3.3 Sharpen Techniques

If you are shooting RAW or have used JPG, you can sharpen your photos.  Do not use the Photoshop SHARPEN filter, this is a huge NO!!!  it applies to the entire image, just like the camera would have. 

After we have done our contrast techniques, played with the curves, colors, lightening, and anything else we wanted to do with our photos we should then apply sharpening.  Sharpening is the final stage of image production. 

After searching for many different ways to “sharpen” my files I have finally found a few methods that satisfy the look and feel I always felt was lacking.

Easy Sharpening: Using photoshop, select the background layer and duplicate it.  Change its mode from normal to “overlay”, then select Filter – > Other – > Highpass    set highpass around  lets say 3 – 8%  and hit ok. 
Now hold the ALT key on your PC and click the layer mask button  so that a black layer mask now is applied over your new highpass overlay layer.  Using the paint brush, paint white over the areas you want to be sharp.  Now you have localized control over what gets sharpened.

Here is a video that i’ve made which shows what i do to sharpen a raw file quickly

That’s the quick and dirty sharpening method,  you get good results but added noise to your image!

2nd Sharpening a bit harder:
Photoshop:   open image,  convert to LAB mode  using  Image – > mode -> LAB mode
duplicate the background layer
click the channels button next to layers,  -> select Light channel   so that A and B are no longer highlighted. 

Apply Unsharp mask