After 5 Designs Blog » Blog Archive » Tips and Tricks 3/6

Tips and Tricks 3/6 – Sharpening photos in Photoshop

Posted by a5dblog | Posted on 06-03-2010

Hi everyone! It’s Sasha here with my first blog post. Tiki talked about sharpening your layouts for web in a previous post and today I would like to focus specifically on sharpening your photos to make them look great on your page. Do you ever look at a layout and think “Wow those photos look so crisp, I wish mine would look like that.” There are many different methods that are used, I will focus on three of them here.

Sharpening with the the unsharp mask filter

Go to Filter/Sharpen/Unsharp mask.

Once you open it you’ll see three sliders. The amount controls the amount of sharpening of course. For higher resolution images a value between 150% to 200% is usually enough. Next you can play with the radius. Usually a value between 1 and 2 is recommended for high resolution photos. I used 2 for my photo. Finally you can adjust the threshhold. When the slider is set at 0 every little part of the image is sharpened and when it’s at its highest value of 255 nothing happens. Usually a setting between 5-20 is good for a high resolution photo. Here are my final settings.

And here is the before and after picture. I boosted the brightness and contrast a little at the end too. This always helps with making the photo look crisper too.

Sharpening with the Smart Sharpen Filter

This is the method I use the most. Unfortunately this filter is only available in Photoshop CS2 and up. Go to Filter/Sharpen/Smart Sharpen.

Just like the unsharp mask you can control the amount and the radius of sharpening. I usually set the radius between 1 and 5 pixels. You can adjust the amount to get the effect you want. Unlike the unsharp mask this filter has the ability to remove some of the blur on your photos. I usually select “remove lens blur” but you can also have fun and play with the other ones. So here is the values I used on my photo.

Here are the before and after photos:

Sharpening using Hi Pass Filter

First duplicate your background layer. Next Go to Filter/Other/Hi Pass.

You’ll see a gray covered area. Enter a value between 5-10. I used 10 on my photo. Next change the blending mode to Hard Light

You can play with the other blending modes to see how your photo will look but this is the one I usually use. Linear light and Soft light work really nicely too. You can lower the opacity of that layer if it’s too strong for you. Here are my before and after high pass sharpening photos.

You have to be careful with this method because you can easily go overboard and your image may look over sharpened. There is one more thing you can do to enhance the hi pass effect on your photo. Go back to your background layer. Duplicate it one more time and change the blending mode to screen. This is what you should have