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

765 Enhancing your big, juicy snowflakes

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

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765 Enhancing your big, juicy snowflakes

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- [Instructor] All right, so we've got some synthetic snow, suited to a high resolution image, but we need much, much more. Which is why, in this movie, I'll show you how to enhance your big, juicy snowflakes. And it's really just a matter of building on what we have so far and cleaning some of the snow off the model's face. Because we want to be thoughtful, don'tcha know? All right, so you may recall that our snow is ultimately a smart object. And that means we can change it size and we can change the filter settings without harming a single pixel inside the image. And so I'm going to start things off by jumping a copy of this snow layer, which you can do by pressing Control + j here on a PC, or Command + j on the Mac. Then, go up to the Edit menu and choose Free Transform, or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + t, or Command + t on the Mac. If you get this alert message, all it's telling you is that during the time you're transforming the layer, you will not see the smart filters. So just go ahead and click Okay. And that is, by the way, why we are currently seeing some big, chunky pixels. All right, now I want to direct your attention up here to the Options bar. Notice in this version of Photoshop CC that the width and height values are linked together by default, which results in proportional resizing. And so you want to make sure the values are linked as well, and then change either the width or height value to 1000%, so twice what it was before, and then press the Enter key, or the Return key, a coupe of times in order to apply that change and bring back the effects of the smart filters. All right, now we need to edit these filters, starting with Median. And so I'll go ahead and double click on this guy. It's the top one, not the one down here, so that we're editing the top layer. That will very possibly bring up that alert message again, which is this time telling you that Motion Blur is going to be turned off for a moment. That's just fine, so click Okay. Now, because the snow is twice as big as it was before, we want to multiply that radius value times two. And you can do that these days inside Photoshop CC by entering asterisk two after the current value. And then notice as soon as I press the Tab key, Photoshop does the math for me. If it's not doing the math for you, just crank that value up to 14 pixels and click Okay. All right, now I'll go ahead and press Control + zero, or Command + zero on the Mac, to take in the entire image at a time. Now the thing about real snow is that it tends to be very light. And as a result, once it really starts snowing, the flakes go in different directions. Which is why I'm also going to modify my Motion Blur settings by double clicking on the words Motion Blur. Notice that the angle value is set to 60 degrees. In the previous movie, I set it to 120 degrees. That's the exact same angle where Motion Blur is concerned. And so I'm going to change it to positive 70 this time around, but of course you can go your own way. You can also modify the distance value if you like, but I'm going to leave it set to 40 pixels. And then I will click Okay in order to accept that change. So, this is the before version of the snow, and this is after. All right, a couple of things I want you to note about your synthetic snow effect, your flakes and mine are going to look different. And that's because the original mezzotint filter is random, which explains why this snow effect and the one that I showed you at the outset of the movie look different than each other. Also, the top snow layer is huge. And to show you what I mean, I'll go ahead and zoom out here and I'll press Control + t, or Command + t on the Mac, to invoke the Free Transform mode. I'll click Okay in response to that alert message. And look how very big this layer is. It extends well outside the canvas, which means, if you don't like your snow effect, you can just drag this layer around to a different location, at which point I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to accept that change. And you probably want to do it not in the Free Transform mode because that way you can't see the smart filters. But rather, I'll just go ahead and zoom back in and I'll switch to the Move tool, which you can get by pressing the V key and then you can drag that big snow layer anyplace that you like. All right, now at this point we have created a very aggressive snowstorm with these big flakes covering up the model's face. I'd like to back that off a little bit. And so, I'm going to start things off with this top snow layer selected by dropping down to the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the panel and clicking on it. Then you want to switch to the Brush tool, which you can get by pressing the B key. Go ahead and tap the D key to instate the default foreground color, where masking is concerned, to white. And then press the X key to swap those colors so that the foreground color is black. Now you want to right click inside the image window and make sure that the hardness value is down to zero percent. And we're also looking for a size value, where this image is concerned, of 800 pixels, at which point, I'll just go ahead and click right there in her face. And then I'll reduce the size of my brush to, about 500 pixels should work, and I'm doing that by pressing the left bracket key a few times. And then I'll click, more or less, on her mouth. Now you can see here that we continue to have a lot of flakes on her face, and that's from this rear snow layer. So, notice if I turn it off, all those flakes go away. If I turn it back on, we can see 'em again. I want to move some of those flakes off her face, and so I'm going to duplicate this layer mask by pressing the Alt key, that's going to be the Option key on the Mac, and dragging the layer mask so that we're seeing that double arrowhead icon, which tells me that I'm going to copy it, and dropping it into place. So, once again, that's an Alt drag on the PC, or an Option drag on the Mac. Then go ahead and select this Layer Mask thumbnail right there. And what you want to be able to do is double click on it to bring up the Properties panel. And if you double click on it, and you bring up the Select and Mask workspace instead, what I recommend you do is change your preference setting by pressing Control + k, or Command + k on the Mac, which is the keyboard shortcut for Preferences inside Photoshop. Then click on Tools right there, and you want to turn off this checkbox, Double Click a Layer Mask Launches Select and Mask Workspace. In my opinion, that's not the best way to work. Go ahead and turn it off. Click Okay. You can always turn it on later if you disagree with me. And then, double click on that Layer Mask thumbnail, and that will bring up the Properties panel instead, which offers these little known, non destructive slider bars right here. The one we want is Density. So notice, if I reduce the density value, I reduce the darkness of the mask, as we can see witnessed by this Layer Mask thumbnail here inside the Layers panel. So we're effectively making the masked areas more opaque. In the end, I decided to take this density value up to 50%. That way we're seeing some snow inside the model's face, but not too much. And now I'll go ahead and hide the Properties panel, and I'll press Control + zero, or Command + zero on the Mac, to once again center my zoom. And just so we can compare things here, this is the version of the image we saw at the outset of the movie, and this is how it appears now. Thanks to our ability to enhance our big, juicy, synthetic snowflakes so that we have a virtual blizzard, here inside Photoshop.

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