How to Sharpen & Blur a Photo Using Photoshop Elements 15
During this Photoshop Elements 15 tutorial video, we will show you how to sharpen or blur certain parts of an image by using the brush.
Welcome back to our course on PSE 15. In this section we’re going to look at Sharpening and Blurring.
The particular image I’m looking at here of a butterfly on some flowers is probably potentially quite a nice picture. The background is quite blurred which tends to focus attention on the foreground. And some of the flowers in the foreground are pretty much in focus and fairly steady. But the butterfly itself is a little bit blurry. It’s very difficult to take pictures of many types of animals, particularly flying insects and so on.
And even when you do get a reasonable picture there’s usually some sort of motion, either the animals moving or the flower it’s on is blowing around and so on. So it’s quite often a requirement to be able to sharpen something a little. Just in this case to bring the butterfly out a little bit from the flowers, which are already quite a prominent feature of the image. So what I’m going to do is to try to sharpen the butterfly a little bit.
Now the way that I’m going to do this is I’m going to zoom right into the butterfly. I’m going to try to sharpen one wing and then we can compare it with the other wing when I’ve done a little bit of work on it.
The tool I need to use the Sharpen tool. That’s in a group which is in the bottom left hand corner of the Enhance set in the toolbox. There is a Blur tool, there is a Sharpen tool and there is a Smudge tool. And we’re using the Sharpen tool first.
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When I use the sharpen tool I choose a brush size and strength of the sharpening effect. It’s very important not to overdo sharpening because what you can do is make an image look extremely artificial. Apart from the size of the brush and the strength of the sharpening there’s a checkbox down there which is Protect Detail. What PSE tries to do when it’s sharpening is to get of pixels which have intermediate colors.
They are the ones that are causing the blurriness in the image. And when it removes those intermediate colors what can happen is that you lose some of the detail in the image because pixels that are normally connected together start to get disconnected and the whole image starts to sort of break up.
If you keep Protect Detail checked then what PSE will do is to make sure that the parts of the image that should still appear to be connected are still connected. What I’m going to do then is choose a brush size. I think I’ll go up a little from what I have now. I’m going to stick with medium strength. This is definitely one where what you want to do is to practice a little on an image and just see what effect it has. I’m only going to work on the right wing and then we can compare it with the left wing.
So let me just brush over that right wing a few times. As I say I’m definitely not going to overdo this even though maybe I already have overdone it but there we are. I also find that generally speaking keeping the strength at a moderate level but applying many brushstrokes also produces the best results.
Okay. Now I think you can already see the improvement in that right wing. And in fact what I might try is just do a little bit on the body as well. Again not too much. But there, I think you can see the effect of the sharpening already.
Let me zoom out now and see how that looks. I think that’s quite an improvement. And of course if I worked on the left wing for a while I think I could sharpen that up very nicely as well. Already the right wing looks quite a bit sharper.
I mentioned earlier on in this section that some of the flowers, the flower petals in particular in this image are quite sharp. Some of them are sharper than the butterfly I think. And that tends to distract quite a bit from the butterfly. You may say well it’s all part of the image but supposing I wanted to blur the flowers just a little bit in something like the way that a few of the flowers towards the bottom left hand corner are blurred.
I can use filters and for instance one of the options for an image like this would have been to select the butterfly, select the inverse and apply a filter which we’ll be able to do when we’ve looked at filters a little bit later on in the course. But you can also use the Blur tool to target your blurring at specific objects.
So let’s suppose I want to very slightly blur the two flowers that are if you like closest to the butterfly and most visible. So that’s the one that points out to the left there and one immediately to the right of the butterfly. What I’m going to do once again is to zoom in. I’ve selected the blur tool and I’ve set the size of the brush to a size that I think will do the job. With the blur, as with the sharpen, it’s very easy to overdo it. But in order to demonstrate this quite quickly I’m going to set the strength right over to the maximum setting.
I wouldn’t normally do that but I just want to show you quickly how this blurring works. And what I’m going to do is to brush over the flower on the right. Now I’ve got it on maximum strength. And after quite a few strokes the point that I’ve got to is this. Now this may not look particularly more blurred than when we started but just to give you an idea of how much was achieved there you can always check back using the History panel.
So if I open up the History panel here, note that it’s currently on the last operation I did, the last blur strokes that I did. If I go back to the last sharpen I did on the butterfly, look very carefully at that flower that I’ve been working on. I’m going to click on Sharpen. So all of the blurs is going to be taken away. And particularly if you look towards the middle of the flower you’ll see just how much blurring has been achieved.
There’s quite a noticeable effect there. You may think that’s an awful lot of work to achieve that but it is a very subtle and slight effect. And as I’ve said a couple of time, it’s very easy to overdo it. But let me just go down and click on my blur so all of the blur is there. You probably again noticed the change there when I clicked on that.
Close the panel and now if I zoom out again I think you’ll find that that flower on the right is now having less of an impact on the image than it was and the butterfly takes a little bit more of a prominent role. Clearly I need to work on the flower on the left as well but hopefully from that you get a general idea on blurring.
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The other tool in that set is the Smudge tool. And I’m going to leave you to try the smudge tool yourself. Don’t forget the PDF and the Adobe Help on the smudge tool. It’s not one that I use very much but well worth you giving a try to. You’ll know what it can do and maybe one day it will be of use to you.
Now before I end this section just a couple of other things to point out to you. First of all on the Enhance menu one of the options is Auto Sharpen. And you should take some time to experiment with this, particularly with an image like this. Bear in mind that if you have a whole image and you click on Auto Sharpen it will try to sharpen everything. If all you want to do is sharpen the butterfly just bear that in mind.
And also if you go to the Guided Edit menu one of the options there is Sharpen. So once again experiment with that and see what you can achieve with the Sharpen Guided Edit.
That’s it for this section. Please join me in the next one.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
