Image Sharpening Techniques in Photoshop

in this video we're gonna be taking a look at a number of different sharpening techniques to be produced crisp clean looking images five mi commissioners here once again you can find me on Facebook at facebook.com slash vibrant shot and also be sure to visit vibrant calm for a number of written articles and tutorials so in this video we're going to take you through a number of different sharpening tools and techniques that I use for landscapes architecture and portraits and are basically a touch on the various scenarios where each of them is applicable so while there's really no right sharpening tool our goal here is to just make you familiar with the different options that are available to you and kind of leave you to experiment with your own images to find the one that produces the best looking result for that particular image so let's go ahead and get started now before we get into the actual techniques I think it's important to kind of just mention what exactly sharpening is and what it does now obviously what it is is pretty clear what we're trying to do is we're going to try and take an image that may not be nice and crisp the way we want it to because of a number of reasons maybe there's you know a bit of haze in the air that day obviously the lens itself may not be it well no lens is perfectly sharp there's always going to be a little bit of softness to the lens so we're gonna try and counteract that and obviously there's other reasons for things not being sharp you've got you know camera shake you've got an item that's that's moving and luckily there are tools these days to help with almost all cases where there's blur or anything this is not the sharpest you want it to be now obviously they're not perfect the ideal scenario is to have an image that is perfectly sharp out of the camera so that's why you want to do everything in your power to essentially get us sharpen image as possible things like shooting on a tripod shooting with prime lenses all those things effectively help to give you a sharp image now obviously we're stuck with what we have and so that's why we have sharpening in in post-processing and you know no matter how great your camera is and how great your ear is you're always going to want to be doing a little bit of sharpening too the look of your image so now sharpening itself what it's essentially doing is if we go into an area like this very very closely where sharpening is basically doing is its boosting contrast along edges so essentially it's finding areas where there's a transition from light to dark effectively so in this area here like for example in this dark spot we shouldn't really be doing too much sharpening because there's no real transitions although if we zoom in a lot we do see that there is some noise in here and so noise of course is going to cause problems for our sharpening as well because if we have what we have here is essentially called luminance noise which means that you've got you know don't knows that is either light or dark within an area particularly you know shadows is where you're going to see it so what sharpen is going to do since it's looking for anything where there's a change in light and dark like this here for example or any sort of noise that we may have in our shadows it's going to try and amplify the contrast between that so over here on this edge where we have light color we're going to do is what it's gonna try and lighten that up a little bit more and then on this side here it's dark it's going to darken it a bit more so obviously as we amplify the amount of sharpening what you can imagine is that if we again go in a little bit closer where we see these slight gradations over here where it's not you know we don't have a dark line and then a light line we do have a little bit of softness to transition through there if we over sharpen essentially were gonna make this line completely black and then we're gonna have white on the other side and nothing in between so it's gonna create a very crunchy looking image and ultimately lead to what's known as artifacting so the same thing goes with noise wherever we have you know bits and noise like this where we have this little light dot over here and then dark around it what it's going to try and do is it's actually end up sharpening that so it's gonna make whatever is dark around an even darker and the light noise is going to get even lighter so we're really just playing up that noise and amplifying it so obviously those are things that we're gonna try and avoid when we're sharpening but it's important to be aware of them and and how they happen so that one more actually doing our sharpening we're doing our best to avoid those sorts of things we're gonna start things off with what's probably the most well known filter and that is the unsharp mask so unsharp mask is used by many to just you know naively sharpen their images and away they go now for me i typically do not use unsharp mask through the actual and process I'll use unsharp mask only for output sharpening which essentially is just me taking the image the final product and resizing it to whatever purpose I need and help putting it either for web use or for printing now that being said we're gonna talk about it in general and then you can choose to use it wherever you need to so usually when I'm sharpening I will create a copy of the the layer or I'll create a smart object so I'll convert the layer to a smart object just going into layer smart object and convert the smart object so if you do that what you can should do is you can apply the sharpening and then you can reduce or increase the amount later if you choose that you know it doesn't quite work for you so in this case I'm just gonna duplicate it just makes for easy demonstration so let's just zoom in again before I