6 Ways to Sharpen In Photoshop Without Plugins

hello Blake grutas here with everyday HDR and HDR insider comm and today I'm going to talk about six ways that you can sharpen your images like a pro without using a single plug-in we're going to do it all right here in Photoshop these methods are so sharp they just might cut you high that was that was pretty bad anyway make sure you stick around to the end because there's an actions package for you that has all of these methods all in a single action that all you have to do is press play and they will work however I strongly strongly encourage you to watch all of these methods so that you understand how to use those actions when it comes time so we've got a lot to cover let's go ahead and jump right in okay so before we get too far into the sharpening methods there's some things that I want to cover here typically people will say to sharpen at the end of your photo sets after you've done all the noise reduction all the things you're going to do sharpening at the end and I'd say that that's probably one of the best notions to go by you can sharpen pretty much at any time during your workflow but you have to understand something if you sharpen your image and then you straighten horizon during the straightening of the horizon it's going to throw off some of the sharpening that you did by the way that the pixels move and shift in order to straighten the image so you're going to have to sharpen after you straighten the horizon so that's why it's a good idea to just make sure you do the sharpening when you're done a couple of other things you definitely want to sharpen if you're going to print you don't want to sharpen if you're going to put it on Facebook Facebook has Auto sharpening in the upload process so when you upload an image and you've sharpened it and then you look at it you're like wow that is wicked sharp I know I didn't sharpen it that much that's because Facebook is doing some sharpening on top of that you want a sharpen image before you print but not to the point that you get crunchy artifacts and we'll talk about that as we go through here and you also want to do some noise reduction but you don't want to do noise reduction to the point that everything becomes creamy because the thing about prints and if you look at just the beginning of photography film photographs were created from grain so there definitely is some grain there don't get so obsessed with having your image so clean of noise that there is no Grainne and don't get so obsessed with your sharpening that your sharpening becomes offensive so let's go ahead and get into these six sharpening techniques we're going to go over global sharpening and then also some sharpening that's selective and then there's even a series of actions that I've created that are going to have every one of these sharpening methods that I discussed in this tutorial so we've got a lot of stuff to get into let's go ahead and talk about the first sharpening method which is the unsharp mask so as in the beginning of this we want to do this on our finished product so I'm going to press alt or option on this bottom layer and show you all the work that I've done from this point on so I'm at the end of my workflow I used the digital zone system for color and this is on a three exposure tone mapped image out of photo maddox and then I use my colors own system for color I use something called the contrast checker that I used to make sure that there's enough contrast in the image and then I used something called customized glow which is new hasn't been released yet it's going to be in one of my next courses that really makes your image pop off the page and then I did some stamping to remove some distractions and then some noise reduction in the end in case any of the noise got enhanced from the process so even I do some noise reduction at the end of my image processing rather than at the beginning because sometimes when you're messing with tone and color like that you can increase the noise along the way and then I did some color grading now I'm going to press ctrl shift E to flatten this image that I'm working with a zero one layer essentially all of this stuff sandwich down and the reason is typically I'll do my sharpening on the top of my image but with some of these methods I'm going to show you it might be kind of time-consuming even with 32 gigs around my machine what you just saw all that work was probably about 30 some layers of work in order to get that so what I want to do is make sure that I sandwich this down so I'm just working on one layer to make it easier so now my new press command or ctrl J to duplicate this image and then what I want to do is I'm going to zoom in on the background here and the reason why is because the unsharp mask gives you a preview but it's not a very good one so zoom in to something that you definitely want sharpened and if we look at this this is haystack rock and it's got a lot of nice I guess algae or growth or something on it it's beautiful but it's not in focus so where my focus was was about right here but I'd actually write this rock right here is where my focus was on so if we look at this we can actually pull this out using some of our sharpening techniques so sometimes sharpening isn't just used to make your image look better and sharper and have