Quick and Easy Sharpening - Mini Tutorial

[talan]

A little while back I wrote about the Manny Librodo sharpening technique (http://www.photographersonline.co.nz/showthread.php?t=79).

Tonight I'll show another very useful and extremely easy sharpening technique without the use of any unsharp mask filters, radius levels, sliders, etc. This technique is great for your photos you wish to load onto the web.

I believe the bloke who first popularised this technique was by the name of Marc Adamus (http://www.marcadamus.com/) so credit goes to him.

Ok, onto the how-to.

It is EXTREMELY simple.


Open up your photo in Photoshop.
Make all your adjustments needed until you are ready for the final resize and sharpen technique.
Resize your photo to 1000 pixels wide
Go to Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen - do this 3 times.
Resize to your final size you wish to upload onto the web.
Save your photo.
Done!

Below is an example comparing a photo straight out of the camera vs. the sharpening technique implemented. The sharpening technique is the only post processing I have done. You will notice it's quite a subtle sharpening technique and does not give the viewer the impression the photo has been heavily processed.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3288/4010337791_debddc4d81_o.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/talan-chen/4010337791/)

Happy sharpening!

Cheers
Talan

[Deviant]

I find with an image 1000 pixels wide:

Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask

Amount 150
Radius 0.3
Threshold 0

works a treat.

I don't know if that's faster or not :P

[HUNTD]

looks good

[Raizer]

I just tried it out, but I'm not sure if I like what it has done to the background.
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/1428/img1ia.jpg
http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/374/img2kw.jpg

[stic]

Why resize your original image?

If you apply sharpening to the image, do it to an original sized image as, sharpening a downsized image will give noise.

Also, you should use the unsharp mask.

For large images (like from a DSLR) use settings:

Amount 295
Radius 1.0
Threshold 4 to 10 (depending on amount of noise it gives).

Also, for better effect, don't sharpen the entire image, just sharpen the edges:

SMART SHARPENING
The ideal way of sharpening would be to only apply USM (Unsharp mask) to the edges in the image and not exaggerate the texture in flat areas. There is a filter called ‘Find Edges’ in Photoshop. Let’s see what we can do with it.

Go to the Channels palette and click on each of the three colour channels. We look for the channel with the highest edge contrast. Duplicate that channel by dragging it to the New Channel button. (Needless to say, we omit step 1 with B&W images).
Select Filter > Stylise > Find Edges. This will be the mask through which we apply the USM filter. The darker the area, the more sharpening it will get.
Select Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. The Blur filter will smooth out the transition between areas that get sharpened and those which don’t. The radius setting will depend on the resolution of the image.
Select Image > Adjustments > Levels. Here we can increase the contrast of our mask by moving the black and white sliders towards the middle.
Choose Select > Load Selection from the menu. This makes a selection from the modified channel. Check the ‘Invert’ box to select the black areas for sharpening.
Click on the RGB channel to return to the normal view and apply the USM filter. We can use a fairly strong setting now, say 250/1/0 or more, because we are sharpening only the important areas. You can get rid of the ‘marching ants’ by pressing Ctrl+H and observe the outcome in 100% view.

Enjoy...

[talan]

Thanks i must try that out.

I've always been told to sharpen after you have resized for the web but to be honest, never understood why :D

[byza213]

so when shooting in raw alwys resize in photoshop or whatever program you use?

before posting on the net?

i have so much to learn about lighting and needing a proper editing program

i think i use photoshop 7.0 or something lol

[stic]

I use a seperate microsoft re-size tool (no longer vailable to download) but i can email it to anyone who wants it...very handy as it doesn't degrade the image too much, even when resizing a 5mb jpeg down to a 900kb jpg.

Gives option to resize to small (640x480 or if portrait, 320x480), medium (800x600, or portrait 400x600), large (1024x768, or portrait 512x768) or custom (set your own size including original size).


Once installed, it's found in the right click menu...

Original JPEG is 3.3mb (size is 2592x3888)

Small resize 29.4kb (320x480)
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4024/4257640393_9db8c69ce8_o.jpg

Medium resize 39kb (400x600)
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4022/4257640447_ac499955de_o.jpg

Large resize 55.4kb (512x768)
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4061/4258399198_99171651a8_o.jpg

Custom 918kb (2952x3888)
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4025/4258399722_16a061a899_b.jpg