apply a sharpening filter I'll typically zoom in to about one or two hundred percent just so I can see the effect within the live preview so I'm gonna maybe go up to 100 here and then we'll go into filter sharpen and unsharp mask so with unsharp mask it's a pretty straightforward filter to use essentially you know there's three sliders here so it's not too difficult to learn it's just a matter of understanding what they do and and you know how adjusting them affects the level of sharpening so I'll probably go up to 100 percent here 200 percent in here so I can really see the effect and now starting off for the first slider which is the amount you can basically just think of that as just sort of the absolute amount of sharpening that we are applying so if we go up to you know 225 we see that we're sharpening more and more and and really what that means going back to our discussion of what sharpening is is that the more amount we push in the more we're going to make the lights lighter and the darks darker in the area of transition so wherever there's edges whatever's on the light side is going to get lighter and whatever in the dark sides may get darker and we can kind of see that right here as well if we really punch out the amount so if we started voting 100 here we see that in general it's making the image sharper and you know what let me just zoom in over here as well - like 400% so you can really see the effect so you know again if we toggle this on and off notice that that edge that's created over here becomes a little bit tighter right so the darks are getting darker and the lights around there are getting lighter now if we punch this up to 200 or let's say 500% we see that that line on the light side is becoming almost pure white and the black line is becoming almost pure black and what that essentially leads to is what we call fringing which is not something that you want in your images and it's something that I see all the time in people's images so it's really important to look out for that and make sure you're not over sharpening your image now the radius slider is basically it's it's saying how much are we going to apply or what area are really apply that lightening and darkening effect to on the edge so with one point one this is the effect now if we punch that up we see that obviously it's applying that to a much larger radius and so now our fringe is essentially becoming huge typically I never really use a radius above one usually my radius will be between 0.1 and one so again if we if we punch this up and then we reduce the amount we see we kind of toggle that effect is that it's you know creating that sharpening further into the building and further out from the building so again radius I would typically keep it at you know around one pixel on a full-sized image for output sharpening this will be anywhere from point one to point three depending on what resolution I'm putting - and generally the way I kind of tend to work is that the smaller the radius the more I go up on my a mount and vice versa so if I go way down on my amount I can increase the radius a little bit more and so on and so on so with output you're happening what I'm usually looking at is between 0.1 and 0.3 and the amount being around 300% if I'm sharpening a full-sized image I'll usually be in the point eight to one pixel range and the amount will be anything up to a hundred percent now the threshold is just basically saying okay how you know how intense does the transition between the light and dark have to be in order for me to affect that set of pixels so again if we kind of embellish this a little bit here let's bump the percentage up to some 135 and little increase already Institute so now if we actually start playing with this threshold we see that the inside of the building is getting less and less affected by the sharpening because the transitions here not that big I mean in these areas where we got the the lights inside the building it's quite large but in these areas where there's a bit of noise it's getting less and less the effect is getting less glass so if we toggle this on and off we see that you know right here where those lights are it's still doing a lot of sharpening because the transition is huge we're going from almost white to black whereas in these areas outside the building the effect is much more muted than it was before so that's basically how you use that and again threshold there's no right answer for this it's really just the nature of your image if you've got a very low-key image and that threshold would have to be higher if you got something with you know a lot of variation like this we've got dark buildings on a light background and then that threshold can be much lower so that's basically the unsharp mask filter I'm not even going to apply that actually you know what let's let's apply it and then let's just talk about one more thing quickly which is once you've applied it to your layer we can and this is why I like to eat a great a smart object or a separate layer is that I can kind of toggle that on and off zoom out to particularly a hundred percent because obviously that's you know what people are gonna be if you're printing it that's what you're gonna see is you're gonna see a hundred percent so let's toggle that on and off see how that looks check the effect and you know what let's say we get to it we decided it's a little too much we can always just reduce our opacity down so let's say we you know take it down to 80% and generally what I tend to do is anytime I apply sharpening I sharpen it I get it to the point where I think it looks good and then I take off about 20 to 25 percent because generally I find that we have a tendency to overdo things so it's best to just back it off a little bit after that so let me just delete this layer I'm gonna duplicate it one