crisp edges sometimes it's actually used to make your image make areas that are out of focus come back into focus so I'm going to go to filter go to sharpen and go to unsharp mask so if we look at the unsharp mask you got an amount of 150% a radius of one point on a threshold so pretty much the way I do this is I leave the threshold at zero the radius is going to control how large the sharpening is so the bigger the radius the more area it's covering so the smaller the area the more my new details are actually going to be rendered here so I like to leave visit about one pixel so that it the sharpening happens on that my new area of the image instead of this large effect here where we get almost as really bad HDR look okay so just leave this at 1.0 and then the amount we adjust accordingly to taste so if we leave the threshold at 0 and the radius at 1 we can now adjust the amount here or this percentage amount of how much sharpening we want typically I say about a hundred and fifty percent is good so just go and press ok and now we can zoom into here and see so what are we looking at well we definitely have some nice sharpened area there now let's look at this rock that was in focus and see just how much better the sharpening is there now this is a global process so if you don't want sharpening somewhere you're going to have to add a mask and then paint in those areas that you don't want the sharpening so I'm going to select my brush by pressing B make sure that it's set to black by pressing D to default them and then you see down here I'm going to make them the X and press to make black so when you press D it's going to default your color palette to black and white and when you press X it'll switch them on the fly so you can paint white and black switches on the fly it's great for masking so I'm going to do is I'm just to make a little bit of larger brush by pressing the right bracket key and then slowly paint in back here so that this sharpening is not affecting that background area okay so that is how you would turn a global sharpen into something a little bit more local by selecting the areas that you want but there are better methods for this let's move on to another global method now the next method is something called high-pass sharpening which you're probably familiar with but what I'm going to do is press command or control J to duplicate the background layer I'm going to change this to something called linear light and it's going to look horrible and that's okay I'm going to go to filter go to other and go to high-pass and here is where you get to control just how sharp this image is with that linear light some people go soft light and then bring this up to 8 i've seen best results between 0.5 and 1 with linear light and we'll go ahead and press ok this is a high-pass sharpen layer and you can really leave it at that but here's a really cool thing you can do with the high-pass sharpen layer you can go and make a new curves adjustment layer press alt or option on top of there and now if we look at this layer this layer is pretty much gray or what's 50% gray but if you look really close you see that there's actually some darker areas and some lighter areas so with this curves adjustment what we want to do is we want to leave a point right in the middle so that no matter what our gray values stay gray and if if you put a point in the middle here it actually goes up a little bit make sure that these inputs and outputs are set to 128 because 128 is our mid-tones so we're protecting our mid-tones by keeping our mid-tones there let's just go ahead and press alt or option on this layer so that we can see what we're doing here now as we move this up or down it's going to make our high-pass sharpen layer a little bit darker but if we move that down and a little bit lighter if we move it up and you see when it does that it's actually changing the shadows in our image and we can do the same thing with our highlights but you notice how there's a glowing edge around some of those areas let's see what happens to the sharpening layer when we do that so if we turn that curves layer off and turn it on look at the difference now we've really popped out some of that stuff now it's a little too much so we can bring that that black layer up maybe bring the highlights down a little bit and see where we are from square one so here we are at square one here is our high path sharpen it's a good sharpen but let's go ahead and zoom into that haystack rock and see what happens when we change from our lights and darks in the curve so if we bring this down it makes our darks a little bit darker in that Highland that Carpinteria if we bring our highlights up really pops our highlights out so now that haystack rock went from something that was out of focus to something that was clearly way in focus and of course this is a little too much so what we can do is lower the opacity on here or maybe even lower the opacity on our curves adjustment layer it's also a good idea to make sure that curves adjustment layer is set to luminosity so it only affects the tone and doesn't bring any color along with it and that would be our second global adjustment at this point we could make a mask on here for two different things we could make a mask on here for a high pass sharp and layer to reduce any of the sharpening