Smoothing Images in Photoshop

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Gary for Expert Village. It's important to know how to affect the different layers, because we might want to kind of perfect the blur effect that we were trying to do. So here we see that we have the first layer selected. One of the ways that we can improve on what we did is have the top layer where the changes were made, have that highlighted. And we can go ahead and go to the opacity window over here and click on the arrow. And now we have a slider. Right now, the opacity is set at a hundred percent, meaning it's not at all transparent. You're seeing the full image on that layer. But if I go ahead and slide it down to the left, I see the numbers are getting lower, and that means that the image is becoming more and more opaque. So, if I look at my image, if I can see my image, I see now that the top layer is much more transparent, and the bottom layer is coming through. So, therefore, the original image, with the freckles, is going to shine through. If I keep moving the slider down, even if I go all the way to zero, that will basically make the top layer totally transparent. So now, I'm only looking at the bottom layer. So if, for some reason, you want to kind of minimize the blur effect or get it somewhere in between, we can go ahead and manipulate the opacity menu, the setting, and we can go ahead and just slide it and make a number, a setting that we're comfortable with. So, we see here that if I do it around eighty percent, still pretty much wiped out a lot of the freckles, but they do shine through a little bit more. So, it really depends on your image. It could be a kid or an image that, if you blur it out too much or you make it look - let's say too good, what's going to happen is, it will look unrealistic and people that know what the image should look like will kind of wonder, like, what happened to this image and it just won't look too real. So that's one way to kind of minimize or maximize the effect that we've done with the blur tool. That's using the opacity setting and minimizing it so that the bottom layer - the original image - comes through a little bit more, and it kind of blends together with the top layer where the changes were made."