more time hitting command J and then we're gonna go to filter sharpen and smart sharpen now a lot of people they sort of say that you know smart sharpen is just a more intelligent version of unsharp mask which in effect is true it has gone through a number of revisions so depending on what version of Photoshop you're using it may be better in quality or worse in quality now in Photoshop CC it is really very good it's improved to the point where rather than using unsharp mask for output sharpening I will typically use smart sharpen instead because it does do a quite a good job of actually removing noise as well so this slider I don't believe was available in cs6 I think it's only in CC and it does actually do a nice job of kind of cleaning up some of the noise that is created by the sharpening process now here you'll notice again our mount slider works the same way as it doesn't on Jarrah mask radius again same effect we don't have the threshold because once again the smart sharpen is trying to kind of intelligently determine where it should be sharpening where it shouldn't be sharpening so we don't actually have that and then we also have this this remove options what are we actually trying to remove so Gaussian blur is essentially just saying okay remove general blur so that's kind of your default value you know if you were using unsharp mask that's kind of what you get lens blur is saying okay find me the blur that is characteristic of lens softness and remove only that and then motion blur is if you've got you know something moving within your frame and maybe you didn't use quite fast enough of a shutter speed then it will try and correct that now obviously if your object is completely blurred out then it's not gonna work but it's if you've got some minor motion blur in there it can be fixed so a lot of people again they think of this smart sharpen is more of a corrective sharpening or an unsharp mask is sort of a generic sharpening now again with the Photoshop CC I think that's changed a bit and for me it's really just become my de facto output sharpening tool you can also control here with a little bit more detail so you get more granularity than you do with the unsharp mask in that you can control how much sharpening gets gets done within the shadows you know what is the tonal width of your shadow and then you know your highlights as well so you can independently control it within those two separate areas again I don't tend to play around with this too much when I'm output sharpening very rarely do I make adjustments here I primarily just stick to this this top portion and I remove Gaussian blur so that's basically it for smart sharpen now again you know a lot of people tend to use smart sharpen or ax unsharp mask within their actual editing workflow as I mentioned I don't use it in my editing workflow I only use it for output sharpening throughout my workflow I tend to use the high pass filter so we're gonna look at a bunch of different variations of high pass filter sharpening and how you can apply it using various blend modes within your layer so the best way to look at unsharp mask it to kind of think of it as the opposite of a blur effect so if we take this layer here and we go to filter other high pass and we apply a decent amount of high Pascal that's about 15 pixel radius and then we apply a blend mode of soft light then we see that we get you know a fairly sharp image here if we toggle this on and off now if we hit command-i on that now we see that we get this almost soft focus like effect so essentially what what high-pass is doing is is kind of taking that and inverting it and instead of blurring its sharpening so not that you really need to know that but it's just kind of a little bit non-intuitive to look at the high pass what gets created by the high pass so it's a good way to think of it is that it really is just kind of rolling back what a blur would do so now let's go back to what we had here actually we're gonna just step back a few steps back to our original layer so let's talk about the high pass itself and you know how we actually create them so first thing you need to do is you need to create a duplicate layer in order to apply the high pass effect onto so whatever layer it is that you want to apply it to select that layer hit command J and that will create a duplicate for you next thing that is recommended is when you are operating on creating any sort of high pass filter you should go into image adjustments brightness and contrast and take the contrast all the way down to negative 50 the reason for that is that the high pass filter does not operate very well on very deep shadows or very bright highlights so what we're trying to do is kind of neutralize those by taking a lot of the contrast out of the image next thing we're going to do is we're going to go into the actual filter other high pass filter option and we're going to apply our high pass filter now again high pass filter very basic in terms of what you can do with it you just have one slider which controls the degree of the high pass filtering so as you can see what hypothesis entually does is it creates a neutral gray layer with certain bits of the image coming through so where we have our sky that had almost no detail we see that there's really nothing coming through we've got a 50% gray layer which you know whenever you think 50 gray layer you're thinking the soft light overlay hard light vivid light and linear light blend modes because obviously those tend to not do anything wherever there is 50 percent gray and wherever it's lighter they tend to make things lighter and it's wherever it's darker than 50 percent gray it tends to make your image darker so really what we're doing again is in the end or adding contrast to the image through the high pass filter so the radius here is like I said