The filter “median”
I had promised you in the previous lesson that I would further help the child with the 56 stars and give her a more decent look.
In this lesson I use the “median” filter. If you have downloaded the pictures, open the picture “Face_03.jpg”.
The first thing I do is duplicate the background layer.

Right click above the background layer and choose “Duplicate Layer” from the pop-up menu.

Then we convert this layer to “Smart Filters”.

Just click the “Filter” button in the menu bar and select “Convert for Smart Filters” in the drop-down menu.

Before I continue, I skip the first photo as a Photoshop image, that is the one with the .psd extension, remember, it supports layers. You can possibly give it another name.

This is what you should have:

Then you click again on the “Filter” button in the menu bar, choose “Noise” in the drop-down menu, and click “median”.
This opens the dialog “median” in which we enter a value for the softening effect.

You can do this by typing a value in the “Radius”, or by moving underlying scrollbar to left or right.

When all the stars are gone from her, click the OK button.

 

This places a smart filter with a mask (1), below the copied layer.

Now, we all know what we can do with a mask.

Exactly, we can view and hide a part of the display. In this case, the effect of “median”. Currently everything that is displayed through the mask is in fact white.

So to hide parts of the effect, we color it with black in the mask.

We select the “brush” tool in the tool bar (2) and choose black as the foreground color.

Then select the mask and draw with the brush over the parts in the mask you want to hide.

So where there are no starts, we can color it in black.

If you have colored too much in black, you can always change this by coloring with white, but you knew that of course.

At last, she looks much better.

Now a little less glum look, but I leave that to her.

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