High Pass Sharpening (WITHOUT HALOS) in Photoshop

hey Steve here and today I'm going to show you a step that you can add to the regular High Pass sharpening Photoshop technique that will banish those horrible sharpening halos forever now if you've ever struggled to get your images to look super sharp but without looking crunchy and over sharpened then in fact no matter which sharpening technique you actually use whether it's the high pass filter or something else then this technique will help if you need to my channel and you want to see more videos like this then remember to hit that subscribe button down below and if you like this video then just give it a thumbs up too and if you'd like to see how I organized all the seemingly random editing techniques that I've learned and taught over the years into a cohesive and structured editing workflow then just click the link in the description below this video to download my free workflow guide so before we actually run through the technique let me just zoom in on this rock here in the middle of the frame this is what we're going to be concentrating on as we can see here is a lot of potential detail that we can really bring out and make look super sharp so the first step if you're not familiar just run through it's quite simple the the high pass filter sharpening technique involves basically duplicating your layer and working on just a single layer here because I've merged for the purpose of this demo I've merged the layers all into one so I can just easily duplicate the background there if if you've got all your layers intact and then you'll need to just go edit sorry let's select all and then edit copy merged and then edit paste and that will basically just paste a new layer on top of all your other layers that are essentially a emerged version of your entire image so anyway this is the sharpening layer that we're going to be applying the effect to let's now go filter other and high-pass now for the purpose of this video I'm gonna over exaggerate the effect just because I think that it is pretty difficult unless you're looking at this video full screen on a very large monitor you might not see the the difference between the various sharpening you know when I turn it on and off and compare the before and after so I'm gonna over sharpen on purpose I'm going to use a radius here of 4.5 pixels I wouldn't usually go that high but as you'll see this technique that I'm gonna show you is actually gonna make it okay to use a radius this high anyway and so yeah that's that's why I'm going as high as 4.5 on the radius here let me click OK and we can already see this kind of weird gray layer now that see result of that high-pass filter you can see the edge particularly over here where we've got the brighter water up against the dark rock that's where halos are more likely to be apparent and we can see that in the high pass layer here however with that said there are also other sort of micro halos they're going to be all over the image that aren't necessarily as easy to see and that's what is going to cause the image to look over sharpened and crunchy so to convert this into a sharpening layer all we do is change the blend mode to overlay and there we go here's the before and here's after so this does look very over sharpened right now and if i zoom in even further and just have a look at this edge over here again we can see the halo that's been introduced so you can see there's like a bright edge that's gone out beyond the rock there and into the water so there's our prior edge that's been introduced by this sharpening effect so how we get rid of that is it's quite simple we go to channels panel if your channels panel isn't next to your layers panel over here then you can just go to window and then channels in the Photoshop menu we're gonna hold on a Mac that's command on the keyboard or on a PC that would be control we'll hold that and click once on the RGB Channel come back into layers and then make sure we've got our sharpening layer selected and then we're going to click the new layer mask icon down here and that is going to load a luminosity selection into a layer mask for this sharpening layer however it's currently the inverse of what we want so if we just have a look at the mask I'm gonna press alt or option and then click on the mask and that loads the mask interview what this is actually doing is masking out the shadows and keeping the highlights but what we actually want to do is mask out the highlights and keep the shadows so to do that all we need to do is invert the layer mask by pressing command or ctrl + I on the keyboard and that flips it around so that all the dark parts of this image are now white and the parts that are going to be masked out are the gray and black areas so if we just look back over here we can see the edge around here where that halo was now in the mask we've actually got a dark halo and what that's going to do it's going to mask this sharpening layer out more strongly so it's going to remove it more from that halo specifically then from the water over here which is slightly less dark in the mask that's what that looks like now if we just come back to the actual layer itself and toggle this off and on you can see that halo is greatly reduced now if we just disable this mask again we can see the difference so this is the sharpening layer with the layer mask and this is without so just watch that halo pop in and out of view as I toggle this off and on now the thing is the sharpening effect is still still there in the shadows of this image and for one reason or another that is actually what's gonna give us the yeah we're still gonna get a big benefit from the sharpening layer by still having it in the shadows and removing it from the highlights so when we toggle this layer off and on with the whole rock in full view we can see there that's a nice pop of sharpness and it doesn't look over sharpened or crunchy and all those halos around the edges and all those ones that we can't necessarily detect they're causing the image to go to look crunchy and over sharpened they are no longer an issue so here's yeah I'm just toggling the before-and-after of this effect on and off here now let me just show you the difference while looking at the whole rock if we disable the mask itself so here's without the layer mask and here's with so basically we're just masking it out of those brightest highlights because that's where things start to look too crunchy and over sharpened whereas in the shadows you can apply this effect a lot more strongly and it's all good so let me just zoom out and if we can see here looking at this from a bit more of a distant view that now looks really nice clean and sharp so yeah if you're on full screen hopefully you can see that thing too and that really is it in a nutshell the you know what we're actually doing here is using a luminosity mask if you're not familiar with the luminosity masking then you know what we did in the RGB channel over here by loading as a selection and then loading that in the layer mask you know if this the first time you've done something like this then congrats you've just created your first luminosity mask and you know there's a lot more that we can get into to further refine the mask itself if you know if this first iteration hasn't quite reduced the Halos by enough but that's probably beyond the scope of this video I've got some more videos on my channel about luminosity masking if you want to sort dive a bit deeper into into how to refine your luminosity masks and but this basically in a nutshell is the techniques so yeah I hope you found this video useful and remember to hit subscribe on my channel if you want to see more videos like this and yeah I hope you do and I hope to see you next time Cheers

Channel: Steve Arnold

Views: 3,617

Keywords: steve arnold, postprocessingmastery, photomasteryclub, photoshop tutorial, luminosity sharpening, high pass filter photoshop, tutorial

Id: FowvufpaIK0

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020