Camera Shake Reduction
Imagine, you took a stunning picture, a photo that is very important to you, and the focus was right but… oh! that wind… you just shook a little! What do you do?
Here’s your answer: try the Camera Shake Reduction of the new Adobe Photoshop CC! Ooops, this sounds almost like an ad, I did not mean that… but it’s really exciting to see how efficient this tool is - not for pictures out of focus, but where we have say low light, long exposure time, handheld camera etc… so the picture is in focus but there is perhaps a minimal blur- like I believe I have on my photo of MadMax, one of the first pictures I took with my new Fuji E1, with a bad eye but with much happiness to finally get going with great equipment but, helas! without a good, stable tripod!
Camera Shake Reduction
Here we tested the Camera Shake Reduction filter at the Ycademy Seminar July 2013! Follow these simple steps on how to use the Camera Shake Reduction Filter in Photoshop CC – especially if you’re new to the program and love to do Digital Photography with post-editing in Photoshop!
How to use the Camera Shake Reduction Filter
Here’s how to use the Camera Shake Reduction Filter
Open your Photoshop CC; use Photography top right.
First: convert picture into a smart object. The advantage is that we work in a completely non-destructive way. It’s like zipping up something and we won’t have the independent filters. Yet, we can always intervene on the filters we are using. It’s very practical.
Now go Filters > and as shake has something to do with blur, we go to sharpen and to > shake reduction.
You see immediately a dotted square on the image, the detail loupe. See on my screenshot.
Ensure the Preview button, top right, is ticked. Normally, when you open the image in the filter, some change has already taken place, and by switching this button on and off you can monitor the result. If you leave it on, as soon as you change something it will render. This might be an issue for your resources, just bear this in mind!
Then you have the various Blur Trace settings where you want to experiment, depending on what you wish to sharpen on your photo.
Open the Advanced section and tick Show Blur Estimation Regions. If it’s ticked, you automatically see the dotted square on the picture. Here you can basically decide on different sections that need to be sharpened on your picture, using the Detail picture
underneath for exact checking.
If you hover over the square, the centre highlights and you have handles to modify the size of the square. The bigger you make that square, the harder for the program to detect all the blurs and to eliminate them, and render them. When you add another square, the program automatically finds another focal point, without you doing anything. Bear in mind that you only want to tick that one now while you work on it, meaning you need to detect the settings that are appropriate for that square. If you leave both active (ticked), you will most likely have conflicts.
Imagine having a picture that is rather blurred, but in the foreground – or wherever, you wish to have something sharp. In this case you would apply this square to this part and leave the rest blurred. Instead of sharpening the whole picture, just sharpen a detail. Make sure you switch the field you’re working on, on – and not all the others. You might get accumulated effects and with it, a big surprise!
Note the little rendering strip once you move or do anything. Also, At the bottom left you can zoom in to see what you are doing.
As mentioned, using several blur areas can be tricky as leading to conflicts; so experiment and observe what happens after your various moves, ticking the different regions you worked on, off and on, to see exactly what the effect is.
While I initially sharpened the tomcat’s face entirely, including all his whiskers, I finally decided that I wanted to only focus on his snout, with the rest being good enough and fading out towards the blurred background.
Don’t be afraid to experiment to see – and understand – what each slider does!
The worst that can happen is that you get a bad hair day as you see below, and all is rippled and wrinkled… but this was showing me one extreme, i.e. setting the Blur Trac Bouds to their extreme (199) – from which I could only learn!
Photoshop initially always finds the most appropriate place, based on its intelligent reading. All readings are different. Here we have a great tool to guide the visitor’s eye. . . and these are just my first experiments, too.
Note also: everything you add to a smart object is a vector. When you then want to add some other filter, you have to flatten the image first, so it can adapt completely.
Normal correction layers have the same size as the picture has at the time of editing. So if you change the image size and you did not flatten the picture, eg. you paint in more light or a higher exposure, and then you reduce the size of the picture, then the adjustment layer you have created still has the same size as it had before, and your picture is reduced – unless you have flattened the picture. On a smart object, the layer follows the picture. So if you change the size of the picture, the layer will follow what you’re doing, for as long as you’re in the environment of a smart object.
No more tears with those heavenly low-light pictures… now you stand a great chance to ‘rescue’ them! Experiment and have fun!
