- Hey, guys, this episode
I'm gonna show you how to sharpen an image in Photoshop. (upbeat theatrical music) Hey, guys, welcome to Kelvin Designs. My name is Kelvin and I design, and that's why it's called Kelvin Designs. Click right here to subscribe
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get the source files to this episode and every other
tutorial that I do for free. In this episode, I'm gonna show you how to sharpen an image in Photoshop. There's a bunch of different
ways using different tools, different filters, and why
should you use some over others, and sometimes should you mix them. I'm gonna go over a few different images and show you different techniques
for different problems, how to salvage a blurry photo, or how to accentuate some detail that you wanna focus attention to. So let me show you. All right, so once you've
downloaded the files to follow along on this tutorial, you'll get this folder here. And let's open up this
first one in Photoshop. I'm in the Essentials workspace. If it doesn't look like this,
click on Essentials down here. And you can also reset Essentials, which will make it come back to this in case you've changed it. And you might note that
I'm in Application Frame just to hide everything in the background. That's over here in the Window
menu, Application Frame. All right, so you can
see I'm at 16% down here. That means I'm zoomed out, so I'm gonna hit Command
+ Plus a couple times. Here we go. 100. On a PC, that's Control + Plus. All right, so the first sharpening
method I'm gonna show you is unsharp masking, which
is probably the most common. To do this, let's go ahead
and make a copy of this layer by dragging it to the new layer icon and then right-clicking over here and Convert to Smart Object. This is so that we don't do
anything destructive, okay? We're gonna down to Filter, Sharpen, and Unsharp Mask. All right, I usually start at
a hundred and, let's say, 0.3. This is my starting point on Unsharp Mask, and you can see before and after. It's very, very minor. You probably can't see
anything in the video. And this is where I like to start. There's already quite a bit
of detail in this photo, so let's go maybe up
to something like 130, and let's bring this up to
0.8, something like that. Before, after. Now I'm getting quite a bit of a detail. Holding down the Space
Bar gives you the handle so I can move around and look around. Before, after. You don't wanna overdo it. In this case, there's so much detail, and it's not getting too, it's not getting too distracting. It's a little bit, but it's
pretty good. It's not bad. All right, so the radius is
what gives you the thickness of the sharpness on the
edges between colors? So if I bring this up, you'll see that it almost
gives you a glowing effect or a really bad HDR type of look. You don't want that unless you're trying to do some illustrative sort of look. which is not really what
we're covering here. But so you wanna keep
that radius really small, and the higher resolution you have, the thinner you can go because
you'll have very thin lines determining the detail, right? Now the intensity or the amount up here is how much you wanna sharpen, okay? So how distinct those little
lines are going to be, okay? I usually like to be between a hundred and 150, 60, or something like that. Again, you don't wanna overdo sharpening. It's overly done everywhere, and it's not necessarily very pleasant. Okay, and the threshold I
keep at zero, all right? So let's do 130.8. That's pretty good for this
image to see before and after. Okay, now, as you can see, because I converted to Smart
Object, it's down here, and if I say, "Oh, you know
what, it's a little too sharp," double-click into here and I
can turn it down to 120 or 0.7. Hit OK, and we're good. That was a nondestructive
way of doing that. All right, so that's the unsharp masking, probably the simplest and easiest way of sharpening an image, okay? All right, so to get to our next image, let's just go to the Finder and open up the second one here. Whoops. Over here. All right, so this is kind
of an urban landscape. Let's zoom in to 100% again. I recommend doing all
sharpening at 100% or more, but 100% is really good. All right, so this is kind
of an urban landscape, which is where I use the sharpening that is available with Camera Raw. Now please note that this
technique is only available with Photoshop CC. Anything prior to that
will not work this way. If you do not have Photoshop CC, you can just skip to the
next sharpening method. All right, so first thing I'm gonna do is duplicate this layer,
and then right-click it, and convert to Smart Object. Okay, and we're gonna go to Filter, Camera Raw Filter up here, okay? All right, and, once again, let's zoom in. Get a better look at what we're doing. I wanna see some of this brick, some of these bricks here. Okay, a couple of things. First off, you got in
this third panel here, you have sharpening or the detail. You have sharpening and noise reduction. Once again, it's kinda
like the unsharp masking. The amount here is the intensity, and the radius down here is
how fat those lines are, okay? I like to keep this, once again, very low on the radius and a
little higher on the amount. And you can keep the detail there. Now you can see that we've gotten... You're gonna hold on the
Space Bar to move around. We're getting a lot of
grain coming out here, okay? Pretty strong. We can actually click
over here on this little, cycles between before-after views here so we can get a sense of how
it was and where we're at now. All right, so let's try to turn down the radius a little bit, turn it up to see what it does. You see, it gives you
