Today it is common practice for the manufacturers to add relatively customizable sharpening function to the bells and whistles packed in the camera menus. But as it may seem the built in functions do not give you as much freedom as a professional photo editing software could provide. Also in most cases serious and professional photographer are inclined to shoot and process RAW files instead of JPG right out of camera. Considering these issues there are many situations which we want to delicately sharpen our beloved images so we need to be equipped with some handy techniques. Here I want to elaborate one of the most professional and I may say straightforward ones which could be accomplished with little knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and a bit of practice. If you are familiar to PS you may well acquainted with common sharpening filters built into it such as Unsharp Mask, Sharpen and so on. Although they provide relatively fair amount of control over sharpening parameters but they still resonate the uneasy sense of automation which could easily ruin the feeling of doing some delicate art work. So I introduce you to some opposite approaches which will enhance the sense of fine and meticulous artwork. To achieve it you need to need to make a copy layer of your final image (after all the tweaks you want to made on the poor primary photograph) and then go to the filters menu and among Others choose High Pass. In the dialog box set the setting as only the edges and main features of the image are visible in the prominently gray pattern. Of course this is highly depends on your type of image. Usually for portrait shots a value of 3 to 8 will do the job. After this you should blend the ugly heinous result to the original layer. To do this you should get rid of the bunch of gray in the layer and no blending options will help you but the contrast ones such as Overlay, Soft Light, Hard Light or so. Usually as we need the sharpening to be subtle and not be anywhere near over sharpened we use Overlay or Soft Light blends. As these blending options treat gray as neutral (invisible) you will get very good sharpening (increased contrast) over the edges of features of the image depending on the primary value of High Pass filter. To even go further we can add a density mask to the layer to restrict the effect to the desired areas which for instance in portraits are the edges of eyes, lips and hairs which in most cases are the darkest areas. To achieve this you can select (Ctrl+Click) one of your channels with most contrast such as red one and use it as mask. Of course you can also manually tweak and edit the mask using ordinary Brush tool. I promise if you just take your time and practice a little on this technique you would probably never use other sharpening tools to work on your beloved photos. It is straightforward, fine, totally adjustable and professional.
Sharpening
Today it is common practice for the manufacturers to add relatively customizable sharpening function to the bells and whistles packed in the camera menus. But as it may seem the built in functions do not give you as much freedom as a professional photo editing software could provide. Also in most cases serious and professional photographer are inclined to shoot and process RAW files instead of JPG right out of camera. Considering these issues there are many situations which we want to delicately sharpen our beloved images so we need to be equipped with some handy techniques. Here I want to elaborate one of the most professional and I may say straightforward ones which could be accomplished with little knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and a bit of practice. If you are familiar to PS you may well acquainted with common sharpening filters built into it such as Unsharp Mask, Sharpen and so on. Although they provide relatively fair amount of control over sharpening parameters but they still resonate the uneasy sense of automation which could easily ruin the feeling of doing some delicate art work. So I introduce you to some opposite approaches which will enhance the sense of fine and meticulous artwork. To achieve it you need to need to make a copy layer of your final image (after all the tweaks you want to made on the poor primary photograph) and then go to the filters menu and among Others choose High Pass. In the dialog box set the setting as only the edges and main features of the image are visible in the prominently gray pattern. Of course this is highly depends on your type of image. Usually for portrait shots a value of 3 to 8 will do the job. After this you should blend the ugly heinous result to the original layer. To do this you should get rid of the bunch of gray in the layer and no blending options will help you but the contrast ones such as Overlay, Soft Light, Hard Light or so. Usually as we need the sharpening to be subtle and not be anywhere near over sharpened we use Overlay or Soft Light blends. As these blending options treat gray as neutral (invisible) you will get very good sharpening (increased contrast) over the edges of features of the image depending on the primary value of High Pass filter. To even go further we can add a density mask to the layer to restrict the effect to the desired areas which for instance in portraits are the edges of eyes, lips and hairs which in most cases are the darkest areas. To achieve this you can select (Ctrl+Click) one of your channels with most contrast such as red one and use it as mask. Of course you can also manually tweak and edit the mask using ordinary Brush tool. I promise if you just take your time and practice a little on this technique you would probably never use other sharpening tools to work on your beloved photos. It is straightforward, fine, totally adjustable and professional.