When an otherwise great image is a little blurry, you may be able to improve it dramatically with two Photoshop Elements tools, Shake Reduction and the High Pass filter.

Here's a blurry photo that needs sharpening. It's called blurry-photo.jpg, and you'll find it in your Ppart 6, lesson seven practice folder.

If I zoom in, you can really see the blur better. Some photos are so blurry that there's not much hope for them, but this one is promising. Let's see what we can do to fix it using Shake Reduction and a little known filter called High Pass. Press Ctrl J in Windows or Command J on a Mac to duplicate the photo. Double click on the name of the new layer and change it to Shake Reduction. Click on the layer to commit the change.

In the Menu Bar choose Enhance, Shake Reduction. When the Shake Reduction dialog box comes up, Photoshop Elements will create an outline around an area it wants to analyze. If you want to adjust the boundary of outline, click and drag from any of the handles. I'll make this big enough so that we can see all of her facial features inside the outline. You'll see a progress bar as Photoshop Elements analyzes the photo and applies sharpening. Once it's done, you can adjust the Sensitivity slider for the amount of effect you want. Dragging to the right will create a stronger effect. Move this again a little bit more to the right. And it's still creating that effect. So we'll wait just a moment.

You can click and drag another outline for Photoshop Elements to analyze if you wish, I'll make an outline around part of her hair. This one though, doesn't turn out quite as well. I can select any outline by clicking on the dot. So I'll delete this one by clicking on the X in the upper right corner. When you're satisfied, click OK.

If I click on the Visibility icon on the Shake Reduction layer, you can see that we've made progress. It isn't perfect, but the image is definitely sharper. At this point, you'll want to check for any area that's over sharpened. I'm seeing some white around the edge of our upper teeth so let's take care of that.

We'll use the same technique we've been using with masks on adjustment layers. This layer doesn't have a mask, but we can create one by clicking on the Add Layer Mask icon in the Layers panel and that adds a white mask to this layer. Let's zoom in and take care of the teeth.

Get the Brush tool and open Tool Options. Open the Brush Picker and choose a soft round brush from the default set of brushes. Set the opacity to 50% and the Mode to Normal. Then close Tool Options. Make sure the Foreground color chip is black. If it isn't, click on the curved double arrow icon to switch color chips. The shortcut for switching color chips is the letter X. When I press the letter X a few times you can see them switching and I'll end with black for the Foreground color.

Again why black? Because white reveals and black conceals. Right now the entire mask is white, revealing everything on this layer. Wherever I paint with black it will hide that part of the laye. On your document brush over any area you don't want sharpened, so I'll brush over her teeth. And that looks better to me.

You may want to remove other areas of sharpening. For example, her sweater is a little over-sharpened and you really don't want to call attention to her sweater. You want people to look at her face. When something is sharp, it attracts more attention. So I'll make my brush larger by pressing the right Bracket key and I'll brush over her sweater. Let's bring this up to 100% opacity by pressing the number zero. I'm going to avoid her hair because I do want that to be sharp. But the rest of this, her sweater and neck doesn't need to be sharp.

Also, her skin will look softer if you remove sharpening from there. I'll press the number 5 to reduce the brush opacity to 50% and brush just over her skin.

Avoid any features on her face. Those need to stay as sharp as possible.

To add the last bit of sharpening to your image, you can use a filter called High Pass, which is a strange name for a filter and very few people ever use it. You'll want to apply the High Pass filter on a new layer that's a snapshot of all the work you've done so far. The original layer plus the sharpened layer that's partially hidden by the mask.

Here is how to use a keyboard shortcut to create a snapshot, which in Photoshop Elements language is called a merged layer. Make sure that top layer in the Layers panel is active and visible. If the layer is invisible, the shortcut won't work. So make sure it's visible. Press Ctrl Alt Shift in Windows or Command Option Shift E on a Mac, and there is my merged layer. Double click on the name of the new layer and change it to High Pass, the name of the filter we're going to use. Click on the layer or press Enter to commit the change.

By the way, you won't find the shortcut for creating a merged layer listed in any of the menus. It's one of those insider tips that someone has to tell you or you won't know it.

Now you're ready to use a High Pass filter to add the last bit of sharpening. In the Menu Bar choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Remove Color to turn your image into black and white. Again in the menu, choose Filter, Other, High Pass. When the dialog box comes up, set the radius to 10 and click OK. In the Layers panel, click on the Blend Mode menu at the top that currently says Normal and change it to Soft Light.

Your photo will instantly look sharper, but it may also have areas that shouldn't be sharpened. To fix that you can use a layer mask. If I simply click on the Add Layer Mask icon in the Layers panel, I'll get a white mask, but I want a black mask. And the way to do that is to press Alt in Windows or Option on a Mac and click on the Add Layer Mask icon. And that hides the High Pass filter effect completely because you get a black mask.

Now use a brush tool with the Foreground color set to white to paint in the High Pass filter effect only where you want it such as the facial features. So let's zoom in a little bit here. And I want to make sure my brush is at 100% by pressing zero. I'll adjust the size of my brush, and I'll begin to paint in some of the High Pass effect. You'll want to just do it over the edges of her facial features, not over her skin. So along here, her lips, and I might zoom out and also do her hair a little bit because she has very pretty hair. And I'd like it to be a little bit more visible.

Now right here, that's too much so I'll press X to get black, and I'll paint that away.

Let's take a look at the original image. I'll press AltT in Windows or Option on a Mac and click on the Visibility icon of the background image to hide every layer but the background and then I'll press Alt or Option and click on it again to show our new image with its sharpened features.

So that's how to dramatically improve a slightly blurry photo using Shake Reduction and the High Pass filter.