Great sharpening technique!

[Darren Howie]

G'day Guys
Surfing around looking at some nature phoographs the other night and stumbled onto the best sharpening technique ihave seen for PS.
Seems to create a great sharpen effect without the creation of noise and grain to the same effect as normal Unsharp mask.
OK
1.do all your normal lighting and saturation adjustments except sharpeneing.
2.Having done that Go. Image>mode>lab color(photo will go automatically seemingly b+w
3.go to the channel selection panel and select the lightness channel
4.now do the USM thing.So far i ahev found that the recommended 150%,1.5,0 seems to work well but mess around and see what you get.The highest i have gne is 400% so far.You can also use all the normal sharpen commands on just the lightness layer with good effect.
5.Image>mode>rgb
Done
Take a close look and you will see far less grain than using the standard USM in RGB mode.
Also no hallowing around the main object!!
A great tip from one of the Canon users.
All the best
Darren

[Leftseat86]

I'll give that a try, thanks!

-Clovis

[JeffinDEN]

Not earth shattering though. You can do the same thing on any of the channels. It can be done in other modes as well, you don't have to switch to LAB. Check out Fred Miranda's website. He has some nice actions that work really well. Only $12-$15 dollars I think. I have a bunch, don't need them all the time, but they come in handy when you need them.

[ckw]

Yes, you can sharpen on any channel/in any mode. The advantage of using LAB mode, and sharpening the lightness channel is that it modifies edge contrast without altering colour data. Part of the noise in images is colour noise and this method avoids making such noise more noticeable.

Many (all?) of the better actions and plugins incoprorate LAB sharpening - including, I think, Fred Miranda's.

Having used Fred's actions (amongst others) and written my own I've now come to rely on a plug-in called Focalblade. It costs $50, but is very sophisticated - firstly it is adaptive and modifies its sharpening model to each individual image, and secondly provides separate sharpening models for screen and print. Optimal print sharpening is very hard to judge by eye as invariably this looks crap on screen.

Cheers,

Colin

[JeffinDEN]

I like using the High Pass method too.

On the Layer palette select your Background Layer and right click. Select Duplicate Layer.

With this new layer highlighted select Filter / Other / High Pass. Set the Radius to 10 and click OK.

Zoom into your image to Actual Pixels level so you can better see what you're going to do next.

Go back to the Layer Palette and select Hard Light from the left drop down.

Now go to the Opacity Slider and select a level of sharpening that seems best to you. Usually something between 20% and 70% will be best.
That's all there is to it.

What I like about this method of sharpening is that it can be undone even after the file has been saved. This is because the sharpening is done on a separate layer not on the original background layer. You can also click the eye beside this layer on and off to see the effect at any time.

Jeff

[Darren Howie]

Great tips guys!
Like flying one grat thing about photography is you never ever stop learning.
If you do its time to give it away!
Thanks and time for some research.
All the best
Dazz

[Radomir]

Colin how does your action stack up against others? I'm not sure about the $50 one.. do I need it?

[ckw]

Well I wrote my action specifically for preparing scanned negs/slides for on line display of 1024px images - I think it does that job pretty well, but its not flexible, and also not really appropriate for digital camera output.

I guess no-one needs to spend $50 on a sharpening package, but if you want a combination of ease of use (time saving) with the option of manually tweaking to the best possible output, Focalblade is a good option.

Depends how seriously you take this stuff. Fact is that each variation of, the size of image, content and intended destination all have a bearing on how an image should be sharpened.

A very different set of parameters should be used for an A4 print and 1024px uploads. In fact, optimal sharpening for a 1200px image might be different to that for a 1024px pic - most of the time it is too time consuming and fiddley to get the best result, so we use an average setting that works pretty well most of the time.

For $50 you get something that does the optimising for you.

Cheers,

Colin

[GrantT]

I like using the High Pass method too.

Nice tip Jeff.

[JeffinDEN]

Your welcome.

[Radomir]

Interesting discussion... and I feel I can learn a lot more if we continue

Colin, a few things:

1) Can you expand on why your action is not suitable for digital camera output?

2) Can you expand on what you meant by optimal sharpening. I mean, are you talking about different techniques altogether, or simply different amounts of the same technique.

My modest experience has shown satisfactory prints (on a Frontier minilab) by making sure they look good on screen.. IOW, I didn't oversharpen (judging by image on screen) to get a good print. However, I need to compare this to somebody else's prints to see the difference... I very well may be doing it wrong (this is 8x10 prints I am talking about). Gotta check if Joe P. has any when we get together (now that he's local)

Thanks!

[ckw]

1 - the action I wrote was for scanned negs/slides, therefore grain is an issue. A major aim of the action is to improve sharpness without emphasising the grain, hence it is a less "agressive" sharpening than I would apply to my Canon CMOS images, and also includes a smoothing element which I would not use on my digital images. You can use it on digi images, but you won't be getting the best out of them.

2 - essentially optimising sharpening involves, for simple USM sharpening using the appropriate amount, radius and threshold - so you already have 3 variables to play with. More sophisticated sharpening techniques involve edge masking, and gaussian blurring of flat areas - you could end up with 10 or 12 variables -each of which has an optimum setting for a given image - way too complex!

On top of everything else, you also need to consider the subject matter - the sharpening I apply to an aircraft shot is totally different to what I would apply to a portrait. On the aircraft I might want to reveal as much rivet detail as possible, on the portrait, I'll want to minimise skin blemishes.

With regard to commercial printing, these services usually apply their own sharpening algorithms, so that a good screen image works well on print - if you're doing your own prints its a different matter.

I should say that none of the suggested techniques are flawed - all will produce good results, and the difference between one and the other will often be revealed only in the case of "difficult" material.

Finally, there's the matter of personal taste - I'm not always seeking the ultimate possible sharpness, as I feel this can look a bit unnatural and "unphotographic" - often I will sharpen up a picture, and then back it off a bit for what for me is a more pleasing look.

Cheers,

Colin

[JeffinDEN]

Colin have you tried the ColorWasher from the Focal Blade guys? I just brought them both, love the color washer.

Jeff

[Katamarino]

Just tried the first method, worked quite nicely on a pic of my cat!

[ckw]

Didn't buy the Colorwasher (yet!) as I already have some stuff from Appied Science Fiction (the people who did the Digital ROC & GEM for Nikon). But I certainly have it in mind for next time I go back to work with some of my old negs & slides. The demo is quite impressive.

Cheers,

Colin