It's a little known fact that most digital photographs need some sort of sharpening to have them looking perfectly focused. In this tutorial I'll be looking at how Photoshop produces the sharpening effect, as well as how the Sharpen, Sharpen Edges, Sharpen More and the Unsharp Mask filters work.
Photoshop Video Series - Understanding and Working with Sharpening
It's often been said by photoshop users and photographers that 'every image needs sharpening'. Whether that's true or not is often down to the photographer, as more often than not, sharpening is a personal choice that can not only convey more focused details but also tell a story. Sharpening can be used for effect, to create drama, to add realism, or to highlight an aspect of the photograph that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Of course, sharpening isn't capable of creating new content and detail inside a blurry photograph, at best, all the array of sharpening filters inside Photoshop can do is add emphasis to the edges and regions of high contrast that already exist. Take a badly blurred photograph and it shall remain a badly blurred photograph - only the blurred regions and softness will become sharper, often making even more of a mess inside the image. I'll show you exactly how all of this works, and what effects it can have, inside my introductory tutorial, Basic Sharpening.
Once you understand how the sharpening filters work, and how they trick the eye into believing its seeing a photograph hauled into tighter focus, I'll show you some other great ways ways to get the job done. Whilst Unsharp Mask and Smart Sharpen may be waiting for your call inside the Sharpening menu, other great filters can work just as well, namely High Pass and Emboss.
And it's not just the filters we're 'focusing' in on during these videos, I'll show you some amazing tips and tricks to help in your sharpening workflow. These include sharpening the lightness channel in the Lab colour space, using the fade command to reduce colour banding and artifacting, the importance of using an accurate view size and how to sharpen only the parts of an image that need sharpening.
If you're a photographer then the videos in this series are a must-see. If you're a photoshop user that loves to understand his or her tool then this will be an extremely useful and altogether rewarding 45 minutes of your life.
Good luck!
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camera, contrast, focus, free, guide to sharpening, Photographic, photoshop cs2, sharpen, smart sharpen filter, video tutorial
For years we've been using the same old filters inside of Photoshop, then with the release of Photoshop CS2, we finally get a new sharpening filter - and the word on the street is that it was worth the wait! In this tutorial we'll be looking at the new controls available to help make our sharpening experience as trouble-free as possible! |
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banding, colour, distortion, fade command, focus, free, guide to sharpening, lab colour mode, luminosity, noise, Photographic, photoshop cs2, sharpen, video tutorial
In this free video tutorial we'll look at how to reduce colour banding, distortion and noise during the sharpening process. To achieve this we've got two options, either use a flat sharpening filter in the RGB colour mode followed by the mysterious fade command or sharpening the lightness channel in Lab. Both techniques are heading in the same direction, so feel free to let me know how they work out for you? |
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camera, emboss filter, focus, free, guide to sharpening, Photographic, photoshop cs2, sharpen, video tutorial
In this tutorial we'll be looking at how to fix small amounts of motion blur in an image using the Emboss Filter and a couple of really helpful blend modes. Removing motion blur is also possible using the Smart Sharpen filter, but here's a tried and tested technique that was around even before Smart Sharpening had a name! |
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camera, edge mask, find edges filter, focus, free, gaussian blur filter, guide to sharpening, invert, maximum filter, median filter, Photographic, photoshop cs2, sharpen, video tutorial
Sometimes sharpening a whole image can solve one problem but create another, in this video tutorial we'll look at building an edge mask and using it to sharpen a selected area. |
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camera, focus, free, guide to sharpening, high pass filter, Photographic, photoshop cs2, sharpen, view size, video tutorial
In this video tutorial we'll look at a great non-destructive way to sharpen an image using the High Pass Filter. We'll also examine the best view size to get an accurate preview of the image you're working with.
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Comments
I've been trying to make
I've been trying to make photoshop work for me but it kept my head spinning. I've been reading a lot of photoshop books online and hopefully I can make it work this time. Marylee