very simple tool itself but it where it gets interesting is how you actually combine it with the radius and the different blend mode options we have so starting off if you want to just sharpen the image what I'll typically do is I will start with a radius in between 0.5 pixels and 1.5 pixels so as you can see that one pixel radius if we barely see anything here there's just some faint edging showing up and you know the great thing about this filter is that it allows you to isolate the sharpening effect from the rest of your image so you can really control it without actually having to deal with any other elements within your image all we're left with is just a sharpening piece and if we really zoom into this we can see that the sharpening is doing exactly what we talked about is wherever on the edge here it's making things lighter because we know again if we blend anything with soft light or overlay whatever is lighter than neutral gray is going to get lighter so that's essentially what's going to do and then this area here we see that's darker so that's going to essentially darken that piece so just like we talked about sharpening in general it's doing exactly that it's going wherever there's an edge and it's lightening everything on the lighter side and darkening whatever is there on the darker side and as we boost the radius it's doing exactly what we did with the unsharp mask it's increasing the the amount of pixels that are affected by that lightening and darkening now you know whereas with unsharp mask if we went up to like a 10 pixel radius we would never ever use that because it looked terrible with the high pass we actually can but let's let's defer that a little bit until we look at some of the different blend modes and let's just start with our one pixel sort of standard sharpening now I tend to use between 0.5 and 1.5 at my full resolution of 36 megapixels so if you've got a smaller resolution on your camera let's say you've got 12 megapixels basically take that by 1/3 so you be using a mounting point five pixel radius if you've got something in between like a 20 megapixel if you'd probably go up closer to one and below that so let's start with one pixel and so again you know we've we've sharpened that and obviously it doesn't look good in his current state so now we have to apply one of the different blend modes that we have so again these are the blend modes that you have available to you when working with 50% gray layer so you can start with any of them what I'll typically start with is vivid light when I'm sharpening out a one pixel radius so with a vivid light and one pixel radius it gives us almost like a almost like the unsharp mask tool that's giving us just a nice punchy sharpness but again the good thing is that we're not really doing anything with in these areas so you know again if we revert it back to that we saw this was all gray is having no effect on that and whatsoever now a couple other options we have is we've got the linear light button as well which we see is even more intense so with this one here we're creating a rather aggressive sharpening which very rarely looks good I never really use linear light and blending with high pass for high pass I tend to stick with either overlay soft light hard light or vivid light so back with good light here we see that we you know with linear light we just created a lot of noise in these shadows in this case it's a little bit better so that's basically my my standard sharpening approach if I'm trying to globally sharpen my image I'll I'll stick to about 0.5 to 1.5 pixel radius high-pass at with a vivid light blend mode now where it gets interesting is we can sort of experimenting with some different radiuses under the soft light or overlay blend mode so let's just take that off duplicate our layer one more time I'm gonna go ahead fill tur other high-pass actually before we do that let's just apply our soft light blend mode because this one is a little bit more experimental I do you like to have soft light selected first so that once I actually start applying my high-pass I can experiment with increasing that radius and seeing what the effect is going to be so let's just zoom out a little bit get a slightly more global view of things and let's just go into around ten pixels here so with ten pixels we see that we're basically applying you know almost like a clarity effect so you know the clarity slider inside of Camera Raw that's almost what we're doing here when we're applying with soft light because it's a very gentle and more progressive sort of blend mode as opposed to the vivid light or linear light where it's gonna be very punchy and obviously with the 10 pixel radius gonna create a lot of fringing for us so we don't want that so let's apply that 10 pixel let's take a look at sort of what effect we've got here so if we toggle that on and off we see that this particular blend mode at 10 pixel radius has done a great job of bringing out these windows so you know where before they were all kind of washed together now we see that distinctly we can see each and every one of the windows in these buildings so really a nice effect for that if we zoom out let's try and apply soft light again at a different radius so we're gonna create one more layer essentially duplicating our background layer go to filter other High Pass and now we're gonna go all the way up to a hundred pixels which you know obviously you would never do with with a standard blend mode so we're gonna click OK I can go back into soft Lichtman mode and now what we can see is that it has you know applied this high pass at a very large pixel radius so essentially were we're lightening a very large area and we're darkening a very large area so if we talk about on/off we see that we're getting a little bit light around the buildings we're getting darker