sharpen up them photos

[Raf]

I think most people are familiar with using the 'sharpen' or 'sharpen more' effect in photoshop. A few others may know about using 'unsharp mask'. I'm going to write about another method which, in my opinion, offers you a bit more control and can often times produce better results - the high-pass filter. if anyone's interested i will put up screen caps of the steps involved.

 

This is based on Photoshop 7.0, but should apply to other version of PS.

 

- Open up and duplicate the background layer by either right clicking on the background layer -> duplicate layer or, from the layer menu -> duplicate layer

 

- switch to the newly created layer

 

- go to filter -> other -> high pass

 

- the only parameter is the radius of the pixels. a value between 0.5 - 2.0 is usually good. the higher the value, the stronger the effect. click ok. wow, a grey pic! this is really great raf. not done yet.

 

- on the layer menu, click the dropdown box that currently says 'normal' and switch it to either 'soft light', 'overlay', or 'hard light'. soft light produces the lightest effect and hard light the heaviest. to further edit the strength of the sharpening, you can reduce/increase the layer opacity.

 

as usual, experiment!

 

you can get fancy.. edit the 'high-pass' layer and tell photoshop exactly what to sharpen. anything that is the flat grey colour will not be sharpened. simply paint over those areas with grey (get the grey colour with the eye dropper tool first). this can be useful if you'd like to add a feel of depth of field to your image or the high pass emphasizes certain areas too much. you can combine with other effects or have multiple high-pass areas. time and sky's the limit.

Edited January 14, 2009 by Raf

[Kevin Rajaratnam]

thanks for the tip, I'll definitely try this out.

 

How would one establish capturing a picture, using a Digital SLR, that focuses on the foreground and blurs the background ( something to do the depth of field)? If the answer is intricate and too lengthy, can you point me in the direction so that I can learn to do this on my camera. Thanks and i appreciate your time.

 

Kevin

[brandon]

Kevin,

 

Blurring the background of a photo while keeping the foreground in focus is done with depth of field. This is controlled using the aperture of your camera. A Larger aperture (smaller number ex. 2.8) will keep the background nice and out of focus....but make sure the subject is a decent distance away from the background. On the other hand if your trying to keep everything in focus, a smaller aperture (larger number ex. 22) will help out with that.

[Raf]

You could also mask off the item in the foreground, invert the selection and use a blur (I use gaussian blur) to simulate depth of field on photos already taken in photoshop. As usual though, the real deal is better than a simulation and the best way is to get it right the 1st time like Brandon mentioned.

[a.cortellessa]

I gotta get familiar with that... I have a crappy camera so I'll take all the sharpening |I can get. Im gunna think about getting one of those SLR cameras when I save some money.

[skeeter99]

thanks will have to try

[bucont]

Good tips, thanks

[belippy]

very nice, thank you.