Sharpen 5 Ways with Affinity Photo + Free Macro

in this video I'm going to show you five ways to sharpen using affinity photo okay let's start with unsharp mask this is the most commonly used form of sharpening and probably the most well-known and it's quite straightforward and easy to use so let's get stuck in first we'll duplicate our layer by right clicking on the layer and selecting duplicate we'll work on this top layer so that we can use it for comparison a bit later select filters and sharpen and unsharp mask to bring up our unsharp mask dialog and let's just zoom in a bit so that we can see what we are doing the first thing I tend to do when using unsharp mask is to select the factor slider and move it up to about halfway the factor is the amount of sharpening next I slowly bring up the radius slider until I think I have enough sharpening now I don't want to go too far because you end up with this weird crunchy look you want to go just far enough so that it looks natural slowly bring up the radius just slowly adjust I think that's too much and that's too little so about there let's just zoom out a bit that's fine now just bring down the factor until the sharpening just starts to disappear like so it's just started to disappear see we have sharpening and now it's a little blurry so we bring it up until it's just sharp you really don't want to over sharpen just set the factor until it's just sharp next we have our threshold the threshold works with contrast the lower the contrast between the adjacent pixels then the lower the threshold as we bring up the threshold slider what we're actually saying is not to sharpen until the adjacent pixels are far enough away from each other in luminosity or if they're too close to each other in brightness then don't sharpen them as we raise the slider slowly but surely things are not being sharpened normally I leave this at zero if I bring it up a little bit you can see it's like sharpening here but it still has sharpening here and here where we have contrast between the colors so when using threshold remember to bring it up nice and slowly I'm going to set it to zero because I want to sharpen everything good that all seems fine if we have a good look at our sharpening just zoom out a little and we can see our skin is sharp eyelashes are sharp the iris is very sharp beautiful turn it off and on and off and on we can see the sharpening works a bit closer off and on and they have good effective sharpening and that's how I sharpened with unsharp mask here we sharpen the layer directly but we can also use the unsharp mask live filter which is non-destructive so if I just delete this layer just go to delete to get rid of our sharpening layer then click the live filter icon and select unsharp mask filter then I'll do the same on the unsharp mask filter just make it bigger increase the factor to 50% bring up the radius until I just sharpened enough I think there is about okay the eyelashes are sharp we have sharpening here and the skin hasn't gone all crunchy it's rather nice I won't do the rest it's just to show that now our unsharp mask is a layer attached to our pixel layer giving us a completely non-destructive workflow very nice and that is how we use unsharp mask the second method I'm going to show you is to use the high-pass filter first things first we'll duplicate our layer using ctrl J make sure Milo is selected then select filters sharpen hype us now at the moment we can't actually see anything because we need to change our blend mode I'll just switch the blend mode to linear light and next bring our radius down to zero we can now see we have no sharpening but if we bring our radius up then it starts to get sharp if we go too far then again we end up with crunchy horrible graphics so starting with our radius at zero we bring it up and so we have just enough sharpening just enough is enough and there we have it sharpening with the high-pass filter another thing we can do with this is use different blend modes to give us different sharpening effects all right let's try a different blend mode if we change from linear light to say overlay and then bring our radius down and now bringing it all the way up you can see it's slowly and progressively getting sharper using the overlay mode gives us a much more subtle softer sharpening than the linear light mode though we are still getting some slight color artifacts especially here so just bring it down and slowly bring it up and so we have just the right amounts of sharpening let's try another we could try um hard light hard light will give us some sharpening so bring the radius down and slowly bring the radius up to the point where it's just sharpened very nice though I'm going to select linear light linear lights will be the best one to use for this demonstration because it shows up well and should show up better when the videos gone through YouTube's compression algorithms so remember slowly but surely but with the radius and just enough is definitely enough and there we go I'll just hit supply and now that sharpening is baked into the layer okay let's have a little plate because we have a little trick that we can do with this we can actually apply this more than once to give us much better fine detail sharpening we can just sharpen again that's just select our background layer and make a copy with ctrl J and drag this layer above our previously sharpened layer make sure this layer is selected and select filters sharpen and high-pass switch our blend mode to linear light reset our radius and then if we bring our radius up just a little it's hard like that we've now sharpened just the very very fine detail there's not a massive difference it's probably pretty hard to see it on YouTube but it's there with two layers of sharpening using the high-pass filter we can perform a general sharpen and then a very very fine detail sharpen which can be really effective so if we just zoom in and turn that layer off there's a very slight change in the very fine detail then if we turn our main sharpening layer off and turn our very fine detail back on you can see the effect of the very fine sharpening now turn our main layer back on plus a fine sharpening and we have very fine sharpening without any artifacts which gives us overall extremely good quality sharpening as we applied this sharp link directly to duplicated layers it's now completely baked into those layers but if we select our layers and delete them we're back to our original blurry image just select live filters and high-pass filter and then set our blend mode to linear lights now again all we have to do is increase the radius so we can just see the sharpening and there we go we have a high-pass filter sharpening with a live filter now you could try having a play with the monochrome button but to tell you the truth I don't use it let's hit the little cross to get rid of the dialog just move our filter above our layer I can now easily double the amount of sharpening if I want to all I have to do is duplicate the high pass filter layer and that will double the amount of sharpening like so and we can also use the second layer to do the trick that we did earlier where we have a tiny radius a really small radius on the second high-pass filter for very fine detail now we have very good fine sharp detail without artifacts beautiful this method of sharpening that I'm going to show you uses clarity so to get started let's use ctrl J to duplicate our layer make sure it's selected then go filters sharpen clarity zoom in a little bit