inside the building so that's not necessarily what we want there but we see that the effect itself is not too bad on the water sofa again where it's just globally zoom out here we go in and out it doesn't actually create a nice textured effect on the water if of course that's what we're going for also it does tend to punch up clouds quite nicely and so with the 100 pixel radius I would traditionally apply that selectively so I would hold down my option key at my layer mask and now I would go in and grab my gradient tool with white and I'm just going to paint down actually that's the opposite so let me just flip that around okay there we go so now we've gone white where the water is and then I'm gonna do a swatch here to bring it out of my clouds this one how if we kind of toggle that on off we see that we apply that that effect only to the water and to the cloud now we can bring it back in our skyline so now again we're bringing out those lights a little bit more and then we can bring back our vivid light sharpening layer to really define our edges so let's just group all that together toggle on and off and we see you know globally it sort of takes the whole image and tightens it up a lot now if we zoom in to 100% which is always good practice whenever you're sharpening going about 100 or 200 percent just to verify we see that we're not doing too badly in terms of fringing if we just toggle on and off the fringing is relatively well controlled but the image is getting a little bit crunchy and we do see that we are getting a little bit of noise in here so I don't it's actually not too bad we don't really notice that noise but what I will typically do is once I apply all of my different high-pass sharpening layers and again I'll group them together and then I'll drop the opacity to at least 50% then at this point if we kind of go back and forth between that while this looked good on a wide scale if we look at it close up and we go out a 50% level we see that this is a little bit more natural and it's it's not quite as messy as it was at a hundred percent so 50 percent would be really my high point typically I'll go down to around 30% and if we kind of zoom back out and and toggle off that group we can still see how that effect applies it's still just gently kind of tightening everything up and defining some of these lights and the edges around the skyline so again when it comes to high-pass filtering just experiment with the different blend modes with overlay and soft light you getting much more aggressive in your radius with things like the vivid light you generally vivid light and hard light you generally have to stick to around you know 11.5 pixels to pixels max and again always look towards reducing your opacity at the end just to prevent any noise from happening and again you know we briefly mentioned output sharpening so you're putting your image out for the web you're gonna apply a layer of smart sharpen to the image in which case you don't need to make it perfectly sharp at full scale you're gonna be doing some additional sharpening when you're when you're sending it for output now the last sharpening option were going to look at is a little bit more advanced and it's considered to be sort of the the best quality and you know it gets around some of the problems the high pass has in terms of you know capturing areas of very bright highlights and very dark shadows and that is essentially using the frequency separation we've talked about before but only using the high frequency portion of it and sort of tossing away the low frequency so to sharpen with frequency separation we're gonna say essentially take the same process that we do when we're retouching with frequency separation which is to create two copies of our layer so I hit command J twice with the layer selected when I name our top one high bottom one low and we're going to turn the high one off for a minute here we're going to filter blur and Gaussian blur now typically when we're retouching with frequency separation the amount of blur isn't quite as important because we're always reversing that effect using the apply image technique that we're going to be doing in a second but here it has become quite important because ultimately the amount of blur that we apply is going to affect the amount of sharpening that's gonna happen so it's a little bit counterintuitive but basically you can think of the blur radius as being the same as the high pass radius so all those same things apply if we're going to be blending with a linear light or a vivid light blend mode we're gonna want to stick with a small radius of 0.5 to 1.5 if we're going to blur with something or if we're gonna sorry we're gonna blend with something that is a little bit more subtle like the soft light or overly applied modes then we can look at applying a higher radius like 10 pixels all the way up to 100 pixels now again as before depending on the resolution of your camera you're gonna have to you know correspondingly adjust those numbers but in this case let's just start with our 1.5 pixel blur amount which is essentially gonna apply a 1.5 pixel high-pass in the end so right click okay there that's going to blur our image we're next going to turn on our high-frequency layer and we're gonna go to image apply image and we're going to have had as our blending mode we're gonna have scale is to invert checked off and we're gonna use our low layer as our source layer now again these are 16-bit image values if you've got an 8-bit image the values are a little bit different so I'll provide a link in the blog post for this video where you can find the values for an 8-bit image so we're gonna click OK there you know if we actually zoom into this we see that this looks awfully similar to what we saw with High Pass where we essentially we have got these little areas