For the past few years, I've been content with keeping my entire photo editing worldview pegged to the Adobe ecosystem. Anything that Lightroom couldn't handle, or that required more refined content-aware heavy-lifting, was offloaded to Photoshop. And that's the way things went for a very long time.
In this short tutorial, Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect lays out his "Sharpening Separation" technique: a more advanced sharpening technique that allows you to sharpen your images as much as you like without creating those dreaded halos.
I’ll own up to this and say that I’m guilty of being stuck in my ways. But age is no excuse for not being as adaptive as I should be to the changing times. But let me explain.
Photoshops High Pass filter can be an effective photo sharpening tool, but its effect can be too drastic for certain areas of your photo. Here's a 9-minute tutorial from photoshopCAFE that looks at how to more effectively use Photoshop's "High Pass" filter for sharpening.
If you're not sure how to properly sharpen your images in Photoshop, this tutorial from the Photoshop Training Channel is a godsend—a deep dive into the most common sharpening techniques complete with an explanation of which ones are better and why.
UK-based glamour photographer Markp created this short video tutorial on how he sharpens …
Want a better understanding of how Photoshop’s sharpening filters work and how to best use them? Here’s a tutorial …
Photoshop is a program of many talents; however, there are three tools that you probably haven't used much for some time now. As some of the first features to find their way into Photoshop, the Dodge, Burn and Sharpen tools have quickly become dismissed as blunt tools of the past.
One of our favorite Photoshop tutorial websites, Phlearn, yesterday put out a tutorial that is both incredibly useful and a bit scary. Useful because making eyes pop in post is probably one of the most sought after Photoshop skills. Scary because this kind of manipulation is a slippery slope that could lead to photographers getting lazy and using the "fix it in post" excuse... so proceed with caution.
When it comes to sharpening an image, more than likely, your technique involves using a certain method over the entire image all at once. However, that's rarely the best way to do it, because how much and where to sharpen varies quite a bit depending on what you're shooting.
Unsharp Mask: the sharpening filter of choice for photographers everywhere. It’s a fantastic tool that can really take an image to the next level when used correctly and I’m here to tell you that you should never use it again. That’s right, bid it a fond adieu and stop using Unsharp Mask. Forever.
In October of 2011, the tech world went into a frenzy after Adobe showed off some crazy image deblurring research it's working on. By calculating the camera movements that caused the blur in the first place, the algorithm is able to "reverse" the motion blur and sharpen the photo. If you've been impatiently waiting for the feature to show up in a new version of Photoshop, you might want to check out Blurity, a similar blur removal tool that's already available. The software has been available to Windows users for a while now, but just recently launched for Mac OS X as well.
The Sharpen Tool in Photoshop has always been useful in that it allows you to quickly sharpen specific areas …
Unshake is a free program available for all operating systems that takes your blurry photographs and attempts to make them clearer. While it's not miraculous or perfect, it does in fact help in making photographs more usable, especially at lower resolutions (i.e. for the web).
We posted a while back on how to sharpen your photos like Flickr for smaller resolution images.