up to 20 pixels like so. Now, one of the by-products of these very high values right here is that we're getting some weird edges inside the gradient. So notice how I'm tracing around each and every step. Now, I could get rid of that effect by increasing the Threshold value. So notice if I take it up to 10, we lose a lot of that sharpening, but we're still getting the effect right there in the center. And then if I take it up to 20, we end up with a pretty smooth-looking gradient. And by the way, in case you're wondering what this thing does, it goes ahead and removes certain neighboring pixels from the sharpening equation. So what we're seeing here is unless two neighboring pixels are more than 20 luminance levels different from each other, they're not going to get sharpened. Problem is, if I were to zoom out, you can see that that has a derisive effect on our edges. And so notice if I were to take this Threshold value back down to zero, we end up with thicker edges like so. And the thickness of these edges is determined by this Radius value. So if I wanted thicker edges, I would increase the Radius value. If I wanted thinner edges, I would take that value down, perhaps not as low as two pixels but something like 5.6. You can see that we do have some lines between the molecules. I want them to be thicker, however, so I'm going to take that Radius value back up to 20 pixels, and I'm going to leave the Threshold set to zero levels, and I'm going to click OK. And so you may wonder, "Well, what do we do about the fact "that not only do we have all this delineation "around each and every step of the radial gradients, "but we're also increasing the size of the white hotspots?" Well, to take care of those problems, we want to apply a blend mode to our Smart Filter, and you can do that by double-clicking on this little slider icon over here on the right side of the Layers panel. And notice, once you do, you'll bring up the Blending Options dialog box, at which point I'll change the blend mode either to Darken, which is just going to darken the image and nothing more. So notice that we lose our hotspots right there. Or if you want to go even darker, then choose Multiply in order to create this effect here, and notice that we do lose our hotspots. We are bringing back some of the choppiness around the gradient, but that's going to work out okay. Alright, so now I'll click OK in order to accept that effect, and then I'll grab this top shadows layer right there, and I'll press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of it because we just don't need that much darkening. And then with the other shadows layer still selected, and then notice my Rectangular Marquee tool is still active over here at the top of the toolbox. I'm going to tap the seven key in order to reduce the Opacity value up here at the top of the Layers panel to 70%, and we end up with this final effect here. Alright, now I'll press Shift + F in order to switch directly to the full screen mode, and I'll zoom on in as well. And just for the sake of comparison, here are the original very soft molecules, and here are the sharper ones thanks to our ability even to sharpen even the softest details in Photoshop using the old-school Unsharp Mask filter.

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