where contrast is going to increase and just as before we're essentially applying a middle gray layer so everything is more or less the same as with the high pass the difference is that the actual source image produced by this is a little bit higher quality because it does use the full dynamic range you know including the the brightest and the highlights and the darkest to the shadow so it gets around some of the quality issues that we have with the high pass filter so now if we apply this with a linear light blend mode which is typical for what we're gonna do with high free high pass sorry this frequency separation retouching we would normally make this a linear light blend mode in this case if we kind of toggle it on or off with linear light we have essentially no difference now what we're doing though is because we want to sharpen we don't really care about the low there which contains mostly our colors we can just toss that away and now what we're left with is a layer that's going to sharpen our image so now if we toggle this group on and off we see that you know the image does in fact become much sharper so if we zoom in here we now have the latitude to change the blend mode as well normally we can't change the blend mode when we're doing frequency separation because then the low and the high group together will not produce the same effect as our output image but in this case we're actually just looking to sharpen so we can go to a vivid light blend mode for example to make the effect a little bit more subtle and now again toggling on and off we see that we get our sharpening effect so it does produce quite a nice clean effect just like the high pass but again I tend to find that it's a little bit higher in quality than what the high-pass produces so once again if you've you know if we were initially blurred at around 10 or 15 pixels we could use a soft light blend mode here in this case if I chose a soft light the effect becomes very small so I just didn't want to really demonstrate that under this particular blow radius so just remember we're really doing the same thing as with high-pass but a couple more steps involved you can essentially assign an action for it create three different variations you know vivid light sharpen soft light sharpen soft light sharpen high so if good light would be 0.5 to 1 point 5 pixels and the soft light would be either a 10 or up to a hundred pixels so if you just want to automate that process create an action to record those steps and generate it for you so that's basically the frequency separation approach again everything that you did with hypothesis applies here it's just the process of getting there is a little bit different now one last thing we're going to look at is Adobe Photoshop CC does include a motion blur or I should say a camera shake removal tool so if we're going to sharpen there's a shake reduction tool which is actually kind of interesting let me just duplicate this layer here it does work pretty well but it does often produce an image that is a little bit crunchy now again this works best when you actually do have a camera shake and I've actually tried it with images that have a fair bit of camera shake blur and it does a rather admirable job of fixing it so basically what it's going to do is gonna take a sample area and it's going to try and find the direction of any sort of camera shake so it's going to finish that up and it's going to create a preview for us here so let's just apply that with whatever default values we have this process does take a little while so you do have to be patient with it and generally my finding with it is that it does sharpen the image quite well but it does also lead to a fair bit of artifacting more so than high pass filter would or using something like unsharp mask so now that we're done basically if we kind of toggle this layer on and off we see that it does sharpen it quite dramatically the one thing you do have to be aware of is that it does tend to shift your image as well because if it interprets that there was a up to down movement and it's gonna try and fix it by either shifting the whole image off or shifting it down and also as you can see it is a little bit crunchy on the edges but it does do a pretty good job of actually sharpening because if we go back to this some high-pass sharpening that we we have up here and we change that back into something like linear light we see in this area right here for example that it's it's fairly sharp but if we turn this off and put on this one it actually does define these fine lines quite nicely so it brings back a lot of the detail that's lost so while I typically you know the general application of this is to fix motion blur this image was shot on a tripod and yet still it was able to kind of you know redo some of the subtle motions that may have occurred in the camera while it was on the tripod and really sharpen up some of these areas but again you know there is quite a bit of artifacting if we look at this version here this is quite smooth and it's you know sort of just the right amount of sharpness within these points whereas if we go back to this one here it's it's a little bit rough and you know it doesn't always look great so we can of course always bring down our opacity there just to just to mute that effect a little bit or we can selectively mask things out so again I'm showing you that in there because it does seem to have applications beyond just fixing actual camera shake it can be used as just a standard sharpening approach within your image workflow now we're gonna finish up just by looking at some sharpening for portraits so for this one I'm just going to clean this up a little bit let me get rid of some of these layers so I've got a stamp visible layer here and we're gonna go ahead and apply two high-pass sharpening approaches