From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Mastery

Backing off a Blur Gallery filter - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Mastery

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Backing off a Blur Gallery filter

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- [Instructor] Alright, so as I was saying, I think this blurry vignette is a little bit too much. Which is why in this movie, I'm going to show you how to reduce the opacity of a blur gallery effect, which at first might seem impossible. And to get a sense for what I mean, notice these other smart filters here inside the layers panel including Add Noise and Gaussian Blur, both of which include little slider icons over here on the right hand side. And so, if I were to double click on the slider for, let's say Gaussian Blur, I would bring up the Blending Options Dialogue Box which allows me to mix this effect with the effects below it, either by switching to a different blend mode or more simply, I can change the Opacity value by clicking this down-pointing arrow head and taking the value down to let's say 60% at which point, I'll click okay to accept that change. Now first, you're not going to see any difference and that's because this merge layer is sitting on top of it. And so if I turn off the merge layer, we can see this noisier effect. And so it's important to bear in mind, whenever you merge layers as we did in the previous movie, that new static layer is not going to dynamically reflect any changes you make to the layers below. In any event, I don't want to reduce the opacity of the gaussian blur effect so I'll press Control Z or Command Z on the Mac to undo that change and then I'll turn the merge layer back on. I do however, want to reduce the opacity of the iris blur, problem is, if you take a look at this Blur Gallery filter right here, which represents field blur, iris blur or any of the other blurs you apply inside the Blur Gallery, we do not have a slider icon. It just does not exist at this point in time. And so, if you want to reduce the opacity of the effect, you have to rely on your filter mask. And so let's imagine for a moment that you want to take the effect down to 60% as we just did with gaussian blur. Then, you would first select the filter mask by clicking on this white thumbnail here inside the layers panel. Then you want to tap the D key to instate your default foreground and background colors, which because we're working on a mask, is going to change the background color to black. Then press Control Backspace or Command Delete on the Mac to fill that filter mask with black as we're seeing here inside the layers panel, which effectively turns the filter off. So in other words, we've set the Iris Blur to an opacity of 0%. Now to increase the opacity value, you want to double click on the Filter Mask Thumbnail which is going to bring up the Properties panel. Now for some reason that doesn't work, then go up to the Window menu and choose the Properties command. Now you can switch focus between the Smart Object and the Filter Mask by clicking on one of these two icons. Now as soon as the Filter Mask is active, you will see these two numerical values Density and Feather. We're interested in the Density value. Now, for our purposes, density works in the opposite way of opacity. So a density of 100%, is like a transparency value of 100%, whereas the density of 0% is just like a transparency value of 0% or an opacity value of 100%. So again, density zero, opacity 100, density 100, opacity zero. If you want to effectively change the Opacity value to 60%, then you want to subtract 60 from 100 and enter 40% like so. So 40% density is the same as 40% transparency, which is the same as 60% opacity. And so, I don't want to rub that in too much but I do want it to make sense. In any event, by taking the density of a black filter mask down to 40%, we end up achieving this effect here. In which we're seeing 40% of the original image mixed together with 60% of that Iris Blur. And that for better or for worse is how you reduce the opacity of a Blur Gallery Filter by combining a black filter mask along with a reduced density value inside the Properties panel.

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