lighting effects 'blur' image

[cees van den broek]

hello to you all,

whwn i use lighting effects on a (really) large image (850x300 cm at 100dpi) it "blurs" the image.
Anyone has an idea and better even: a solution?

greetings, Cees

 

[Tom Mann]

- You'll need to be a lot more specific, e.g., exactly what/which lighting effects?

- How much is the blur? A couple of pixels, or really profound?

- Can you post a couple of JPGs cropped from an example image, one before, one after the lighting effect was applied.

- What version of Photoshop?

- Do the same lighting effects not blur smaller versions of the same image? Where is the cutoff in size?

- Can you post your PSD file? Note: since it's likely to be too large for the forum software to accept, you'll likely have to make it available to us using dropbox or some similar file sharing service.

Tom M

 

[cees van den broek]

Good afternoon Tom,
I used the lighting effect 'five lights down' on Photoshop CC 2015
When the image is smaller the blurring effect is less. Posting a PSD is not possible, I'm forced to use the 'large file format', the entire image is over 6 gigabyte


thank you for your time and your help,
greetings, Cees

 

[Tom Mann]

Hi Cees -

Thanks for the info.

Please take your final PSB file (ie, one that illustrates the blurring) and:

1) Crop it down to something in the range of 1000 to 2000 pixels on the long side. Retain an area that illustrates the blurring. Do NOT use the "Image Size" tool - only use the crop tool.

2) Rename it (eg, add "-cropped version" to the file name) and re-save it as another PSB.

3) Close and then re-open PS, and then open the cropped PSB again. Is the blurring still there? If not, let us know.

4) If the blurring is still visible, I would like to examine this file. The cropped PSB should be small enough to either upload to dropbox, or even upload directly in the forum in the form of a zipped file.

Thanks,

Tom M

 

[Tom Mann]

Also:

What are the dimensions in pixels of the full sized version that exhibits the blurring?

How much memory do you have in your computer?

How much memory do you have on your graphic card?

Thanks,

Tom M

 

[cees van den broek]

Good evening Tom,
Even cropped and after a restart the image is still blurred
I don't know exactly how much memory i have on both items but my son (wellknown nerd) assures me it's plenty...
the entire image is 33465 x 11811 pixels
How can i sent you a zipped file? (1.95 gb)

greetings, Cees

 

[Tom Mann]

Hello again, Cees -

With respect to sending me a file, take a look at this concurrent thread:
How do you send images to people?

Personally, I'm OK with either of the first two methods that I mentioned in that thread, Dropbox and WeTransfer.com, with a reasonably strong preference for the second.

With respect to the size of your (full-rez) image versus the amount of memory you have, your image is about 100 times larger (in number of pixels) than a typical mid-sized image that (say) might be produced by a cell phone. Not to disagree with your son, but having sufficient memory to deal with such a huge image would be highly unlikely. Specifically, both of your pixel dimensions are about 10x larger than a normal, mid-resolution cell phone image. That means that the total number of pixels is about 10x10 = about 100x larger. So we don't waste time guessing at such things, please try to get the actual numbers and then we will unambiguously know where we stand.

With respect to sending me the cropped image, if you are going to use a file transfer service, there is no need to zip it. You can just send me the (cropped) PSB file. The only situation in which you would have need to zip it would have been if you had wanted to post it directly on the forum. If even after being cropped vthe image is that large, there is no way the forum software would accept it, so just use WeTransfer.com and post the link in the forum (or via private message).

I look forward to receiving it.

Best regards,

Tom M

 

[Tom Mann]

Also, once we solve the mystery of the blurring, we should move on to a separate discussion of why your image is that large. Low detail images like the one you posted typically do not need to be printed at 300 dpi when printed large. We can discuss this later.

'Nite.


Tom M

 

[cees van den broek]

Goodmorning Tom,
The image in't 300dpi but 100, it's just a very large object that needs to be sharp from a small distance
And i know how to send a file... i'm just not familiar with this forum... I can't seem to find a way to send you a personal message with my dropbox-info in it...
greetings Cees

 

[Tom Mann]

Good morning to you, as well

I apologize if I was "preaching to the choir" about basic PS concepts like ppi, how to send a file, etc. To be honest, we never know the level of sophistication of a new person who has joined the forum, so we want to make sure we don't overlook some basic issue a visitor may be having trouble with.

