Lessons

Lesson Info

Bonus Video: "Sharpen"

hello folks in this bonus video on talk a little bit about sharpening and frankly sharpening could be a whole creative live class in itself because there's a lot of options so I'm gonna narrow it down to talk about some key things we know about sharpening now even the term sharpening and what that means to people is convene a lot of different things for example if you I did a google search on photo shop sharpening I'm sure you'd find lots of different ways to do it and lots of options I don't talk to mostly about the different concepts of sharpening and when we need to consider doing so when we talk about sharpening is usually three things that people really need to be considering one is capture sharpening that means either light room or cameron and show you on camera aw how to sharpen it overall just to make sure that all the detail that your camera captures is actually there now there is some scharping happens by default in camera we'll talk about how to take full advantage of that a...

nd also about the fact that now that camera either khun do it as a smart object or as a filter from within photoshopped cc means we're also creating the sharpening away this editable which is very important then the second type of scharping many people doing this one depends entirely on the photograph is known as by different things some people call a detail sharpening or cosmetic or selective what that really means is sharpening on ly certain parts of an image for example if I had a portrait I wouldn't sharpen everything because I don't want her their skin to be sharp and I want maybe the eyes and the hair to be sharpened but not everything else so that's a second form of sharpening where we're looking at different aspects of the photograph and then lastly the final type of sharpened way also want to concern themselves with his output sharpening which really just means sharpening based on the kind of output that also suggests that it would be next to impossible to sharpen something for print and for web the same way because that's two different forms of output now we'll talk about this more later but just let me say right out front one of the most challenging parts about output sharpening is on the screen sharpening usually looks much more intense than it does when you print so if you're specifically sharpening for print you really need to do some testing to figure it out because sometimes you look at something on the screen and go while that's way too much I need to pull that back only to find that when you print it it's not a sharp ish you'd like it to be so let's first of all go into camera here and talk about sharpening from a camera raw perspective in terms of the's this capture sharpening so the sharpening tab is the third one in here and the first thing you want to do is make sure that we're looking at something at one hundred percent side so I'm going to make this a little bit larger and then this menu is going to come in to play down here I want to make sure that I'm viewing this at one hundred percent size because any decision about scharping you should be viewing at a hundred percent and by the way that doesn't matter if you're talking about sharpening and camera or any type of sharpening should always be viewing it at one hundred percent okay back to camera so in here you can see I have all these sliders amount radius detail masking if by default the amount of sharpening is usually twenty five percent the higher it is the more noticeable b will see it goes up a zayas one hundred fifty zero would mean no scharping at all one hundred fifty means quite a bit you can see if I turned the preview on and off there's already a noticeable difference one strategy that some people like is to go about half way and kind of see how that looks and then work back from there I would say if I had to give a number I'm usually in the fifty ish range all the time that gives me a good amount of sharpening the radius sliding now this is interesting because in as we'll see later with filters and photoshopped this radius goes really high up to like some crazy I'm like two hundred fifty whereas in camera at a maximum of three which is good because it means you can't overdo it basically you this is going to adjust the size of the details that are going to be sharpened so if you only have little fine details you could get away with a smaller number now even in here as capture sharpening I'm still kind of thinking ahead to print so I don't want to go too high on the radius right now because I might alter that based on the uh what my final help was going to be either web or print the details slider is goingto influence how much high frequency information is affected and in here one of the simplest ways to figure this out as a hole down option or alter and as you drag the slider going to see a bit of a change and in here the darker areas are the part they're gonna be sharpened gray is nothing so if you have like in this case mostly great just a little bit that's actually pretty good because I want to sharpen just these little detail areas as I push it further you see it's picking up a bit more information this idea of options are all dragging is very useful down here the masking is goingto also decide how much you want to really sharpened overall right now it's set at zero which means everything is going to be sharpened and again if I hold down option or ault and hold on this to start to drag the lighter areas is what's going to be sharpened star right now everything's being sharpened and in some cases like in here I have some a bit of depth of field in this texture maybe I don't want that sharpened as much so this is where I'd option or all click on masking and start to drag and say if I'm on lee scharping a light areas then I could see for example now I'm on lee going to be let go about there sorry I'm on lee going to be sharpening those areas and that you always have this ability of course to turn the preview honor off and at this point my goal is as for things that need to be sharper to be sharper these background areas because there's depth of field doesn't need to be sharp there's also a bit of an angle here so this area is less sharp so my expectation is not for that to be sharpened as much as some other areas so this point I'm going now open this object and of course it will come into photo shop as a camera raw smart object which of course means that if I double clicked on this it would go back to photo shop to edit my original sharpening options so now let's assume for now we're happy with this overall look now we want to maybe do a bit of this selective or detail sharpening and this is kind of cool because remember this because this started camera aw those settings can be added now we'll apply a smart filter to this which means that can also be edited so I'll go here and let's use smart sharpen and we talked about in various lessons I used my my favorite phrase end up with will I in this case I want to end up with certain areas being particularly sharp so to be able to see that I'm going to sharpen mohr than you should it's very important not that I'm sharpening here toe let me see what I'm doing then I'm gonna come and pull it back in a minute so I'm gonna push this amount much higher than I normally would and the radius much higher and you'll see that looks completely artificial and bad and I deliberately