The Best way to Sharpen your Wildlife Shots (step by step)

hey guys what's going on in this video i'm going to be talking to you about sharpening how i do my sharpening for almost all of my wildlife pictures and i'm going to go over some of the standard sort of sharpening techniques that i think most people use and why i think they're not quite as good as this one i'm going to be working from a raw file in lightroom and photoshop and i'm using a windows pc so let's get into it alright so here we are in lightroom this is the image i'm going to use i was going to use a different one but the trouble is a lot of these shots i was at very low shutter speeds and it was quite good lighting that day so they were just a bit too clean this one was shot at you can see up here it's one one thousandth of a sec and iso 900 so if you zoom in you'll see if i zoom in even a bit more to two to one you can see there is quite a bit of noise in the background here one of the problems i see other people doing quite a lot is i guess maybe that picture is a bit soft or whatever and they'll really crank up the sharpening and you can see the more i crank up the sharpening the more the noise in the background starts to get really harsh the details pop nicely but the noise also gets much worse so what if there was a way to crank up the details but not increase the noise okay well selective sharpening um yeah let's get into it so one of the approaches you can use is actually built right into lightroom and so i'll just turn the sharpening all the way up so you can see a bit more clearly how this works you can see it's increased the noise in the background but it's made the details pop nicely and if i increase this masking slider you can kind of see how the background has now lost a lot of the noise but the detail still pops nicely and if you hold down alt you can actually see how it's doing this as you raise the masking slider up and down it's actually changing the threshold where it will add sharpening only to detail and not to areas where there isn't detail so i find around 70 usually works quite well the problem with this is it doesn't give you much control it'll only add sharpening where it thinks it should go based on the contrast of the image and the other thing is you're adding it right down at the pixel level on the full resolution image for web use in particular you do want to be adding your sharpening at the final output resolution so when you're doing this kind of selective sharpening basically turn off sharpening in lightroom so i'm going to drag the sharpening down to zero and you can see that really improves the look of the noise it doesn't look that bad it's iso 900 but honestly the noise in the background isn't that bad um it does make the rest of the bird look a little bit soft but we'll be able to fix that alright so let's just say i'm happy with the crop i'm gonna right click and edit in photoshop cc and here's our image in photoshop now you can see i'm zoomed at 33.3 so i've got a long way i can zoom in i think the most important thing about this technique or one of one of the main things that why this technique is so good is you want to do your sharpening at the output resolution if this was were a print it would be different but for web use say you're going to upload this on instagram or flickr you want to do your sharpening at the resolution that it'll be displayed at now i know everyone's phone has a different resolution everyone's monitor is a bit different but for the sake of simplicity i'm going to do the sharpening at the resolution that i export for each one so in this case say i wanted to upload this picture to flickr i would want to do the image resizing first so let's do that image size for flickr the long edge which is this one in this case should be 20 48 and then the height just have just happens to be 1365 for this aspect ratio which is fine make sure resample is ticked by cubic in general is the best one to use so make sure it's set to that and hit ok and there we go this is the resolution that flickr uses now we're actually going to apply our sharpening so the way we do that is i'm going to come over to this background layer and duplicate it by dragging it down onto the new layer icon down here and this gives me background copy now we're gonna with this layer selected go to filter other high pass and this looks a bit crazy but basically you can think of this filter as it extracts the high frequency details or the fine details and kind of removes everything else the radius we're using is one pixel i find one pixel works best if you're working at output resolution so in general just leave this on one pixel we'll hit ok and by the way so one thing to note about sharpening it doesn't add detail i guess that's a misconception that's easy to have because it seems to add detail try to think of it more like a contrast slider for high frequency details so it's just a way to kind of push them up and make them pop a bit more so the next thing i'm going to do is all right i'm just actually re-recording this part because when i did this the last time i found it a little bit too difficult to see on the final video so i'm just going to do the same thing again