Sharpen Photos like a Pro!

unlike many things in photography sharpening is one of those things where there is a right and wrong way to do it and i've done it wrong so many times that i've put together some best practices for you today so that you can get it right in your workflow hey everybody blake rudis here with f64academy.com where we learn to master photoshop to make better photographs f64 academy is photoshop for photographers so today we're going to be talking about sharpening i want to break down some barriers break down some walls with sharpening it's a question i get a lot especially from beginners how do you sharpen your photographs where do you sharpen your photographs why do you sharpen your photographs do you sharpen all your photographs these are questions that i receive so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to kind of set the foundation for you and then give you my five best practices for how i sharpen my photographs so somewhere along the line in the beginning of my photo post-production journey i had heard that you're supposed to do noise reduction at the beginning and sharpening at the end so i had that stuck in my head and many beginners do have that stuck in their head but the reality of the situation is you can do your sharpening wherever it is that you want to do your sharpening i'd even say noise reduction as well but this is a video about sharpening you can do that wherever it is that you want to do it okay and i'm going to teach you why so let's first lay the foundation of what sharpening is before we get into the five best practices we need to talk about contrast first contrast in your image is basically the area between highlight and shadow light and dark and the transition between the two that's contrast right so there's this thing called micro contrast where instead of the image as a whole having huge various areas of contrast within each individual detailed area you have this thing called micro contrast and that's where you have small areas of contrast that are next to each other what sharpening is it's actually an optical illusion it targets the micro contrast areas of your image to make higher highlights on that micro contrast and deeper shadows which in turn makes it appear as if that area is sharper okay that's what sharpening is it's an optical illusion it's a trick knowing that is a critical element here when we talk about sharpening so my five best practices best practice number one the why of sharpening why do we even need to sharpen sometimes it's our camera and our sensor type i remember when i was shooting with an olympus e510 it was a rather small sensor micro four thirds sensor and i found myself sharpening every single photograph because i needed to it just didn't have the detail that i needed or the megapixels that i needed so i needed to sharpen those photographs in order to make those images appear sharper another thing might be your lenses if you have lenses that are on the soft side you might need to sharpen your images as well let's also talk about focus you might have your image slightly out of focus you might have missed that focus by just a little bit of a hair that also might be a reason why you might want to sharpen your image but you have to be careful with that you don't want to sharpen bokeh areas and we'll talk about more of that in a second another reason why you might want to sharpen your image is because you might have missed your exposure if you underexposed your photograph and then later brought up the exposure in something like adobe camera or lightroom what would happen is those areas of dark dark area didn't get recorded quite as sharp as they should have because they were underexposed so what happens is you often need to sharpen those areas as well another reason why you might want to sharpen is to draw the viewer's eye specifically towards something that's sharper than the rest of the image it's a deliberate tactic for sharpening that i use quite often in my workflow now notice i didn't just say why you need to sharpen it because every photograph needs to be sharpened that's not the case that's not a that's not a best practice for sharpening okay it's understanding why you need to sharpen that transitions us into the rest of it so best practice number two where do we sharpen lightroom adobe camera photoshop any other program or plugin you think well the type of sharpening that you're doing will dictate where you're going to want to sharpen that image i prefer to do most of my sharpening in photoshop but but there's sometimes in the beginning of my workflow i might need to bump up that micro contrast in something like adobe camera raw a lot of times when i'm getting the questions of how i sharpen my images people are asking me where do i sharpen my image where do i do it in adobe camera roll and how much sharpening do i do well i can't answer that question with a blanket statement because it's image specific i hate to be vague about it but it's absolutely true you have to know when the image needs to be sharpened and that will help you determine where you need to sharpen it and also why you're sharpening that image so that leads us to best practice number three what to sharpen typically i'd like to leave my sharpening to the mid-tone areas and try to avoid over sharpening in my highlights or over sharpening in my shadows oftentimes when i'm doing critique sessions i get an image that i can tell someone just did a blanket global sharpen and you can tell because areas around the sun especially if you zoom in really close it looks like they're trying to draw a black line around the sun and it just doesn't look good so global sharpening is not necessarily the best idea what i'm talking about is more local sharpening getting down in there to get an idea of what you need to sharpen let's talk about a knife that's not a knife that's a knife okay so looking at this knife if my survival instructor said blake go sharpen this knife and i came back and the handle the hilt and the entire blade were sharpened i think my instructor would be a little bit upset with me why because the handle doesn't need to be sharpened if the handle was sharpened we wouldn't be able to grab the knife the hilt doesn't need to be sharpened because if our hand was too high up on the knife it would cut our thumb now the entire blade doesn't need to be sharpened because there's a purpose for each side of the blade the only thing on a knife that actually needs to be sharpened is the edge of the blade itself all the other parts and pieces need to remain intact because they have a purpose just like the edge of the knife does and the same is true for your photographs you don't want to sharpen the entire photograph because if you sharpen the entire photograph you can be doing a lot