in areas that we don't want by painting in black or we can do that on that curves adjustment layer say we like the curve that we have for maybe some of these rocks but we don't want that in the background we can then paint black on the background to bring some of that area back to the thing with sharpening is that you don't want to take it too far so here our rock looks like it's very well sharpened okay so it definitely looks very well sharpened almost looks like you can grab it now you can see the water running off of that rock very very nice and back here on haystack Rock same thing alright so now we're going to move on to a method that actually uses a high-pass sharpen on top of an unsharp mask and still gives you the ability to adjust a curve this is another crazy way to sharpen your image all right so to do this this High Pass sharpen on top of an unsharp mask we're going to press command or control J we're going to go to filter we're going to go to sharpen and we're going to go to unsharp mask now we'll just leave the unsharp mask from the exact same settings we had before press ok and now we're going to do is change that to linear light so now we're high-pass sharpening and unsharp mask and go to other and go to high-pass and we're going to leave that at 0.9 so we can see here that we have a really really well-done sharpen for that background area it's almost as if that haystack Rock area is in perfect focus even though I had no focus on that rock on haystack rock period and then you got this rock here if we turn the sharpening layer on and off it's very well sharpened almost too sharpened so at that point we could go in here and we could drop the opacity a little bit on here we could also zoom into here and make that curves adjustment layer so curves adjustment layer on top of there alt or option so that it only affects that high-pass sharpen unsharp mask make sure this is set at 128 128 so that we don't change any of our mid-tones and now if maybe the highlight portions of our sharpen were too much we can just drop that down and as we drop that down it reduces the amount of sharpening on our highlight areas same thing with our shadows if we bring it down it's going to increase our shadow sharpening if we bring it up it's going to reduce our shadow sharpening almost to the point that it starts to create a blur so you see how sharpening and blurring are very close to one another sharpening and noise reduction are very close to one another one kind of blurs and blends pixels and another one makes the edges on the pixels nice and clean Dodd's zoom out and see what's happening to our haystack rock in the background here and there's the before and there's the after again another thing that's going to be global if you want to make your adjustments on here you click this layer make a mask and paint in black on areas that you don't want to be affected because sometimes you don't want the entire image to be sharpened especially with those clouds in the background we want those to remain smooth and creamy and if we want those to remain smooth and creamy we definitely have to you do some masking there so now what we're going to do is go in and look at some sharpening methods that are very selective in nature by the way that we create them the first one we're going to look at is Adobe Camera Raw sharpening all right so I'm using Photoshop CC so all I have to do to use Camera Raw for the sharpening capabilities is press command or control J on my background layer to duplicate it press ctrl shift a ctrl shift a is the hotkey for the filter the Adobe Camera Raw filter however I have to say that this only works in Photoshop CC if you're using anything before Photoshop CC you can't do it this way you'll have to save the image and then bring it back into Photoshop as a tiff so that you can work on it and it'll be Camera Raw by going back into Adobe Camera the benefit of CC is definitely having Photoshop CC as a filter so we're going to find the sharpening is in the details section typically when we look at the details section here you're going to see that we have a radius again and then we also have a detail and an amount very much like our radius and our threshold and our amount that you see in the unsharp mask it's very very similar let me go and zoom in here and show what we're going to do with this so let's go and take a look at the radius first if we increase the radius let's just go and bring our sharpening all the way up so we can see what happens that amounts all the way up we increase the radius to 3 pixels you can see that it becomes a very large sharpen and move it down to 1 pixel it's a very small sharpen we can zoom in even closer and see this but like I said before you see how this is kind of getting what I call crunchy it almost looks like a like it took a bag of potato chips crunch them up and threw them onto a table and you see all the little sharp edges on each one of those little individual chips so you see as you bring the radius up we also kind of get a glow around the edges this isn't what we want I would never take my sharpening in Adobe Camera all up to 150 typically I will leave the radius at 1 let's go ahead and bring our detail up and down so you can see what happens with detail detail is like an amplified slider so I'll take all of your detail in your image