Edge Sharpening
After testing some various techniques of sharpening on my images I finally found a way that suits my own taste. (Special thanks to Benjamin who kickstarted my search to a good sharpening method for my images and who contributed to the last two(three) steps.
Most of the previous versions I used had one thing in common: They produced too much
sharpening artifacts on large areas of color. The noise I tend to have in some images becomes much more visible and the skies or skin tones don’t look smoothly gradated anymore.
Also the
bokeh (the character of out of focus areas) becomes prone to artifacts in the noise visible there. I’ve found now that creating a mask of only the edges of the image and successively applying sharpening to the areas under the mask works well for me.
In Photoshop I do the following:
1.
Open your image and as usual perform all your corrections to the image as you would otherwise.
2.
Open your Channels palette and create a new channel. This new channel will eventually be your mask. Change it's name to "Sharpening Mask” or any other name that works for you.
3.
Click on the RGB channel for your image.
Select the entire image (Select->Select All).
Copy the entire image (Edit->Copy).
Click on the Sharpening Mask channel you created in Step #2. Paste the image in (Edit->Paste).
It will appear in black and white, but that's what we want, so don't worry.
4.
Use the Find Edges filter (Filter->Stylize->Find Edges) on the Sharpening Mask channel. It'll turn into something that looks a bit like a line drawing. Our next steps will be to tweak this mask.
5.
We want the black to be really black and the white to be really white in our mask, so use Levels to make the adjustment (Image->Adjust->Levels). Move the black point in from the left, and the white point in from the right (the triangles under the histogram). How much you do this is one of the critical choices you'll be making, so take your time, and remember that the black areas are what are going to be sharpened (the white areas won't be sharpened).
6.
We want to hide the actual sharpening of the edges, so we need to make sure there's a smooth transition from white to black in our mask. To accomplish this, use a small Gaussian blur on the image (say 2-4 pixels) (Filter->Blur->Gaussian Blur).
7.
Now we need to tell Photoshop that our Sharpening Mask is just that, a mask. To do that, we need to select the black bits only. Use Select->Load Selection. In the dialog that comes up, make sure that Sharpening Mask (or the name you gave it previously) appears as the Channel and that the Invert box is checked.
8.
Click on the Layers tab and make the image visible again. You should see the selection created in Step #7 superimposed over the image.
9.
Get the image ready for sharpening. Choose View->Show->Hide Edges (Cmd/Ctrl-H) to make the selection invisible, then choose View->Actual Pixels and scroll the image to an area with which you want to evaluate the sharpening.
10.
Finally, we're ready to sharpen.
Select Filter->Sharpen->Unsharp Mask and play with the values.
I usually do a two pass sharpening on the image. In the first pass I choose a percentage of 275 to 300%, a radius of 0.5 to 1.0 and threshold of 0
Note that you can use much higher amounts than usual, as the halos tend to fall outside the selected areas.
11.
Time for the second pass sharpening.
Select Filter->Sharpen->Unsharp Mask and play with the values.
In the second pass I choose a percentage of 10 to 15%, a radius of about 50 and threshold of 0
If you find that the sharpened area is too restrictive, go back to Step 8 and change your mask.
12.
For a small lighting tweak I duplicate the layer, choose soft lighting from the drop down menu of that layer and set opacity to 25-60% depending on the image.
It’s quite a set of steps, but after some use I find that I can do in image in about 2 to 3 minutes. It would of course be possible to make an action the various steps.
Some results are below
and a 100% crop
Hope it is at least usefull to one person
Cheers,
Mike
I now also see what I did wrong with the selection!
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