to this particular image so we're going to just again duplicate this twice here and I'm going to turn off this layer and this one we're gonna blend with soft light we're gonna go into filter other high pass and one thing I find is really nice with the high pass under soft light approach is that again if we go into this sort of 10 pixel range we see that really starts to bring out some of the detail within the face like you know detail on the lips within the eyes the freckles really pop out the hair texture really comes out so if we just apply this at let's say 10 pixels here and we toggle it on and off we see that again we're creating this nice amount of depth within the face something that we really didn't have before we had a lot of softness and with this it really brings those details back out now we can do the same thing with the standard sort of pivot light approach we can again blend that with vivid light go to filter other high pass not maximum one filter other high pass and from here we're gonna pick again our radius which was standard around 1 to 1.5 pixels and again we see that that just brings in some of the detail within the hair and the eyes now in both cases what I may do is just with this one here I may want to use that to bring out some of the freckles so I'll add a black layer mask hold down option add layer mask and then just choose a white brush and we're going to brush in areas for example where we have some freckles maybe around the lips a little bit as well and we see if we just toggle that on and off it just adds a lot more pop to the skin texture and really brings the skin texture out with this layer for example we may choose to again I'm just gonna add a black layer mask we may just choose to bring out some more detail in the eye so we just brushed that in that area and toggle on and off and again we see that we're just defining some of the details within the eye there and you know we can really apply this anywhere we can add a little bit more within the lips and add a lot of additional sharpening in the hair similarly on this layer we can just bring out some of this hair here and just grouping these together toggling on and off we see that you know the effect is subtle but we're just bringing up some more detail in the freckles some more texture in the face and things of that nature so just as with with landscape images architecture images the same techniques apply but one thing you'll always be doing with portraits is applying them selectively because we never really want to sharpen everything on the skin we're always going to be primarily focusing on areas of interest so within the portrait we generally want to draw people into details like the eyes the lips and the hair so that's really where you're going to be selectively sharpening your images so again we've gone through a ton of different sharpening techniques hopefully you know again I don't really discuss when you would use one versus the other because you know it really just depends on the image that you have at hand but as I mentioned before I generally apply either high pass or frequency separation sharpening during my workflow and then stick with unsharp mask and smart sharpen during the output stage and then you know with portraits it's the same process but I generally do not output sharp and portraits because we don't really want to make them too crunchy we want to always leave portraits a little bit softer than we would an architecture or landscape images so again thank you for watching and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel below and also follow us on facebook at facebook.com/ slash a vibrant shot we'll see you next time Wow you made it all the way through to the end of the video well for that I'm gonna give you a little bonus tip when using unsharp mask so what you can do is we're gonna take our layer that we want to sharpen we're gonna duplicate it twice by hitting command J twice or ctrl J if you're on a PC then with the top layer selected we're gonna go to filter sharpen unsharp mask and we're gonna pump up our amount to about 150 at a radius of one point five pixels so now with that if we actually zoom in to this area we see that we are getting into a little bit of white fringing in the transition point between the sky and that's gonna be common anytime you have a you know a darker subject against a light sky so what we can do to get rid of that fringe is we can go into our blend modes and set that blend mode to darken and what it'll essentially do is it'll take away that fringe and just essentially add some sharpening in the shadows around the highlight but it won't touch the highlights now what we can do is we can go into this layer here go into sharpen unsharp mask and then we're going to change our amount to around 80 with a radius of 1 pixel click OK and now we're going to set that blend mode to lighten so now if we combine those two together and we toggle on and off we see that we're getting that sharpening effect but we're kind of controlling the fringing a little bit better here so we can also obviously vary the intensity of each of these layers by adjusting the opacity but at least were we're controlling the additional contrast on either side so remember that that sharpening will lighten the lights and darken the darks at any time there's an edge so now we can kind of independently vary the intensity of that effect so hope you enjoyed that little bonus tip and we'll see you next time

Channel: Michael Woloszynowicz

Views: 172,638

Keywords: Adobe Photoshop (Software), unsharp mask, smart sharpen, high pass, frequency separation, photo sharpening, shake removal, blur removal, tutorial, how-to, retouching, photography, image processing, image editing

Id: YOeZD8ZKCjQ

Length: 37min 51sec (2271 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 28 2013