and amplify the amount of detail that comes along with that sharpening I would typically leave this between 5 and 15 so if you leave this between about 5 and 15 let's just say 10 pixels for this you can then adjust the amount of your sharpening based on the amount and that's it now what you're looking at is that this is sharpening the entire image right well there's a masking capability down here if you move the masking to the right it's masking something but you have no idea what it's masking if you press alt or option while you click on that mask and move it it's going to show you the areas in black are not being affected by your sharpen and areas in white are being affected by our sharp and you see how this isn't like an automatic protection for your shadow areas typically I will tell all the people when I'm doing any kind of tutorial in sharpening is that you do not want to sharpen your shadows because a lot of times you get color noise in those shadows and that color noise really comes out when you sharpen so we press alter option here you can see that a lot of our shadow areas are being protected and a lot of our highlight areas are being protected we move all the way over and it's pretty much only touching some of our mid-tone areas there so it's going to move that to about 50 and see what happens it's going to zoom into some of these areas here so we if we bring the masking all the way down bring the masking all the way up to where we had about 50 you can see this some of our our shadow areas are being protected they're mainly in this is going to be our highlight areas I'll show you another technique for protecting shadows so here we have pretty much just our highlight areas being protected and anything in the background or clouds are not being sharpened now like I told you before you can use a mask and you can paint that area in but in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom you press alt or option on that masking and it'll show you exactly what you're sharpening what you're not sharpening so that you can mask out areas that you don't want to be sharpen negatively like we said before in those clouds you press ok and that will bring you right back into Photoshop and you now have your sharpening that you've just done in Adobe Camera Raw right here has a layer in Photoshop definitely a very helpful tool to have Photoshop CC as a filter and I'm an Adobe advocate I do not get paid by them but I will tell you this Adobe Camera Raw as a filter is worth $9.99 a month boom done dropping like so now I'm going to show you one of my favorite ways to sharpen it's a very very selective way to sharpen because what you're doing is you're really navigating the viewers eye to a certain area our viewer is going to be attracted to certain number of things in our photographs number one areas of high saturation number two areas of highlight so your white area so where the eye is going to navigate to first and then you're going to navigate to areas of high detail so there's certain things are going to pop out and grab you right away and then there's other things that your eye is going to navigate around to look for so let's go ahead and pick on haystack rock because it's kind of out of focus so I'm going to do is control click here make a new layer I'm going to click on my sharpen tool that's right here make sure it's at the 25% sample all layers protect details unchecked and if you're using a Wacom tablet you can use this for pressure sensitivity if you'd like I'll go ahead and use it because I have a Wacom tablet and I'm just going to go ahead and start painting in on this area and you'll see it might not be working so fast but we have a trick to speed this up so I'm gonna press alt or option on the side wall so I can show you that these are the areas that are going to be sharpened and I'll just go ahead and paint the entire haystack rock here now this one is really tricky you don't want to speed it up by going to something like 50% because it will create some really nasty crunchy artifacts that you don't really want let's press alt or option and see the sharpen that we've got on our haystack rock here and I'm just going to go ahead and fill in some of these other areas and I'm just being really casual about it press alt or option on there and see okay we're doing pretty well so now we can do is very similar to that last technique with the unsharp mask on the high pass sharpen well change this to linear light we'll go to filter we'll go to other and we'll go to high pass so now we've got a linear light high-pass very similar to what we did with the unsharp mask now if you if you set your brush at 50% or 75% because you wanted to speed things up and then try this it's going to get really nasty so don't do that just leave it at 25% and even the smallest of areas that you end up getting in your brush so if you have a soft edge brush even some of those soft areas are going to get this this detail enhancement you can see that as we bring this up so let's go ahead and keep that radius between 0.5 and 1 I know press okay we're about 0.8 and we'll zoom in here and we'll see we've got some really pretty crazy sharpening happening here on this this high past sharpened sharpen tool very selective way because you paint in that sharpening the problem with using just the sharpen tool