From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Sharpening images - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Sharpening images

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- [Instructor] Three of the most commonly used filters in Photoshop are the Unsharp Mask, Smart Sharpen, and High Pass Filters. They're all used to help prepare our images to look their best when they're printed or viewed on screen. Let's take a look at these filters to see when we might want to use one over another. I'm going to view the image at 100% so that we can see what we're doing. I'll use Command + 1 on Mac, Control + 1 on Windows, and then use the Spacebar just to scoot this over, I want to convert the background into a smart object. So I'll right-click and choose Convert to Smart Object, and I'll use the keyboard shortcut Command + J in order to create two different duplicates. Then, I'm going to hide the duplicates and target the bottom most layer. Then, I'll choose the Filter menu, and Sharpen, and then Unsharp Mask. So sharpening is really a trick to fool our eye into thinking that the image is sharper by increasing the contrast. And the amount is the amount of contrast that Photoshop is going to add when it finds an edge. The radius determines how many pixels out from the edge you want the amount to be applied to. So as we increase the radius, we start to see these halos where one side of an edge is lighter and the other side of the edge is darker. When we see those halos, we definitely need to back off on the radius. And then the threshold is used for suppressing the sharpening in the lower contrast areas of the image. So perhaps in the sky or maybe in the top of this dried mud. All right, for this image, I'm going to decrease the amount. I think 176 is too much. I want this somewhere near maybe 140 or so. And then the radius is a bit too high as well. I'm just going to take that down to make sure that I don't see any halos. Then, I'm going to increase the threshold, but not very much because I want all the texture in the top of this mud, and if I move it too much, it's going to start suppressing that. Okay, so here's a preview, that's before and after, and I think it's looking much sharper. All right, in this next example I will target Layer 0 copy and choose Filter, and then Sharpen, and we'll use Smart Sharpen. So Smart Sharpen is actually newer than Unsharp Mask, and although Unsharp Mask has been around much longer and it's still used more often, Smart Sharpen actually has several advantages. The edge detection in Smart Sharpen produces far less in the way of halos, and it has additional options for more control over reducing the sharpening in the shadows and the highlights of an image. So it has the same amount and radius options. The amount would be the amount of contrast and the radius determines how many pixels are affected on either side of the edge. But there are also three options for noise reduction. The Gaussian, which removes blurs that aren't due to noise or motion, like transformations when you rotate an image. The Lens Blur can help remove a blur caused by a lack of depth of field. Removing Lens Blur is more useful for the majority of images and it does do a better job with edges and details. And then there's the Motion Blur. You can use the angle slider to determine the angle of blur that you're trying to remove in your image. But for now, I'm going to set this back to Lens Blur, and I'm going to actually reduce the noise all the way down to the left because I don't want it to remove the noise in my image. Now, instead of just the single threshold slider that Unsharp Mask has, we have the ability to reduce or suppress the sharpening in the shadow areas separate from the highlight areas. So for example, if you had an image that was taken in low light with a really high ISO setting, you might need to suppress the sharpening in the shadow areas so that it didn't sharpen all of the noise. In this image, I'm going to suppress the sharpening in the highlight areas, but let's increase the amount just a little bit more and just make sure we can see some of these smaller grains of sand. So the fade amount is going to fade back the amount of sharpening in that area. So I'm going to move that all the way to 100. Now, I saw a little bit of a change, but if I move the tonal width over to the right, we're going to see a bigger change because the tonal width determines the tonal region being affected. So in this case, with it set to 50%, it was only changing the brightest values in the sand. And by moving it over, we can remove the sharpening from kind of the midtone sand regions. I'll also increase the radius. Again, that just determines how many of the edge pixels are going to be affected by the fade amount that I enter. All right, let's preview this. So there's before and after. We see we're still getting a good amount of sharpening in our shadows, and midtones, and along those edges. One last advantage of Smart Sharpen is you can save out your presets, so if you have certain settings that you use for clients or for specific output devices. All right, next I want to take a look at another powerful way that you can sharpen an image, and that's by using the High Pass Filter. I'll choose Filter, and then Other, and then High Pass. So the High Pass Filter is actually an edge detection filter, and anything that it detects is not an edge. It's going to turn to 50% gray. I'll go ahead and decrease the radius down to maybe five in this image, and then we can apply that. But, we need to get rid of all of that gray. So to the right of the High Pass Filter, we have this icon. I'll go ahead and double-click on it. And then we can change the blending mode. We can try Overlay, but to me, that still looks oversharpened, so I'll choose Soft Light. So there you go. Three different ways to sharpen your images, depending on the look that you're trying to achieve. If you're watching us on a small screen and it's difficult to see, you'll definitely want to start experimenting with images of your own.

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