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

690 Editing your smart-filtered molecules

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

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690 Editing your smart-filtered molecules

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to take our gradient molecule effect so far and we're going to make it look more organic by editing the Smart Object, and that's a great thing about working with Smart filters is that you can edit your base artwork as many times as you want, and come up with all kinds of different effects. All right, so the first you want to do is double-click on the thumbnail for that Smart Object and you can tell it's a Smart Object by the fact that it has this little page icon in its bottom right corner. And so, I'll go ahead and double-click on it in order to open the artwork in a new window. And then I'll switch to my Gradient tool, which again you can get by pressing the g key. Notice that this first option is still set to foreground to background, which is this guy right here. And by virtue of the fact that my foreground color is white and the background color is black, that means I'm creating white to black gradients. You should also note that the style is set to radial gradient and the blend mode is set to Lighten with an opacity value of a hundred percent. All right, now you just want to fill in the shadows. Now, there's a couple of different ways to work. You can create small gradients, like these guys right here, or then you can create very large ones which is going to fill in the dark regions and create these kind of gradient islands in between. All right, so notice that if you're going to work that way, if you want to create those little gradient islands, then you want to start with some relatively small gradients and then follow up with the big gradient because otherwise, if you just try to add a gradient in the middle of things, like so, you won't get the same effect. All right, I'm going to undo that last gradient and then I'll go ahead and create a couple of smallish gradients right here and then a big one at this point. You can totally go your own way, of course. And while it would be an exaggeration to say that this kind of artwork creates itself, it's certainly hard to go wrong. All right, so I'll go ahead and add a couple of guys down here and maybe follow up with a big one and draw a couple small ones or at least relatively small, and then add a bigger one at this location. You are going to find, if you work this way, that you end up, occasionally altogether, covering up earlier gradients. All right, so I'll add a couple of small guys here at these locations, and then another big one, like so, and then I'll just go ahead and follow up. So again, I'm just trying to fill in some of the shadows at this point. It's sometimes a little hard to recognize where those shadows are given that the artwork is becoming so very light. But remember that anything that's relatively dark inside of this version of the artwork is going to be very dark indeed when you save your changes. And to demonstrate what I'm talking about, I'll just go ahead and close the contents of my Smart Object and then I'll click the Yes button, that would be the Save button on the Mac, in order to update the layered composition. And just so you can see the difference, this is the before version of the artwork and this is the after version. All right, now I want to create the effect of shining, a kind of flashlight or a torch on my scene, so I'll go ahead and switch back to my artwork so far and with the Smart Object active, I'll go up to the Filter menu and choose Lens Correction in order to add yet another Smart Filter. Then I'll click in the Custom tab over here in the right-hand side of the screen, and I'll drop down to the Vignette controls and I'll grab the slider triangle, the one associated with the Amount value, and I'll drag it all the way over to the left so we have an amount of negative 100 combined with a midpoint of plus 50. At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK in order to apply my changes. Now that's not much difference. This is before and this is after. If you want to compound the effect, then you want to move the lens correction filter below Unsharp Mask, which as you may recall from the previous movie, is set to Multiply. And you can do that either by dragging Lens Correction down, like so, which isn't going to work in my case and actually, it's very unlikely that it's going to work in your case, and that's because these darn things are a little bit stubborn. And so, what you might want to do is click on the filter mask, that white thumbnail right there, and then try dragging Unsharp Mask. Go ahead and click and hold on it, and then drag it upward to above Lens Correction and drop it into place. And that time, it ended up working. So, you may have to try a few times to get these guys to change order. But what we want is Lens Correction first at the bottom followed by Unsharp Mask. And as a result, we get a darker effect. And just so you can see the difference, this is before and this is after. All right, now, I still have a few overly dark areas, in my opinion, and so, I'm going to double-click on the thumbnail for that Smart Object once again in order to open it up in an independent window. My Gradient tool is still selected, and so I'll just go ahead and drag, like so, in order to add a few more gradients. Now, something I want to demonstrate is that you don't have to close the Smart Object in order to update the layered composition. You can just go up to the File menu and choose the Save command or of course press Control + S or Commanded + S on the Mac, and then when you switch over to the composition, you'll notice that it's been changed. And so, this is the before version, notice this region in the bottom left corner of the image, and this is after. Now, the link between the layered composition and the contents of the Smart Object will remain intact as long as you don't undo the effect. So, if I were to undo the effect and leave it undone, then the link is going to be broken. If I were to press Control + Z or Command + Z again in order to redo the effect, then the link will be maintained. And just to demonstrate what I mean, I'll just go ahead and add a couple of more gradients to this region of the image and maybe a couple more over here in the right-hand side of the image as well. And then I'll close the Smart Object this time. Click the Yes button here on the PC or the Save button on the Mac, and you can see that my changes have taken hold. And to demonstrate that's the case, I'll press, in this case, ctrl + alt + z or cmd + opt + z on the Mac, and then notice that we have changes in this region right here. If I were to press ctrl + shift + z or cmd + shift + z on the Mac, to redo the effect. And then finally, I decided to warm things up a little bit by double-clicking in the blue thumbnail for the midtones layer, and then I simply change the hue value from 210 degrees to 20 degrees, like so. And then I'll click OK. All right, now I'll press shift + f in order to switch to the fullscreen mode and I'll zoom on in as well. And just so we can see how much progress we've made here, this is the version of the image that we saw at the onset of the movie and this is the image as it appears now thanks to our ability to edit our smart filtered molecules as much and as often as we like here inside Photoshop.

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