6.1 Blur and Sharpen

Hi, welcome back. In this chapter, I'll be guiding you through all the different filters you can apply in Manga Studio, and in this lesson I'll be showing you the blur and sharpen filters. So I've opened up the Mona Lisa picture here, again, because it's a lot easier to see what a filter is actually doing if you apply it to a completed picture. And to apply a filter to a picture, all you do is click on filter at the top and then choose whichever filter you'd like. So I'll show you the blur filters first. So if we go into blur, go across to normal blur and it blurs our image very slightly and it's quite a subtle effect. If we go to blur strong, it's a much stronger blur, but if that isn't strong enough, we can always go to the next one which is a Gaussian blur. And if you drag the node along the slider It'll become more blurry the further you move it towards the right. You can also enter a numerical value here. If you want to see what your image looks like before you've applied this blur, you can always tick preview on and off. So I've not applied this blur at the moment, because we're still changing our settings here. I can always untick this, see what it looked like before, and then tick this to see what the filter would actually do. The next blur we have is a moveable blur, which is basically a motion blur. So we have a few different options to choose from when we have this. So area to blur basically means how far this is blurring, so if I drag this slider towards the right, you'll see it blur further and further. We have Direction to blur, so we can drag this node on our slider, or we can enter a numerical value, and we have Position to blur. At the moment, it's set to Front and back, which means it will expand to both sides of this blur. So whatever angle it's blurring towards, it'll expand to both sides of this line. If I change it to front, you'll see it will only expand this way, and if I change it to back you'll see it will only expand that way. We've set it to blur at box at the moment, and that gives us this sort of doubled effect so you can see she almost has two pairs of eyes and two mouths. But we can set back to smooth, and you can see the features remain the same, but they're just blurred in a motion, there. The next one we have is a radiation blur. So this radial blur, again, has a few options to it. Firstly, we can determine where the actual start of the radial blur begins, and that's defined by this cross on our canvas here. So if I was to click on this cross and drag it towards her nose, you'll see that the radial blur now comes from her face. We can change the Area to blur again. And again, the Position to blur, Front or Back, or Box or Smooth. The last one we have is a Smoothing blur, and it's actually easier to show you this one on a pen tool, so if I just hide the Mona Lisa for now, draw a new layer, and then just draw a line, and you'll see, because I've got my Anti-Aliasing set to very, very low, we have these jagged edges here. So if we wanted this to look a little bit more anti-aliased, we could go to Filter>Blur>Smoothing, and you'll see the edges look a lot more anti-aliased. Back to the Mona Lisa, and I can show you the sharpening tools. So, we go to Filter > Sharp > Sharp, which sharpens our image. Filter > Sharp > Sharp Strong, which sharpens it even further. And the last one we have is an unsharp mask. Now, this one will be easier to show you with pen strokes again, so if I hide this one, draw a few different marks on the canvas, We should be able to see what this unsharp mask does. So I'll choose Unsharp Mask, and I want to turn the strength up first, and then we can turn the radius on, and you can see what that's doing is sharpening our edges. But as well as sharpening our edges, it's adding contrast to our edges. So where these colors are meeting, you can see that highlights and dark points are being made, and these parts are sort of popping away from each other. We can change the radius so that effects the radius of these contrast points. If I drag the radius up, you see they become more pronounced. We can change the strength. So as I drag that up, the sharpness and the contrast goes up. And we can change the threshold. So the lower the threshold, the more this contrast and sharpen effect will affect all of these parts here. So if I drag Threshold up, you'll see it starts to be limited to a smaller and smaller space. And obviously, once you're done with a filter, just press OK, and that will be applied to your image. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to use the more unusual miscellaneous filters.