of damage to very important areas of that photograph where there's only one specific spot that actually needs to be sharpened i'll demonstrate this in the last best practice but let's move on to number four when do we sharpen i already alluded to this but before during or after now i'm gonna break down any barrier to this you don't have to only sharpen at the end of your workflow okay there's times where i sharpen at the beginning of my workflow in adobe camera raw to get a rough idea of what the sharpening is going to look like in a given area however i do that very selectively as well which i'll show you in the next best practice during my workflow i might sharpen as well i might be working on my image in photoshop and find that there's an area where i want to draw the viewer's attention to so i'll use sharpening techniques that will over sharpen a very specific area and then i'll mask that in and use things like blend if i'll even sharpen after i'm done with the entire image when i'm going to do output sharpening for print and sometimes that might include a bigger swatch of the entire image but i'm still going to make sure that i'm not sharpening things like my shadow areas where i'd create more noise or my highlight areas where i draw that marker around edges okay so yes you can do it before for some mild sharpening to sharpen up some of the details in the image you can do it during and selectively to get the viewer to look at something very specifically and you can do it after for output sharpening so it looks really good when you print it out on a 13 by 19 piece of paper and you're just going oh man that is so pretty real quick before we continue this is kind of like the commercial break if you like this please press the subscribe button below and hit the little bell to get notified i do video tutorials like this all the time where i take photoshop something very convoluted and very difficult and make it very easy to learn and give you an actionable workflow that you can use right now today so if you're the type of person that likes that kind of content press the subscribe button below and you'll get notified when the next video comes out so that leads us to how do we sharpen so let's look at this image here you can see that the foreground of this image has a really nice sharpening on these rocks these rocks look like you could reach in and touch them right that might be a good sharpen for something like printing but it's probably not the best sharpening for something on my screen but i'm showing you this for a very specific reason now if i turn this off you'll see that this is the original image there might be certain areas of this that i want to be sharpened but i don't want the entire image to be this sharp because even look at this it looks like there's a glowing edge around this branch here you see the optical illusion that i was telling you about about the difference between highest highlights and darkest dark areas in the micro contrast area to make something appear as if it's sharper than it actually is now the this is a really over sharpened image but i did this on purpose because i actually see images like this during my critique sessions look at this sun it looks like someone took a sharpie and tried to draw a line around the bottom of it to sharpen it i see this in the critique sessions that get submitted in f64 elite so i want to talk to you about sharpening and where it needs to be done so if we look at this image here this image doesn't have any sharpening on it yet so one of the ways that i do sharpen is using something like adobe camera raw or lightroom so i'm just going to go into adobe camera roll as a filter by pressing ctrl shift a on this image if i was actually sharpening at the beginning of my workflow it would be done at the raw level very similar to what i'm showing you here so i'm going to go into the detail section and if we look at sharpening here i have no sharpening that is on this image but the only things that i would really want to be sharpened in this image might be the tree line and maybe the granite rocks here in valley view here but i wouldn't want that sharpening to happen on my sky so let's just heighten the sharpening here increase the radius here maybe increase a little bit of detail here now if you look at this it looks actually pretty good on the sides of those rocks and it actually brings out quite a bit of detail that's happening in those trees but if we zoom in look at what happens to the sky this is what i'm talking about you don't need to globally sharpen like this so how then do we not globally sharpen an adobe camera or lightroom now we don't want a global sharpen so if we don't want a global sharpen if you see this masking tool here we can move this over to the right and that will start blocking out areas where adobe camera roll does not think it needs to be sharpened now i say that because it's not very intuitive now you can see this sharpening if you press alt or option and click on the masking here right now the entire image is being sharpened because it's all white if i move this over to the right while while holding alt or option the areas of black are not going to be sharpened and as i move this over i don't want the whole sky to be sharpened so in order to not get the sky sharpened i would have to go all the way over to here and still adobe camera or lightroom is thinking that those clouds need to be sharpened okay so i wouldn't want to do this type of a heavy-handed sharpen here at this level because even at the local level of this it's still trying to sharpen those clouds so i'm going to reduce the sharpening here reduce the the radius here reduce the detail here and then bring this down to about here now this would be ideally what my sharpening would look like if i was doing this at the raw level before i brought it into photoshop you'll notice that it's not a whole lot of sharpening if i move over here to the rock face here and zoom in a little bit more it's not a whole lot of heavy sharpening it's very subtle sharpening it's only happening to areas that are very detailed and that's because of the masking that's in place and the lower sharpening that i have on this image if we look at the back of this photograph though we are not getting quite as much sharpening on the back of that sky and it looks alright so ideally here at the adobe camera or lightroom area when it comes to sharpening i would say a very very mild sharpen i would not go very sharp with this now where i would go sharper is doing something in photoshop and my one of my favorite ways to sharpen is called a high pass sharpen so i'm going to do is i'm going to press ctrl shift alt and e and that's going to make a stamp of everything that i've done here okay now this high pass technique it's been