This is an alternative approach to sharpening images I would like to share with you. We all know that Photoshop has a set of pretty decent Sharpening filters, so "why bother?" you can ask. Well, there are some up- and downsides in any method, so why not learn about one more? In this tutorial we're going to make a sharper and more detailed picture like this:
Let's begin. Open the picture you are going to sharpen (I took my favorite photo of a business lady with a phone :)) and duplicate the layer Cmd+J. Now set the layer's blending mode to Overlay in the dropdown menu of your Layers palette. You'll get something like this:
I know, this doesn't look like sharpening, but hold on for a second. Now go to Filter → Other → High Pass... And start moving the Radius slider back and forth, while looking at your picture. With a low-resolution photo like mine (its quite small, 360x270 pixels - but it's totally OK for web use) the Radius is gonna be 1pixel – just use your eyes and adjust it to your taste:
That's all, no more steps in this trick! Cool, eh?
Now you might ask why is this better than for example the trusty Unsharp Mask filter. Let's consider this.
Here I took the same image and applied Filter → Sharpen → Unsharp Mask..., aiming for the same amount of sharpening as with High Pass. Here are my settings and the sharpened picture:
While these images might seem almost identical, they are not! For example, a noticeable downside of using Unsharp Mask filter is this:
Here you can see how Unsharp Mask tends to "overburn" the contrasting edges, and adding too much dark to the darker areas.
One more, High Pass filtering is more likely to give you a clear picture of small details, like hair (roll your mouse over the picture a couple of times to see the difference):
You can see that Unsharp Mask is basically just adding more contrast, while High Pass actually preserves the details.
But while both methods have their goods and bads, the main thing here is the incredible flexibility of High Pass approach. Now your sharpening effect is just a layer, you can do whatever you want with it. You can try to change it's Opacity to see different amount of sharpening. And here I did a version where only the face of this lady is sharpened, and everything else is not – as you can see, this instantly drags the attention of the viewer and establishes eye contact!
As always, I hope this was interesting – and good luck with your designs! :)
Oh man, I have to change that last line to something more creative. What 'luck'? Are we in Las Vegas or something? It's not luck, it's hard work, everybody knows that!
So, I hope this was interesting, and remember – today is the day to come up with something better than everything you did before! Cheers! :)
P.S. While tweaking the High Pass filter, I discovered a surprising effect I want to show you:
While the colors and lighting here seem a bit unnatural, the whole picture looks kinda interesting compared to the original. It's the same little trick but with a High Pass Radius of about 5px. Hmmm, definitely will try to use this somewhere...
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