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

717 Smoothing out jagged contour lines

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

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717 Smoothing out jagged contour lines

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to take rough or jagged contour lines, and make them absolutely porcelain smooth. So, let's say I zoom in to this section right here and I'll go all the way in to 300%, and you can see that we have some pretty darn jagged transitions and we have some very colorful anti-aliasing as well. Compare that to this much more desirable effect in which the lines are perfectly smooth and the anti-aliasing is neutral. That is to say, at least where the lines are concerned, we're just seeing shades of gray. Alright, so here's how we're gonna pull it off. I'm gonna zoom out just a little bit here and I'm gonna turn the H lines red layer off for the moment, so we can focus our attention just on the blue lines. And by that I don't mean that the lines are blue, although we are seeing some blue anti-aliasing. The word blue references the channel upon which this displacement is based. Alright, with that layer selected, you wanna go up to the filter menu, choose blur, and then choose Gaussian blur. And because we're working with a smart object, we'll be applying Gaussian blur as a dynamic smart filter. And notice that I've taken the radius value up to 2.0 pixels. So two pixels, nothing more. Then I'll click OK. That does smooth out the formally jagged transitions, so this is before and this is after. But it makes the lines very blurry as well. We can fix that by going up to the layer menu, dropping down to new adjustment layer, and then choosing levels. And I'm gonna go ahead and call this layer smoother, and I'm gonna turn on this check box, use previous layer to create clipping max, and that way we'll affect the contents of this layer and this layer only. Then click OK. And now you just wanna modify the black and white points values to taste. And so I went ahead and took the black point value up to 120, which thickens up those lines quite nicely. And then I tabbed over to the white point value, and took it down to 180, and so we're clipping a bunch of shadows to black, which is exactly what we want, and we're clipping a bunch of highlights to white, and that's gonna make those lines nice and sharp while keeping them smooth as well. Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and hide the properties panel. And now what you wanna do is turn the H lines red layer back on, and notice that it is still quite jagged, and so what you wanna do is duplicate Gaussian blur as well as levels. So let's start things off by duplicating the levels adjustment layer, and I'll do that by pressing the alt key, or the option key on a Mac, and dragging it down like so, so that a copy of the layer is resting directly above H lines red. Now, that's making a mess of the background image, and that's because we need to clip this layer by pressing the alt key, or the option key on a mac, and clicking that horizontal line right there between smoother and H lines red. And that limits our modification to just that one layer. Alright, I'm gonna zoom in and notice that that has actually made those lines that much more jagged. And that's because the levels adjustment layer has increased the contrast of the layer below it. What we need to do is duplicate that Gaussian blur effect by pressing and holding the alt or option key, and then dragging the words Gaussian blur, and then dropping them onto the H lines red layer, and that makes things much, much smoother. Problem is that we still have that colorful anti-aliasing, and that's a function of this layer right here, purply blues, that gradient map layer that we created last week. And so I'm gonna go ahead and collapse both of these layers, so that we're no longer seeing their smart filters, by alt or option clicking on that little up arrow icon right there, and that goes ahead and collapses both of those layers, just so that we have a little more room to work. And then I'll grab that purply blues gradient map layer, and I'll drag it and drop it to this point right here, directly above the invert layer, and that's gonna take the color out of the anti-aliasing. And now I'll press shift F in order to switch to the full screen mode, and I'll press control zero or command zero to fit the image on screen. And that is how you take rough or jagged contour lines, and make them porcelain smooth, using a combination of a Gaussian blur smart filter along with a levels adjustment layer here inside Photoshop.

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