Practical Photoshop October 2022

Neural Filters have transformed the way many of us edit our photos, from automated hand-coloring to AI-assisted upscaling. Over the next few pages we’ll explore all the Neural Filters currently on offer, as well as those in the pipeline, ranked in order from best to worst. (Bear in mind that some of these filters are still in beta mode, so they’re not the finished article.) Intriguingly, the cutting-edge AI technology in Photoshop is at its most impressive when used with very old images… DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT FILES HERE http://bit.ly/pho_139 ON YOUR PC OR MAC…

Photo Restoration has to be the most impressive Neural Filter yet from Adobe. It will automatically restore old photos by sharpening faces and it even rebuilds facial features. What’s more, it can automatically detect and remove scratches. At the moment it’s available in Photoshop Beta, which will need to be downloaded – but it’s worth it for the jaw-dropping enhancements it can make to old photos. REMOVE SCRATCHES While the facial enhancements grab the attention, the Photo Restoration Filter is equally effective at removing scratches and dust, and it’s perhaps this feature that will prove most useful for retouching. After initiating the filter, turn off the Enhance Face box and enable Scratch Removal, then use the slider to control the strength (a high value tends to work better). 01 INSTALL PHOTOSHOP BETA At the…

The Landscape Mixer takes elements from other landscape photos and mixes them in with yours. Here it results in a completely transformed scene: the filter has mixed in a sunset mood from another photo and added a long-exposure look to the sea to give the choppy waters a misty quality. Like most automated AI tools, the results are simultaneously impressive and far from perfect. The leap in technology here is truly staggering. The ability to automatically recognise the different parts of a photo and splice another landscape into the mix is genuinely impressive, and something that we wouldn’t have dreamt of a few years ago. But while you marvel at the technology, you’re also likely to notice plenty of dodgy patches in the image it’s created. Aside from the image looking very…

This command can automatically recognise people and faces in your photos, isolate the skin and let you apply a softening effect. Spots, wrinkles and rough skin can all be eradicated with ease. Crucially, the filter retains texture in the skin pores while smoothing out the skin, which helps to keep the effect from looking too fake and unnatural. 01 START SMOOTHING Toggle the switch to enable the filter. If it’s your first time, you may need to download it. The command will analyze the image and recognize any faces within. So if your photo has more than one person, the tool can differentiate between each face and allow you to make different edits to each one. 02 ADJUST THE STRENGTH The Blur slider affects the finer details of the skin surface, so it’s good…

Super Zoom is a wonderful tool for upscaling images if you want to give them a boost in resolution. Simply go to Filter > Neural Filters and turn on Super Zoom. Click the Zoom button to upscale the image by 2x, 3x or more. Your chosen Output is important here. If it’s set to New Layer, the command will zoom in to a part of the original image, as if cropping in (you can drag the preview to change the cropped area). But if the Output is set to New Document, the entire image will be upscaled, rather than a portion of it. The latter is perhaps more useful for most purposes, as it lets you increase the resolution of the whole image. You could try the Super Resolution command in…

Harmonization automatically matches the color and feel of one layer to match another. As such it can be hugely useful when you’re creating photo composites, because if you cut out and copy part of one image into another then the colors may not initially match up. But by running the cut-out layer through the Harmonization Filter, you may be able to come up with more realistic results. Here’s how it works… 01 MAKE A CUTOUT Open the image of your subject and go to Select > Subject. Improve the selection if necessary, then click the Add Layer Mask icon to convert the selection to a Layer Mask, thereby hiding everything else. Grab the Move Tool and drag the layer across to the image you’d like to use for the backdrop. 02 HARMONIZE THE…