Adobe Photoshop Advanced and Enhanced Image Sharpening Tutorial

[dogfacedboy uk1]

Hello all, I have recently been going through all of my holiday snaps and have used a technique I learnt off the net many years ago to sharpen them up a bit.

For those who struggle with mini photography (and I include myself here) this tip will enhance the sharpness of your picture, but dont forget levels, brightness and contrast adjustments and colour correction as required afterwards (I wont cover that here!).

Please note, this tip will not salvage an excessively poor quality image, but it will do a great job of sharpening soft edges nicely. Its result is totally dependant on your photos quality.

1) Make sure your layer pallette is showing, if it is not then go to the windows menu and click on "Layers" a little tick should show up next to it and it will open up.

2) Open your photo and drag your Background layer onto the "New Layer" icon (next to the bin). This will create a copy of your layer

3) Click and highlight on the Background layer. Go to the filter menu and select "Sharpen > Unsharp Mask"

4) A dialog settings box will appear. These settings will be wholly personal depending on your photo, I suggest some experimentation here. I typically use the following settings:

Amount : 120%
Radius: 2.8
Threshold: 3

Try and keep the bottom two settings low. The easiest way to explain what they do is for you to individually increase the sliders and play about a bit!!!

5) When the filter has been applied click on the Background copy layer above.

6) Go to the filter menu and select "Other > High Pass"

7)Select a value for the radius. I usually use 6, but again you will need to play with the slider and see the effect it creates.

8) Go to the layer pallette and select the blending mode, change it from "Normal" to "Overlay". Use the opacity to soften the effect if required.

9) Job done.

There are other ways to sharpen that are less destructive such as conversion from RGB to LAB mode and using the unsharp mask filter to sharpen specific channels. Indiividual channel sharpening and a couple of other ways as well. This method should suffice for the sharpening of your minis however!!

I hope this helps some of you out there.

dfb

[10 ball]

Cheers, this is some good info. Nice One
Two photos of one of my minis. One on left has been adjusted.

[Avelorn]

@10ball: I think you oversharpened it actually, tone it down a bit. Take the recommendations with a pinch of salt, the radius you would use is dependent on the resolution of the image.

[dogfacedboy uk1]

@10ball: I think you oversharpened it actually, tone it down a bit. Take the recommendations with a pinch of salt, the radius you would use is dependent on the resolution of the image.

Yeah Avelorn is right. This image resolution is quite low so you have to be way more careful. The halo you have got as a result from the sharpening can be used to great effect as some people present their minis with an outline. If you wish to do this then do it on a duplicate layer and carefully erase the area of the actual mini so you are just left with the halo and background.

i think you image will benefit more from basic adjustments like Levels, brightness/contrast and colour adjustments more than sharpening here. If you look at your gallery photos you have a heavy cast on most of them so try some of the levels adjustments and see what happens. You only need to sharpen a little in mini photography. The reason being most people are in a position to use tripods, timers and so on to create a controlled shot, the camera is more secure and you have time to be careful.

The settings I used as an example above are for a 9 million pixel image at full size, so if you have cropped your photo down ready for the web everything will be different. cropping and resizing is best left until last.

dfb

[10 ball]

Will do, I get excited and just start adjusting everything :-0
Thanks for the tips.

[dogfacedboy uk1]

Will do, I get excited and just start adjusting everything :-0
Thanks for the tips.

Yeah I know what you mean. i increased the saturation on some of my gallery shots and they look fine on my monitor but they look pretty shite in the cmon annual 2008/2009, the over saturation shows up in print and i have spoilt them!

dfb

[Emerett]

Yeah I know what you mean. i increased the saturation on some of my gallery shots and they look fine on my monitor but they look pretty shite in the cmon annual 2008/2009, the over saturation shows up in print and i have spoilt them!

dfb

I know your pain. I did a gig as a photographer for a event one night, one of the perks was free booze, after a couple of Car Bombs, I thought it would be a great idea to crank my ISO up to 4K.

I didn't get paid for the gig.

[warsait]

Interested ^^

[Donna111]

HI there
Thanks for your nice sharing.It is really important for me.I want to sharpen my image .And i have googled this code for image sharpening:

namespace WindowsApplication1
{
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
}

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string fileName = "c:/Sample.png";

REImage reImage = REFile.OpenImageFile(fileName);

REImage newImage = ImageProcessing.Apply Image Sharpen(reImage);

REFile.SaveImageFile(newImage, "c:/reimage.png", new PNGEncoder());
But it can not work after i entering this code.What's wrong with my code?
Thanks for any suggestions.