that kind of a HDR look, which you don't really want. All right, let's turn down the sharpening. We just want a little bit. It's kind of nice in bricks,
something like that, okay? Now there's another thing. Imagine I'm sharpening up here. You see this in the sky here,
you get a bunch of noise? So you got masking, all right? And the masking is basically gonna make it so it doesn't sharpen everywhere. If you hold down the Alt or Option key while you hold down the masking, everything that's black over there means it won't get the sharpening, okay? So there you go. Now the sharpening is still on the bricks but not in the clouds, which is nice, so you don't have all that noise and all the artifacts
showing up in the clouds. You can bring that up a little bit more. Okay, all your shadows are protected and all your highlights are
protected, which is nice. Okay, and you can see that we've sharpened maybe a little too much. I would still tone this down. And let's take a look down
here at the buildings. So before, after. Okay. There's another thing. So I would still tone this... I still feel like this
is a little too strong and it's pretty sharp to begin with, but we get a little more
sharpening, so that's pretty good. All right, another thing you can do, and it's not really sharpening per se, but it gives you a feel of
sharpening, which is clarity. Just increase the clarity a little bit, okay, something like this, and it gives you that
sense of sharpening, okay? Hit OK. Now, before, after, okay? All right, we'll get into fine tuning some of these sharpening
methods, but for now, I want you to see this is a little, it's actually quite a bit too strong, but that is the camera raw method, okay? Let's go back to the Finder
and open up the third image. And in this image, let's go
ahead and make a duplicate. Now for this tool, so I'm gonna show you the sharpening tool. On this method, this is destructive. You cannot do a Smart Object and go ahead and apply it on that because it will not work. This is destructive. And so you go here to the
little, it looks like a drop. Click on it, you get the Sharpen tool. Okay, and so you have Protect Detail, I highly recommend you check
that, and Sample All Layers. Sample All Layers means
we're gonna go ahead and create a new blank layer, and by sampling, it means
it's gonna take everything. That's if you have a bunch of layers, it's gonna put it all into this new layer, and it's gonna apply the
sharpening to it, okay? I'm gonna go ahead and just reduce my brush
size just a little bit. My hardness down to 25, okay. And I think we're pretty good. The strength is 30%,
which is pretty strong, but it's pretty good. All right, so I'm just gonna
start brushing over here on the eyes and on all that little detail. Move around. Let's go get his ear. Here up in his fur. Up here like this. Okay, on his nose and
his mouth. Those paws. I mean, there's a pretty, there's a pretty shallow
depth of field here where this is very sharp and right behind his chin it's blurry. So we already have a pretty
shallow depth of field, which means that whatever is in focus is gonna become extremely in focus, like his eyes and his forehead here, a little bit of his ears, his paws. That looks like a piece of walnut. All right, something like this, okay? Maybe sharpen a little
bit of his fur over here even though it is a little blurry. Okay. All right, let's take a look. Before, after. Before, after. It's pretty impressive
what this tool can do. It has been completely
redone since the old days, and the algorithms, the method that it uses
to create that sharpness, is actually unlike any other. I highly recommend this,
especially for portraits, not just squirrels. So, anyway, this looks pretty nice. All right, so let's go back to the Finder and open up the fourth image. All right, so I'm gonna
show you something, a method that you probably
may have seen before, and it's using the High Pass. To do that, the first thing you do is you duplicate this, your layer, and let's go ahead and
convert it to a Smart Object. Okay, and let's go ahead and name it Blur. And let's go ahead and
duplicate this one again, and let's call it this
one High Pass, okay? High Pass being at the
top, Blur in the middle, and your background back there. Let's hide the High Pass for now. Go to Blur, and just simply go to the Blur and Gaussian Blur, and let's just do something
like three pixels for now, okay? It's pretty strong. I did the Smart Object so
we can go back and say, "Oh, you know what, it
was a little too strong. Let's undo that," okay? Hit OK. And now let's go to High Pass, and Filter, and Other, and High Pass right here. Let's keep it the same, three
pixels, like we did the Blur, Hit OK, and let's go over
here in your blending modes and put it on Linear Light, okay? So you can see... Let's just hide these. You can see before and after. Pretty remarkable, right? Before, after. Now we can actually select
these two with the Shift and then create a group by clicking the little group icon here. We can call this Sharpening. Okay, now it's in a group, which means that if I create
a mask like so on the group, we can go ahead and fill the... Here we go, fill with,
let's fill it with black. Okay, that's the mask. Now it's hiding everything
that's within that group. So if we take a brush, b for brush, and let's just make this
a little bit smaller. Something like, that's decent. Okay, now if I go in here
using the white, okay? I'm basically going to reveal in the mask. So I'm saying I wanna be sharp over here. I wanna be sharp over here. Over here, over here.
