From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Removing noise and adding Lens Blur - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Removing noise and adding Lens Blur

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- [Instructor] With the help of artificial intelligence, Camera Raw can automatically generate a synthetic depth map based on the content of the image so we can change the focal plane and quickly create a narrow or a more shallow depth of field in a photograph. In addition, the Denoise Enhance feature removes noise and uses AI to fill in details in an image. I'll open up the reindeer, using Command + R on Mac, Control + R on Windows, into Camera Raw. Then in the Lens Blur panel, we can click to apply the lens blur. We have an amount slider where we can either decrease or increase the amount of blur in an image. And if I use the disclosure triangle, we can see that we can add a bouquet and we have five different aperture shapes to choose from. Now in an image like this that doesn't have several bright light sources or specular highlights, the effect can be really subtle, but with images that do have those bright points of light, it can create a beautiful blur effect. If we want more control over the focus point, we can select the point or the area focus icon and then click in the image to shift the focus to that area. So here, I'll click in the background and we can see that the background area is now in focus and the foreground gets blurred. We can also adjust the focus area using the Focal Range bar. So I can drag this rectangle in order to change the area that is in focus, and I can also expand or contract the area that's in focus by just dragging out either side of the rectangle. To see an overlay of the depth map, we can click on Visualize Depth and the colors in the image overlay correspond to the colors in the Focal Range bar. However, as soon as I start making adjustments, then we get a different overlay. So the white areas here represent the areas that will be in focus and the purple and the yellow areas represent those areas that will become blurred. All right, let's hide that overlay and I'm going to return to the AI selected Subject Focus. If we zoom in to 100% and we take a look at, say, this area here of the reindeer's antlers, we can see that this area was missed. Now we can try to adjust the Focal Range, but it might be easier to use the refinement tools. There's a refinement tool that'll help us paint in focus as well as blur. So this area I'd like to bring back into focus. So I'll select the Focus brush. We can change the amount, which would be the amount of blur. We can change the size of the brush as well as the feather or the edge softness and the flow of the brush or how fast the effect is applied. We can also use Auto Mask and that will tell Camera Raw to look for edges where I'm painting in order to get a more precise selection. But for now, I will leave that off. I'm going to get a little bit smaller of a brush size. I can also use the left or right brackets to decrease or increase the size of the brush. And now I can paint over this area in the antler to bring it back into focus. However, the amount slider isn't enough so let's go ahead and move that over to the right. So even after you've painted, you can adjust the amount with the Refine tool. You can adjust it until you choose another tool or you click on the plus icon. So this enables me to add different amounts of focus or blur in different areas of the image. So as soon as I select Blur that's going to set down or commit to that change that I made with Focus. I can come over here and I can just blur this area, but then I can always return to the Focus refinement tool and say Blur this area, or this area which I might have missed. So you can always use the refinement tools, but just notice that this version of Lens Blur is enabled early access. So it can provide good results with a well-defined subject, foreground and background, and the Camera Raw team didn't want to hold the feature back, but if the Lens Blur results aren't working at the level that you expect to please use this feedback option right here to share your comments with Adobe because the team is continually improving the AI and machine learning model for Lens Blur. All right, let's zoom back out. If your image has a lot of noise in it, because it was taken in low light, so it had to have a high ISO, you can use the Detail panel in order to remove the noise. Simply click on Denoise and that will bring up the Enhance dialogue. I'll scoot that out of the way. We can use the zoom icon to zoom out on the image and then click in the image area where we want to zoom into. Here I just want to focus on the eye so I can click and drag in order to pan as well, using the hand tool. There's an amount slider so we can decrease the amount, in which case we'll see a little bit more noise or grain in the image, and if I move that over to the right, we can increase that amount, which will decrease the noise. If you move it all the way to the right, just be a little careful. Your image can take on a more painterly effect, which can be really interesting, but in this case, I want to just back off a little bit and get a little bit of noise back in the image. All right, once I click Enhance, Camera Raw is going to create an entirely new version of this document. So I'm going to have two DNG files, my original and the one where the noise reduction has been applied. So it's up to you if you've made adjustments like we have to this image, all of those adjustments will be carried over to the new DNG file. But if you run this earlier in your workflow, if you know, for example, that you're going to want to remove noise and you do that first, then when you make all of your adjustments, including those fine adjustments, like maybe texture or clarity, then you'll have a accurate representation as to what they'll look like. Whereas if you run it later in your workflow, you might need to go back and just refine some of those sliders. All right, I'm going to click Done, which will return us to Bridge and we can see here is our original DNG file and here is the one that has been enhanced using noise reduction. So as you can see, AI can help us to remove noise as well as add blurs to narrow the depth of field after the fact.

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