The filter “median”

I had promised you in the previous lesson, 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 to 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 button “Filter” 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 the 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”.
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 you want to hide in the mask.
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.

The “Patch” tool

With the “Patch” tool, we can “fix” a selected area with the pixels from another area.
Select this “Patch” tool in the tool bar.
Then drag in the image to select the area from where you want to sample a pixel and select “Destination” or “Source” in the options bar.
Select “Source”, if you want to change bad pixels with good pixels.
Select “Destination”, if you want to copy the good pixels.
Then place the cursor in the selected area and drag it to the desired position.

Tip!

You can make a selection with any selection tool, as long as you click and drag the selected area with the “Patch” tool.

Featured Courses

• Downloading iPad Apps
• Lesson 1: Introduction to Publisher
• Lesson 65: File Formats