without using the high-pass sharpen with it as it takes a long time to build that up and when you do build it up a lot of times you get really bad artifacts from sharpening too much with the sharpen tool so using the high-pass sharpen with the end with the sharpening tool it's a really great way to pull out some of that detail that wasn't there before and last but not least I want to show one of my favorite techniques for sharpening I talked about sharpening not sharpening your highlights and not sharpening your shadows and only really sharpening your mid-tones so how do we do that in a way that we don't have to use a complex mask well let's do this command ctrl J to duplicate our background layer go to our linear light go to filter other high pass and we'll change that to something like 1.04 this will work so 1.0 press ok so now we've got a really strong global sharpen happening to our entire image let's go ahead and pick on haystack rock because it's got a lot of stuff here for us to look at when we do this there's some shadow areas right in here and there's also some highlight areas right here so let's look at ways that we can protect those areas if we double click right here it's going to open us up into what's called the layer Styles okay so now down here you have something called blend if and what that means is that if the underlying layer is black or white we want to protect it from what's happening with this layer so we want to protect our shadows watch what happens as we move the black part over you see what happens back there as we move this over way back in that back area everything in the shadow area is up to at 128 our mid-tones is now protected but it's happening in a very quick way meaning it's very blocky so if we press alter option we can say okay protect everything in like say zone 0 sorry darkest darks will not have any sharpening whatsoever press alt or option and let's move this up to about maybe our zone 3 or zone 4 area so that our mid-tone areas our zone 4 and zone 5 we'll still have the sharpening same thing over here let's go ahead and press ok and we're going to zoom in to our background here so we can really see this so you can see that in the background we have a lot of this area that is sharpened that we don't want sharpened so I'll double click here and we'll look at our layer Styles again we'll move this over and you start to see that boom right there at about this mark which is a two away that's about zone eight and about zone eight we don't want that to be sharpened at all because what that's doing is it's sharpening our background area press alt or option to split this and boom we now have our highlights and our shadows completely protected from a sharpening so we'll zoom in here to this rock did we sharpen the rock we sure did but our highlights and our shadows are protected along the way let's look at haystack rock did we sharpen it we sure did but our highlights and shadows are separated so a sharpening it's definitely one of those things that you want to do it with all your images but you want to be careful with it you don't want to take it too far because if you take it too far things get really nasty and really crunchy and it just doesn't look good so I know that was a lot to cover so what I did was I created a series of actions for you that do all of this work for you so let's look at these actions okay so after you open that dot etienne file you're going to see right here this sharpening with Blake Curtis okay so the first one was the unsharp mask if you press play it's going to create an unsharp mask layer it's going to be already done for you and it's also going to open up as a smart object because some images are going to have a higher pixel count than others so you're unsharp mask might need to be stronger or slider than mine so I'll even tell you a message here the new sharpened layer is now a smart object at any time you can adjust that smart object by double clicking right here at the unsharp mask it will bump that unsharp mask and it will let you go ahead and go about your day let's just look at the next one press play on the high pass same exact thing it's going to run through it's going to do a high pass sharpen and then it's going to give you that curves adjustment layer that's right here so you just put that you have to put that midpoint there yourself at 128 128 and now you can move this up and down to get your your high pass sharpen so it gives you a high pass sharpen layer and also gives you a curves adjustment layer with that high pass sharpen just like I showed you in that that module same thing here the unsharp mask plus the high pass press play it's going to duplicate your background layer it's going to do an unsharp mask then it's going to do the high pass on the unsharp mask and give it to you on a smart filter so at any time you can go back through and you can double click any of these areas for either the high pass or for the unsharp mask so if we double click that it'll bring us back to the high pass if you need more or less you adjust it accordingly double click the unsharp mask and it'll do the same thing for you there you can redo the unsharp mask as you see fit and then you also have your curves adjustment layer here so that you can do the same exact thing because it's a high pass layer and it's got that gray