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Camera Raw: Graduated Filter

Lesson 43 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

Camera Raw: Graduated Filter

Lesson 43 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

43. Camera Raw: Graduated Filter

This filter is used to gradually fade adjustments in and out of large portions of an image. This is perfect for scenic photos with sky and land differences.

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

00:52
2

Introducing Photoshop

02:37
3

The Class Materials

01:36
4

How To Open Files

01:42
5

Using The Home Screen

02:35
6

Exploring The Interface

03:30
7

Getting Additional Help

01:36
8

Understanding Workspaces

05:11

Lesson Info

Camera Raw: Graduated Filter

let's take a look at the graduated filter. It's similar to the adjustment brush, but it's used for areas when you have a hard line so I'm going to disappear from the video right here so you can see exactly what I'm doing. And over here on the right hand side, I have this graduated filter. Notice here we have these very strong vertical lines in the image and right here on this one, the glass is not tinted and so we have a different color temperature than we do here. Maybe we have different exposures. So if I wanna change just this area right here, I could brush that all in but there's a better way to do it. I can use a graduated filter. So I'm going to grab the graduated filter over here and then I'm going to click and drag. Okay, so now I'm doing this intentionally. You can see we have a green side and a red side. If I take my exposure and go very far down, you can see that on the green side of this filter, that's the area that's applying this selective edit. In this case it's an expos...

ure on the red side, that's where nothing is being changed. And between these two things, that's the transition area where the filter is fading from fully on to fully off. So you can change how big that transition is from a lot to not very much. You can also click in the middle and move this filter around so you can put it anywhere you want. You can also click on the outside and you can drag this around so you can move it any way you want. You can have it horizontal or vertical. And so the farther out you choose to move this, the more control that you have. And so I'm going to move this over. I accidentally just created a new one. I don't want to do that. Someone had delete to get rid of that. Don't click on this, click right in the middle and move that over to this and that is lined up pretty well. I'm going to make the transition a little bit tighter and now I just want that exposure to be just very, very soft. Maybe something like negative 25, you know, maybe take the tent down a little bit. So now I have matched this area with this area. We can see that. So I'm turning it off, turning it on. It's a very subtle thing but you can see how this graduated filter really makes a big difference. I'm gonna hit okay on this to return to Photoshop and then I want to go over remember we opened in the previous session, this beach image. So what I want to do with this is double click on that layer. We go into adobe camera raw. I'm gonna go back here to the graduated filter. This is where graduated filters really come in handy. Now one of the things I'm noticing right away is this is crooked. So just because it bothers me. I'm gonna go up to the crop tool, I'm gonna click on this little level here. I am going to click on the horizon and it's going to fix that for me. So now that's fixed. Let's go back here to the graduated filter and now we want to work with the sky and the foreground independent of each other. So I'm gonna fit this in the screen. We've got our graduated filter. I'm going to reset these selective edits so I can start from scratch. Then I've got my uh my graduated filter here when I click and drag, Okay, we can't really see anything here. So let's see what we're doing. There we go. Remember the green side is the side with the filter. The red side is the side without the filter. So I'm gonna make this transition area something about like this. And make sure that I have this lined up with the horizon. I'll pull this up just a little bit and now let's do some things to this sky here. So let's make the whites really white. Let's make the color temperature a little warmer. Let's make the texture much higher. So we're only affecting the sky. We're not doing anything to the bottom area of this image. And so that works much much better. So the other thing that we're noticing here is with this transition area or messing up these rocks or doing some transitions to these rocks here and so I don't want to do that. So what I can do here is look at this, I have a paintbrush and an eraser. So we can, we can combine the features of the adjustment brush with the graduated filter. So let's look at our mask option to see where we've done our edits. You can see that we've got a bunch of white over here, meaning that this filter is applying itself to these rocks. So what I can do is get the eraser and I'm going to get a brush that's about 05, looks pretty good. That feather is pretty good. And then what I can do is I can come over here and just on the rocks, I can paint off that graduated filter. Just gonna paint that off when they get a smaller brush, paint that off right there. So we've got the filter on the ocean, but not the rocks. So I am going to turn that off now. We can turn off the overlay to sort of see that and the eyeball, that's before, that's after. So we've changed just this area of the image using a graduated filter with the benefit of painting off and on some areas like an adjustment brush. This is a really fantastic tool

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Workbook
Class Materials

Ratings and Reviews

Katie
 

Mark did a great job at explaining things and going over them multiple times throughout the lessons. My only issue was that sometimes it went a little faster than I could keep up and I needed to rewind it a bit and start again. But from someone who has never worked in photoshop before I 100% recommend this class to anyone trying to learn.

Terri Schwartz
 

Student Work

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