which is to go in and change the blending mode to overlay double stack these layers by creating a copy that's just going to really accentuate the effect and hopefully you guys watching on youtube will actually be able to see it as i'm doing it i'm going to also select both of these by holding shift and place them into a folder by clicking on the folder icon here and then i'm going to add a layer mask to that folder by holding alt and clicking on the layer mask icon that's actually going to add a black layer so that's essentially made everything in this folder invisible so both these are set to overlay the folder itself is just set to the standard pass-through with a black layer and what happens when i paint white so i've got the brush tool selected my color is set to pure white and the brush i'm using is a soft brush i'm gonna make it a bit bigger so hopefully on youtube you can see this effect as i do it as i start to paint over in white it's actually starting to show through that sharpening but only in the areas where i paint so i'll just do that again i'll zoom in just i just want you to see this happening in real time so as i'm painting you see how the eye and the feathers just start to get a bit sharper it's kind of a subtle effect you can add even more of these layers on top of each other to make it even stronger if you wish but i would say this is probably a bit more intense than i would than i would usually do it and um try to avoid over sharpening your images i see it a lot on flickr it looks pretty bad if you overdo it go with a little bit more of a subtle look that's my approach just enough to make the details pop but not enough to make the image look crunchy so just paint over any areas that are in focus and have sharp detail don't paint over the background that'll accentuate the noise i'm not going to paint over any of the out of focus areas like down here on these chest feathers or the tail here and so what if i was to overshoot if i say i was painting around the edge of the head here and i went a bit too far you might be able to just see that it increases the noise a bit on the outside um if that happens don't worry you can either ctrl z to undo or if you press x you'll see the colors change from black to white so then you can just paint black over the area that you painted white by accident and it will change it back to black and make it transparent again so you know if you want to you can take lots of time and really go in and paint around these borders really nicely generally i find you can be fairly rough just use a brush about this size and just paint over and that's really all there is to it so now if i toggle this layer on and off you should be able to see the difference even if you're watching on youtube hopefully you can see this it just adds a nice bit of extra crispness and pop especially you can see it around the neck feathers here and the eye yeah it's quite a nice effect and then if you wanted to tone the effect down you would just drag the opacity for this layer or group down a bit and you can see that just reduces the intensity of the the effect a bit so i would probably go for something around here so that's it basically it lets you give your images a bit more crispness and pop but without increasing the noise in the background so that's why i like this technique so much and i think that if you start using it on your own images you'll start to really notice the difference alright well i hope you got something from this video if you liked it hit the like button subscribe if you want to see more videos like this and don't forget to check out my other videos i do a lot of wildlife vlogs where i go out into nature and get shots like the one i just showed you yeah with that said i'll see you in the next one bye i'll do right gonna be doing a few more videos soon one is about this lens i actually don't own this anymore but a friend of mine lent it to me and i kind of wish i still have mine this is a great lens it's a portrait lens so yeah i've got a video coming up on this scene and i also want to make a video about the atomos shinobi so that'll be coming soon as well this is the monitor i use for focusing and for situations like this where i need to see myself on camera so subscribe to see those all right catch you in the next one oh and one more thing before i go i've recently set up a profile on kit.com this isn't sponsored or anything but if you go there you can check out the gear i use and you can actually go in and i've written a few descriptions for some of the products i use stuff like that and there are links to them on amazon so if that interests you at all go and check it out

Channel: Rob Blight

Views: 36,588

Keywords: image sharpening, photoshop sharpening, wildlife sharpening, wildlife photo sharpening, how to sharpen wildlife photos, selective sharpening, selective sharpening in photoshop, selective sharpening in lightroom, wildlife photography, nature photography, how to, sharpen image, adobe photoshop (software), unsharp mask, image sharpening techniques in photoshop, photoshop sharpening high pass, photoshop sharpening tutorial, sharpening

Id: b_Xd_NtoTTA

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2019