Sharpen You Images with Photoshop

After you’ve color corrected your photos and right before you published you may want to sharpen your photos. To sharpen digital camera photo can either to help bring back some of the original detail that lost during the correction process or to help fix a photo that’s slightly out of focus.

I alway sharp only final image before published, especially when you down-sample it for published. By keep your original working file (with layer) as is, and sharp only duplicate flatten file. This will let you freely sharp you image depend on source of publishing and file size, and easier for you to re-adjust it later. The easy but effective way is using photoshop unsharp-mask filter. This filter is always professionals choice because it offers the most control over the sharpening process than all other photoshop native sharpen plug-in.

Using Photoshop Unsharp-Mask Filter

1. Open the photo you want to sharpen.

   Note: If your image have more than one layer you should flatten it first. Or keep your original working file by using menu image > duplicate

2. Zoom and view your image at 100%. By double-click on the Zoom tool in the Toolbox, and your photo will jump to a 100% view (look in the image window’s title bar to see the actual percentage of zoom).

   Note: it’s absolutely critical that you view your photo at 100% when sharpening. To ensure that you’re viewing at 100%.

3. Go under the Filter menu, under Sharpen, and choose Unsharp Mask.
4. When the Unsharp Mask dialog appears, you’ll see three sliders.
   • The Amount slider: determines the amount of sharpening applied to the photo
   • The Radius slider: determines how many pixels out from the edge the sharpening will affect.
   • Threshold slider: works the opposite of what you might think the lower the number, the more intense the sharpening effect. Threshold determines how different a pixel must be from the surrounding area before it’s considered an edge pixel and sharpened by the filter.

   You will see real-time preview for current sharpen setting. Just adjust it to fit for your image. »Or use Amount 100%, Radius 1, Treshold 0 for moderate sharpen that work best for general use.

5. Click OK and the sharpening is applied to the photo.

Sharpen Value for Different Situation

	Amount	Radius	Treshold
Sharpening Soft Subjectsfor subject is of a softer nature (e.g., flowers, puppies, people, rainbows, etc.)	150%	1	10
Sharpening Close-Up Portraits	75%	2	3
Detailed Sharpening for product shots, photos of home interiors and exteriors, and landscapes	225%	0.5	0
Maximum Sharpening for bring back blur or out-focus image. and also work with highly detailed image.	65%	4	3
All-Purpose Sharpening	85%	1	4
Web Sharpeningfor image that a lot down-sample for the Web, the photo often gets a bit blurry and soft.	200%	0.3	0

please remember that above value is guide for you to start. You can freely adjust the value that work best for your image by working with the real-time preview.

Other sharpening method

High Pass Sharpening

At photoshop-tutorial blog they use different method to sharp image , call High Pass Sharpening. There are not use sharpen filter but they use different blend mode to increase brightness and contrast of image edge. There are more information and action that are available for download here.

A Two-Pass Approach to Sharpening in Photoshop

And there are more advance sharpening method that use two pass of Unsharp Mask filter. The idea is to sharpen more only at the edge of object by using Find Edges Filter. And only apply moderate sharp for the plain area of image to get better quality. For more information and step-by-step instruction here.

Real Digital Unsharp Masking

At www.astropix.com show step-by-step process on how Unsharp-Mask filter really do when sharpen the image. This will give you better understanding about this filter. You can also use this method to sharpen your image without using Unsharp Mask Filter.

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