Maybe a little over here. So I'm really selecting where I want it. I'm not applying it everywhere. I don't need to sharpen
this area in the background that's actually out of focus because that would just
bring out more artifacts and grain and noise and so on, all right? So before and after, all right? So the nice part about
creating Smart Objects is if you're like, "Well,
it's a little too sharp," once again, let's zoom in 100%. It's just too sharp. It's too much. You can go in here, double
click the High Pass. Let's bring that down to two. Okay, that's better. Okay, and let's go to the Gaussian Blur and bring this down to two. Okay, that actually sharpened
it a little bit more. Let's try to bring it to five, see how that looks. So it's getting a soft edge around here, almost like a diffused lighting. It's kind of interesting. Okay, I'm gonna bring us down to, I'm gonna bring it back to three. I kinda liked it like that, okay? All right, zoom out. And there you go. So that's the High Pass method, okay? Now I'm gonna open up this next image, and I wanna show you that you can actually
mix all of these methods, and it's not like one method
is better than another. It's depending on what you, what's your photo's like,
if it's just a small area, if you have a lot of detail, and so on. So here we have a photo of this camera. Very shallow depth of field. It looks like we have
some chromatic aberration. And if you zoom in here, you have some, yeah, you see that chromatic aberration. And usually using the unsharp masking, that usually has a tendency to really accentuate the
chromatic aberrations. All right, one thing I
recommend when you have this is using unsharp masking, but we're gonna go through
another mode, all right? So what this means is you go to Image. Once you have a flattened
image, you go Mode, and instead of RGB, you got to Lab. All right, now without
getting into too much detail of what everything is, once you
click on your channels here, Lab is comprised of lightness, a and b. A and b is your color, and lightness is
essentially all the detail. If I turn off a and b, it looks like a black and white image, and if I turn off lightness, it's just a bunch of color, all right? Or lack of. So if I go to just my lightness channel but I show all of them
affecting just the lightness, and if I go to Filter and Sharpen and Unsharp Mask, I will be able to sharpen
this image, right? Without affecting the color at all. Let's zoom in a little bit so we can see what we're doing, 100%. Granted, I'm bringing out a
little too much noise in here, but you see, those the chromatic
aberration that you see, which can be fixed individually, but if I wasn't in the lightness, those red or magenta lines would actually present
themselves even stronger, okay? So once you're done with this, it's a little too much
but just to show you, let's go back to 120 and
let's go down to 0.7, okay? All right, and then once you're
done with your sharpening, just go back into RGB, and there you go. Now you can go back and
manipulate your image as you wish. It's a nice, neat little trick: go into Lab mode, just
selecting the lightness channel, and then manipulating that,
and then coming back into RGB. Okay, and let's take
another image over here. Okay, in this case, we can do a number of, we can actually kind of
just mix what we wanna do. So let's start by zooming in. I'll move him over, a
little over this way. And I'm gonna create a new layer. I'm gonna go to the sharpening tool, Sample All Layers, Protect
Details, strength: 30%. That's not bad. Let's zoom
in a little more, okay? And let me go ahead and
sharpen him here and here, around his mouth, around his whiskers. Up here, the ears. Okay, and his fur. Not necessarily everywhere. I want it to look like the
parts that have strong detail, something like this. Okay, let's get some of that fur. As soon as you see detail, it's really nice to have sharpness. It kind of accentuates that sharpness. All right, so it's really his face and his eyes the most, okay? Now instead of just leaving it like this, and just to compare
it, we'll make another. I'm gonna duplicate that, okay? Hide that. I'm going to Filter, Other, High Pass on the layer that I had, right? We'll do two pixels. Pretty strong, but let's just try it out, and then change this
to Linear Lights, okay? So I have two, I've mixed now two different
sharpening methods. Granted, it's a little too sharp. See, if we compare before, after, you see this is just a sharpening brush, and this is sharpening brush
plus the High Pass, okay? And we could if we found that
it was a little too much, well, you can always just
turn down the opacity like so or you can go and mask areas out. What I'm trying to show you is that not every method is exclusive, and it's just you can actually
mix different parts, okay? So something like this. And let's take up another
image over here, seven. And in this case, we can mix different areas. Let's try, let's duplicate this. And I'm not going to
make it a Smart Object because I wanna use the sharpening tool. So I'm gonna start off by
using the sharpening tool. Let's zoom in a little bit. Okay, I don't want everywhere. You know what, for this one, I'm not actually gonna
use the sharpening tool. I'm just going to go
straight to Camera Raw. So Convert to Smart Object, Filter, Camera Raw, all right? And let's go to the sharpening.