around for ages and some people don't use it anymore they think that there's other better ways but i still think that this is the best so what i'm going to do is i'm going to change this blend mode to linear light now linear light at first glance is not going to be very good for this but linear light works on something called fill so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to drop the fill to about 30 and that's usually a good start when it comes to this okay now i'm also going to press ctrl shift and u which is going to desaturate this so this is actually a desaturated layer the reason why we're seeing color come through is because it's linear light at 30 percent and what's underneath now i'm going to zoom into an area here that i'm going to get my sharpening at so i'm going to go to filter other and then high pass and looking at this high pass sharpen now you can see that here we have a lot of control over how sharp these areas are going to get now you see you'll see a haloing edge that's going to happen around here too and that's going to be one of the the downfalls of sharpening in general because again we're taking areas of micro contrast and we're heightening them by creating that optical illusion and that's okay that's where i use things like masking and blend if okay so i'll press ok on this now look at the sharpening that's happening here this is a pretty heavy-handed sharpen if i turn the preview on and off on this you can see here's the before and here is the after it's a pretty heavy sharpen okay so i'm going to zoom out and this is where i would control things with masking there's a couple ways that you can do this there's many ways that you can do this but one of the ways that i would do this with masking is i would create a new mask on this layer i'll press alt and then click on the mask what that's going to do is it's going to default that to a black mask what does that allow me to do that allows me now to press b for my brush tool change that to the color white and then i can brush in anywhere that i would want that sharpening to be okay so i'm just going to get my um big soft edge brush for this and just kind of brush this in here you see i'm being very selective about about where i want that sharpening to be because i want to draw the viewer's eye into the granite structures here in yosemite and also into these trees back here and i'll do that also on this edge here okay and then over on this edge here and where i'd also do this is probably along these rocks here maybe just towards the middle towards the center okay to draw the viewer's eye more towards the center okay and then zoom on down here and maybe do it on this rock as well that way the sharpening actually leads the viewer's eye into the photograph and they don't even really know what's happening it's very subtle okay because i'm leading the viewer in and they're kind of like their eye is going to be jumping around on the things that are sharpened especially if they're seeing this in a print and it's really large and say oh wow look at all that detail there and where what am i doing we're going hop hop hop hop hop hop hop all the way back into all of the areas of sharpening so you'll notice that the only thing i actually sharpened on here is going to be those areas very selectively and very selectively sharpen this image so it's only affecting the areas that i want it to be sharpened and that's why i go back to the fact that where can you do this in your workflow you can do it anywhere in your workflow anywhere especially when it's a linear light blend mode like this you could do this sharpening almost anywhere okay because anything that goes above or below it it's still going to be sharpening it based on the linear light blend mode you can also use things like blend if so let's say i wanted to blend this a little bit better and i don't want the darkest dark areas to be receiving this because i did say that you want to avoid highlights and you want to avoid shadows so i'll double click on this okay and if i wanted to avoid the darkest dark areas from getting that sharpening like this area next to the waterfall i would move this to the right which would then start to block that sharpening okay alt or option because we're protecting the underlying areas darkest dark areas from this sharpening by about this much if we want to see what that looks like go to a color overlay and you can change this to a magenta color overlay and it'll actually show you exactly where it is that you are protecting those areas so when this is like this this was our original mask if we press alt or option we can move this over and it starts to block out and protect those darkest dark areas from sharpening we want to protect our lightest light areas okay press alt or option here and now our highlights are going to be protected from that sharpening so there we're being very selective about not only painting this exactly where we want it to be but also ensuring that it's only going to really be affecting the mid-tone areas and not allowing our highest highlights and our darkest dark areas to receive that sharpening because it's going to look a little funny if it does like we saw with the marker effect under the sun what it would also do on the darkest dark areas is it would sharpen noise so if you did noise reduction and then you did sharpening guess what it's counterintuitive but we can also control this better here in photoshop as opposed to adobe camera or lightroom is that if i want more sharpening out of this i just increase the fill if i want less sharpening out of this i just decrease the fill i've got a lot more control here on my sharpening in photoshop versus adobe camera raw or lightroom if you want to learn more about the blend if stuff which is a thing i showed towards the end of this video go ahead and click this playlist over here i've got an entire playlist full of blendiff videos that will help that make a lot more sense i sure i want you to look at that because that's the most powerful way to control sharpening or almost anything in your photographs if you like this please comment share it like it tell a friend and subscribe if you haven't done so already

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 24,723

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 academy, f.64, How To, Tutorial, Photoshop, Adobe, Sharpening in Photoshop, sharpening in lightroom classic cc, sharpening in lightroom classic, sharpening in lightroom or photoshop, sharpening in lightroom vs photoshop, how to sharpen a photo, best practices for sharpening photos, sharper images, how to get sharper images in photoshop, how to get sharper photo, sharpening in adobe camera raw, Sharpening in ACR

Id: C0O5c7cwCi8

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020