With respect to sending private messages on this forum, depending on whether you are looking at an index, a thread, a message, etc., you will see the menu item, "Private Messages" appear in the bar that runs across the top of some pages, as illustrated below. I can't wait to take a look at your cropped PSB file.

With respect to your problem, given the huge size of your file, unless your computer is quite special, and your son understands the special hardware needs for files this large, there is the very strong probability that your computer simply does not have enough memory or video memory to gracefully handle this file. This is why I keep urging you to find out the two numbers I asked about.

All the best,

Tom M

 

[cees van den broek]

Good afternoon Tom,
here come the results of the jury...

DDR4 16 GB
SSD 465 GB

Nvidia Geforce GTX600 2 GB VRAM

I will send the acces to my Dropbox by personal message.

Greetings, Cees

 

[Tom Mann]

Hi Cees - I received your files and I've been looking into this problem. I'll post my thoughts in just a moment.

Tom

 

[Tom Mann]

First, I wanted to let you know that I could reproduce the blurring problem that you reported using CC 2017, CC 2014, as well as the very first release of PS CC several years ago.

I used a machine that has 64 Gigs of RAM (ie, 4x what you have), as well as a newer video card than yours, whose driver I just updated less than a week ago. The blurring that I saw while attempting to use "5 downward lights" was absolutely identical to yours, so the problem does not seem to be related to hardware, memory, video card, or drivers.

I did a bit of searching for other reports of this problem, and there were reports of the same thing, as well as folks who tried to help out, and, like I did, went through the process of reproducing the problem on other hardware, other version of PS, etc.
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2002353
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/photoshop-2015-5-lighting-effects-filter-bug
etc.

It's obviously a bug, and the problem is considered un-resolved by Adobe.

The next thing that I did was to try to quickly (ie, approximately) simulate the "5 downward lights" preset in "Render / Lighting Effects" using the classical method of masked "levels" or "curves" adjustment layers using the full resolution image that was in your dropbox folder. My 1st step was to reduce the overall brightness of the scene so that when I added light to the 5 areas, it did not blow out the highlights in these areas. My layer stack looked like this:



Although I did all my work at the full 33k pixel wide version of your image, I can't post the results at such high resolution in the forum. So, In a few minutes, I'll upload the full resolution version to your dropbox folder. In the meantime, and for everyone else to see, here are the before and after shots down-rez'ed to around 3000 px wide so that they can be posted here:

Before:


After simulation of "5 lights down" effect using the classical method of masked "levels" adjustment layers:


To show that the old fashioned, manual method does not blur the image (like the "Render / Lighting Effects" approach does), here's a tiny crop of the full rez version:


Since I did not know the details of the lighting effects that you actually want, I did not spend any significant amount of time trying to make my demo look good. There are lots of things that you could do to improve / modify what I did. For example, you could paint individual masks on each light source (... I used the same mask for all 5 sources, just displaced from one source to the next...).

Similarly, if you wanted to better simulate the interactions of the "sources" (ie, my "levels" adjustments) with the background, you could adjust all the parameters that "levels" allows, as well as use the BlendIF commands. If you intended to use the "texture" feature of "Render / Lighting Efx", you could even simulate that using more basic tools, although you would probably find it tedious.

Unfortunately, since this problem has been known to Adobe for some years now, and they haven't done anything about it, you should probably resign yourself to taking a DIY (do-it-yourself) approach.

Sorry we couldn't help you more on this.

Best regards,

Tom M

 

[cees van den broek]

Hello Tom,
I'm glad the problem isn't entirely due to my ignorance and i'm very gratefull for your help.
The image you crated was just whwt i was aiming for and i realize masking is the only solution... the only problem is... i'm not that familiar with it.
I can't seem to create proper masks from a background that i rendered with lighting effects and to be perfectly honest i wouldn't know how to create the light effect using masks with levels and curves
Would you be so kind to write me step by step how you managed to do so?
Thank you very much for all the time you had spend on a nitwit like me.