tone to it make sure that you protect your grays but making that 128 128 and now you are free to go in and adjust your sharpening accordingly all right next one Adobe Camera Raw as a filter press play by default what it's going to do is it's going to go right into Adobe Camera Raw as a filter make all the settings for you and then allow you to adjust that as a smart object so if you want to go back in there the default settings that I've chosen we'll be there that 1:50 at one point Oh with a detail of 10 so kind of what we talked about in that last module so make sure that you go in there and you adjust yours accordingly as well because you might need a different mask on there also remember this will only work in Photoshop CC if you don't have Photoshop CC number for action will not run the next action we have here is the sharpen tool that little wicked sharpen tool now here's the thing if you press play here it's not going to do anything if you go to 5 a it's going to create your new sharpen layer it's going to tell you use the sharpen tool from the menu make sure a sample all layers is selected and then once you've done that after you've sharpened something up a little bit it's already gonna have your sharpen tool set by default so we'll just click here after you've done that you go to 5 B and press 5 B right on that on sharpen and that's going to tell you that you want to keep this between 0.5 and 1.0 so there's all these messages along the way that will give you reminders on what you're supposed to be doing press ok and then it's also going to give you the curves adjustment layers you can adjust that curve on top just like we talked in the module on the sharpen method and then the last but not least is to protect highlights and shadows one go ahead and press play on this it'll make a new layer and it'll tell you about the curve adjustment layer that it's putting on top of there and I'll also by default it'll have those areas protected that we discussed in the video it's a little less on the highlights side but definitely you don't want those shadow areas to be adjusted for your sharpening definitely want to protect shadows from sharpening otherwise they get think that really noisy color noise in there we'll press ok if at any time you want to use this blend if on any of the other options you can so just because it's protected here doesn't mean you can't do that with something like this one we'll go ahead and press play on this unsharp masking high-pass so press play on that action it will run us through some of them take longer than others awkward silence press Continue and then here if we double click right here it's already done the unsharp mask for us let's go ahead and zoom in here if we wanted to protect certain areas we just double click inside those blending options and protect it just as we did in that module so we'll move this over and protect those shadow areas alter option to split it same thing with our highlights that to me is the best sharpening method known to man is when you protect your highlights and your shadows no matter what sharpening method you choose that shadows and highlights protection is really important so that your shadow areas don't become really crunchy so now I hope you know just about everything you need to know about sharpening in Photoshop and realize that you don't need any plugins to do sharpening it's all right here in Photoshop you've got the unsharp mask that we discussed you've got the high pass you've got unsharp mask on a high pass you've got Adobe Camera Raw which is one of the most powerful programs in the world to use on raw images especially for the noise reduction and for the sharpening you also have the sharpen tool where you can really use that very selective sharpening that we we can get really crazy about and really make certain things really sharpened don't take it too far remember and then we have the protection measures that we can put in place on any one of these sharpen layers there's a lot of stuff to understand what sharpening but the thing is don't go over sharpened because if you over sharpen it's really hard to correct for especially if you save your image afterwards you don't want to sharpen for Facebook you do want to sharpen for print sometimes if I sharpen when I put stuff on my website I don't sharpen it as much as I would for sharpening for print because in print I want things to pop out a little bit more so it's sometimes it's a good idea to take your sharpening measures a little bit higher in print than you would if you're posting it online because things will look different on that printed medium or where the ink goes up against those edges so once again my name is Blake Brutus with everyday HDR and HDR insider comm and this is just about everything I know about sharpening in Photoshop if you like this please comment on it share it there's a lot of stuff here with these actions going over to everyday HDR and download those actions because they're available for you thank you very much for watching this you you you

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 80,773

Keywords: Sharpening Actions, Sharpening in Photoshop, 6 ways to sharpen a photo, Sharpen photo without plugins, Blake Rudis, HDR9

Id: I8A3fspL1x0

Length: 30min 1sec (1801 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2015