Let's sharpen a little bit. Zoom in a little bit, Command + Plus, and Space Bar for the Hand tool. Okay, and let's just get a comparison so we can see the before and after. I wanna see what it looks like. All right, so increase the
amount a little bit. Not bad. Now I don't want it in the sky there, so let's go to the masking. Hold down the Option key. And you see it really, all those flat areas kind of just go out and it's just doing the more, the lines really. Okay, let's keep the radius around one. Increase that a little bit. All right, it's not too bad. And once again, I know
it's not really sharpening, but if I increase the
clarity just a little bit, it gives you that sense of
sharpness that's pretty nice. All right, and let's hit OK. All right, okay, now there's
a very important thing. Let me just zoom in before I get into... All right, it's decent. There's still quite a bit of noise. It was already blown up a little bit. One thing I wanted to show you, it's a little more complex
but very important, is you usually do not want to sharpen highlights and shadows, and that's because those areas usually will bring out
artifacts and noise and grain. So what you wanna do is make sure that your sharpening is
isolated to your midtones, so anything that's not purely
dark or purely whites, okay? So to do that, you take the layer that
has the sharpening on it, and you double-click the
area that has the name; it'll bring up the Layer Style option. And here it says Blend If, okay? Now if the underlying layer is black... Now let's zoom in a little bit so we can see how this works, okay? Now, for example, in these
darker areas, you'll see, you see how it's taking
away all those dark areas? And now I don't have all that
strange chromatic aberration and artifacting and all that noise. And the same in the light areas. You bring it up this way, and you'll see at one
point it stops right there. You can see it there, right? So like before, after. Now it is very sudden, meaning it's going from this
to this in a very sudden way. So to make it gradual, you hold down the Alt key and
you kinda bring this out here. So you see now you have
it's from here to here in a gradient. It's saying everything that's
white from this point on, it's not gonna apply, and
everything that's black. So you do the same with the black, hold down the Alt key,
bring it up this way. And let's see before, after, okay? So we're not sharpening the little noise that's in the black areas,
which we were before, okay? Something like this. Maybe a little too strong, so we can bring it down
just a notch, okay? All right, and so that will be applied. And if I add another filter,
it'll still maintain the fact that it's not going to be
applied on the dark areas, very dark areas and the very light areas. All right, let's take a look
at our last image over here. Okay, so we see once again we have a shallow depth of
field, but it's a little blurry. In this case, I would once
again use the sharpening tool. So new layer, go to the sharpening tool. Make sure Sample All Layers
is checked, Protect Detail. 30% is pretty good. I'm gonna need a much larger brush. Let's do 1,500 pixels, hardness 20. Okay, and let's start off
a little lighter, like 20%. And I'm just gonna click here, click here. This is a pretty big
image, as you can see. Something like this, okay? Zoom in a little bit to
see what we're doing. All right, and bring it here. Let's see. Before, after. All right, I'm on 20%, so it's very, it's doing it extremely progressively. Light touches, which is nice. That way I don't accidentally
over-sharpen something. Okay, keep doing that. Clicking, clicking. Let's take a look. Let's
zoom in a little bit. It's actually processing. So this algorithm is
actually pretty intensive. So don't worry if your computer
slows down a little bit as you're doing this, especially
with very large images. The process is very, very effective, but it takes a little
bit of computer power. All right, so let's take
a look before, after. So it's really in that little detail. You don't want it to look like
everything is super sharp, but look at that little detail. Before and after. You have that. Now, once again, I actually want to, I wanna make it, I'm gonna make this and use
the High Pass filter again. So Filter, Other, High Pass. Let's keep this down to 1.5 pixels, and then Normal, and Linear Light. Look at that. Before, after. So now I've really accentuated the fact that I'm blurry around
here and sharp over here. I could tone it down using
the opacity over here, so let's say 70%. And that's better, okay? And that covers every
method of sharpening. All right, guys, I hope
you learned something in this episode. And if you did, don't
forget to like the video or share it on Facebook and Google+. It really helps me out. And I'll see you in the next episode.
