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

792 Giving a guy a digital shave in Photoshop

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

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792 Giving a guy a digital shave in Photoshop

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- [Instructor] All right, now the thing about the White Walkers, at least in the Game of Thrones television show on HBO, is that a lot of them have hair, but the Night King does not. He doesn't have any hair on the top of his head and he doesn't have any whiskers either. Whereas, if you notice this guy, he's obviously pretty young, but he does have some stubble along the top of his lip and along the bottom of his chin as well, which is why in this movie, I'm going to show you one of the oldest tricks in the book where Photoshop is concerned, and that's how to give a guy a digital shave. And so notice, once we're done here, we're going to all but eliminate the stubble below his nose, and we're going to greatly reduce the effect along his chin. And we're going to do so using a filter known as Dust & Scratches. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch back to our composition in progress. We're already working with a smart object, so we'll be able to apply Dust & Scratches as an editable smart filter, even though it is one of the oldest filters inside Photoshop. And so I'll go up to the Filter menu, choose Noise, and then you want to choose this guy Dust & Scratches, which is a relative of Median, by the way. It goes ahead and smooths over details, but it offers an additional option in the form of threshold. So I'll go ahead and choose Dust & Scratches. And notice that we've got these two values here, radius and threshold. If I crank the radius value up, then you can see that we end up averaging the heck out of neighboring pixels. And as a result, we do get rid of that stubble, but we get rid of a lot of other details in the guy's face as well, such as the eyes and the nose, and so forth. All right, let's keep our eyes on the stubble here. And by the way, I'm dragging in the image around just by pressing the space bar to get the hand tool on the fly. All right, the second value is pretty interesting. What it allows you to do is apply the radius value based on the luminance difference between neighboring pixels which is known as the threshold. So notice if I crank this value up let's say to 70 levels, then what I'm telling Photoshop to do is just go ahead and apply this radius value to any two neighboring pixels that are 70 luminance levels or more different than each other. And so if you have the threshold set to zero, then everything gets gummed up because every pixel is at least zero luminance levels different from its neighbor, whereas if you cranked it up all the way to 255, then you're not going to apply the radius value at all, because after all, there's really no such thing as two neighboring pixels, unless they're black and white, to be 255 levels different from each other. And so I came up with a threshold value of 50. And so what that does is it averages the areas that very different from each other, such as that stubble detail, without averaging the low-contrast stuff, so that you keep the natural pores in the skin. But because the radius value is so high, we end up with some anomalies, like the edges of the nostrils right here. I don't want that, so I'll go ahead and take this radius value down to let's say 10 pixels, which is going to give us a much more desirable effect. And so I want you to see the pore details right there. I'm going to zoom in just a little farther so you can see what I'm talking about. Notice, if I take the threshold value down to zero, we wipe out those pores, which is not what I want. And so if I take that threshold value back up to 50, then we keep the pores and the natural crinkles in the skin but we get rid of much of that stubble. At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that effect. All right, now I'll just go ahead and press Shift + F to switch to the full-screen mode, so that we can see how much smoother his skin is. And that, my friends, is how you give a guy a digital shave using the old-school Dust & Scratches filter. And because we applied the filter to a smart object, you can change your settings any time you'd like.

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