so that we can see what we're doing and now as I increase the radius it gets sharper not sharp sharp not sharp sharp don't go too far if you go too far you get crunchy it's that's clarity is a form of local contrast if you apply too much you get local contrast where you don't really want it and you probably don't want your whole image to look like it's had a lot of clarity applied so if we get it to just the right Pony about there then clarity can be quite a nice suitable method of sharpening clarity works extremely well for eyes especially the iris we can apply that and there we have it we have a much more clear and sharp eye let's just see without and with without and with and of course we can use a live filter version so if we just delete this layer and select live filters and then clarity filter and as usual slowly increase the radius to apply the clarity sharpening and if we quickly take a look turn it off and turn it on we can see it's there pushing it all the way you can see the whole image is affected we're ending up with local contrast everywhere but this actually can be to our advantage if we make sure our clarity layer is selected and then press ctrl I to invert it to erase the effect then select brush and select white set our slides make sure opacity is 100 is 100 and our hardness is quite soft now we can paint the clarity back in just to the iris and the pupil we don't even have to be that accurate with this then let's zoom out now we have a really really dramatic iris and pupil and as you can see this is a really great way of doing something really effective with the eyes it may not be realistic but it's a technique all techniques are useful part of the toolbox so to speak another method for sharpening in affinity photo is to actually use the toe mappings persona I'll duplicate the layer so that I've got something to compare with then make sure our top layer selected and select the tone mapping persona right so we're in the tone mapping persona Ida fault the tone compression is 100% so we just bring that down to zero to reset it that is the only thing that's set by default in the tone mapping now all we have to do is scroll down to detail refinement detail refinement gives us very nice clean sharpening so here we go bring the amounts up to about halfway and as usual slowly bring up the radius not too far but even if we do go quite far it really is a very clean sharpen so we can bring the radius up let's just zoom in a little bit and have a play with the radius I think no that's too far I think about though next set our amount what PI it's getting a bit crunchy so so bring the amount down that's up slowly and I think I think about this fine and there we have really nice sharpening using the tone mapping personas detail refinement it does a nice job and if we add a little local contrast which is very similar to clarity that will also add sharpening though it does seem to affect the surrounding skin and there we have it sharpening we have a nice sharp eye using the tone mapping persona okay so saving my favorite until lust here is an excellent method of sharpening probably the best one that I know and it actually uses a blur to sharpen it's like magic so let's get stuck in first we'll create a merge layer of everything that we have here I have my previous image and I just added a couple of adjustments for effect select the top layer and right click then from the list select merge visible now here we have our merge layer make sure it's selected then press ctrl J twice to create two copies now we have two copies of the merged layer make sure both of the top layers are selected by clicking on the first one and holding ctrl whilst clicking on the second one now just right-click and select group now just click on the group which contains the top two merge layers and then making sure the group is selected select the blend mode list here and set the group blend mode to overlay it looks a bit strange but don't worry about that now everything will become clear clear get it select the top layer in the group then press ctrl I to invert that layer next while the layer is selected select blend modes and set the blend mode to vivid light what we have now is the basis for this sharpening method we just have to add a single filter we are going to add a filter to our top merge layer so with our topmost layer selected go down to live filters and select I lateral blur filter now the panel is up so if we zoom in we can see that it's already done some sharpening if we set the radius to zero the sharpening will disappear all we have to do is slowly increase the radius until we think the image is just sharp you just have to do it by eye you'll get used to doing this I think around eight ish is about five then our tolerance we bring it down and slowly bring it up again until we have our sharpening and I think for this image about rule thirteen is right you should play around with the radius and tolerance to suit your image even if I increase the radius we get sharpening without much in the way of artifacts in fact hardly anything it's a beautiful method but I don't need it that sharp I would like to bring it up not too very much just around about there I think just look at that it gives absolutely beautiful sharpening using the bilateral blur filter okay now we can get rid of that let's open it up and because our bilateral blur is a line filter we can bring it back up and if we want to adjust it we can which is really useful and so here we have a fantastic halo free artifact free and clean sharpening method using the bilateral blur filter superb I've created a free macro for the blur sharpen method this would allow you to instantly apply the method without having to build up all of those layers first make sure your library panel is available if you can't find your library panel in the panels or on your screen then you will need to enable it so select view and studio and then library and that will bring up our library panel where we keep our macros here are the default ones we're going to add another one to it the macro is available by clicking the link in the YouTube description once you've downloaded it just click on this little icon to bring up these library options just click on import macros you will have to navigate to the resources folder which you will have downloaded just double-click Scott Williams photography AAF macros and the sharp and macro will appear in your library to apply this macro make sure you have your top layer selected because this macro doesn't select the top layer for you you have to select the layer where you wish the sharpen effect to take place then just click sharpen with blur and after just a couple of seconds it will have activated if we zoom in we can see that we have a nice sharp I dissemble this group you can see it's not sharp enable it and it's sharp nice and as this effect uses a life filter we can open it up and adjust the radius or adjust the tolerance adjust to suit our image and that is how we import and use the free macro [Music] [Music]

Channel: Scott Williams Photography

Views: 91,465

Keywords: affinity revolution, photoshop, inaffinity, affinity photo, affinity, sharpen, sharpen 5 ways, sharpen five ways, tutorial, photo, image, editing, edit, serif, editor, graphics, art, best, top, superb, brilliant, production, post production, retouch, retouching, re-touch, re-touching, photography, Stunning, sharp, top tips, tips

Id: WsRWBHl4SnM

Length: 21min 36sec (1296 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 16 2018