gone way overboard so you can see what's gonna happen my click okay and that's going to of course apply this smart filter it looks really really bad so I take the mask for this smart filter and I inverted which will temporarily hide everything now once again I would change my view to one hundred percent when I'm making decisions let's just kind of folk is it on this area so like a lot of things we talked about I would check my brush settings I want a regular brush in normal mode one hundred percent capacity does need to be that big though and wherever I paint I'm going to be revealing the effects of that crazy overdone smart sharpened filter and I'm just sort of paying attention to the rial texture edges here just to show you the idea here and you can see how it's way overdone but that's okay because my goal was just to see what I was doing and like we talked about numerous times now I would double click on this and say okay but now let's put this down to more normal amounts normally for this kind of sharpening our radius between one and two is pretty good you can see by click and hold this is before this is now also the amount is really high I usually don't go any higher than two hundred and even that's probably a little high but you can see the effect this is having so in a case like this I'd say I was doing this for web I would probably be at somewhere around one thirty one forty with a radius of around one point five or so and then reduce noise at around ten percent just this usually a good number and I'm always looking here on my intention is not to go into every bit of detail with smart sharp and you'll see it has the option of deciding what kind of huh what are we trying to remove lens blur and so on I can also get even more details to say let's make it less obvious in the shadows so there's all kinds of controls and again I'm not my intention is not to go into every single one of them but you'll see now if I turn this off remember there's already overall sharpening now I'm doing detail sharpening I didn't do the whole thing of course I didn't scroll around I just put my attention right here because that's where our screen is at the moment but of course normally you would move around and do everything at this point now I want to do my l put sharpening and again as they talk about l put sharpening means based on what output I will be using so if I'm gonna end up scaling this down and putting on my website I would do that first and then sharpen that to make sure it looks good and this is the one place where I can make a judgment based on what I see on the screen in other words if my image's gonna end up on the screen that I'm ok with judging its sharpness on my screen at the same time if instead I'm sending my image of to print on my inkjet printer I don't want to judge it on the screen because that's not the final output the final output is my printer and as I mentioned earlier generally speaking when you view sharpening if you're preparing for a print it will look mohr intense than you want before you send it to print so don't make a judgment call they're the only thing that I would say if you're sharpening and you're seeing these halos where there's like glowing things than that's telling you that's probably a little bit much and as we talked about this is just the beginning of a different story a couple of other methods of scharping but this is the context we need to be thinking capture details sharpening if required output sharpening okay so in this particular case now if I wanted to output sharpening as odd as it probably sounds I would personally convert this to a smart object now I can do another round of sharpening to the whole thing and whether you're using on shark mask or smart sharp and at that point I'd say it doesn't matter as much although this has a few more options now I have to do it might even be the same numbers I used before but now I'm sharpening based on my final output so if I was doing this for the for my website or for a portfolio or something on that was on online I would look at them say okay that's a little too much let me pull this back and use different numbers so again I'm making the decision here based on my final output so now I have three different levels of sharp why did the original camera scharping that little bit of selective sharpening and this final opa scharping each of which I can edit based on this method so some interesting options there now just to touch on them because people asking sort of question is there you will hear lots of different options about now you should sharpen using l a b mode you should sharpen and reduce the luminosity you should change the blend mode to this and lots of different choices the bottom line for me is do you like the way it looks when you're your final output whether that's online or for print I will show you one other methods since the cup people asked about it during a couple of our q and a sessions this is a camera smart object so if I double click on it you can see I just pretty much used the default options I'll just put the masking up a little bit because I want to concentrate mostly on the gravestone not the information the back quick okay and let's make sure we're looking at a one hundred percent which we are and now another option that some people like for sharpen and I would use this one person I don't use a lot but I understand why people use it is because it really brings out texture so if you have ah avery texture heavy photo like this one this is where I might consider using this filter which is found under other high pass and basically what you wantto move this if you move it you're trying to find get mostly gray and little bits of highlights here it's almost like when we were in camera wrongly held down the option all key and I said it's the light parts that are going to be sharp it's kind of the same thing here grey is going to be neutral the other areas in here are going to make a difference so because it is a smart filter aiken try a number like say three click okay and then I double click on the blending options for the filter and then I can change it to either soft light or hard light again it's a personal choice but let's look at the difference if I turn this smart filter off and on so it's really he pulled out a lot of detail almost a little too much I think in this case so now that I have in the right blend mode I might pull it back one advantage of doing the high pass is again it still is a smart filter so I could take my brush tool set to black and I'm just going to paint this whole area here with black because I don't want any sharpening because I want this to be that nice boca depth of field kind of thing happening in the background so scroll up sure and this way I can continue to edit if necessary so again the high pass filter is another option you'll also hear people talk about doing some kind of sharpening and then changing the blend mode to luminosity which means it has less chance of a color halo that's more advanced sharpening I think if you just focus on the aspect of capture sharpening in the camera light room if necessary a little bit of detail sharpening using that filter with a mask and then build that all into some final output sharpening most of these things you can create presets like camera raw I could make a preset just for sharpening and with filters the smart sharp in particular has I didn't show you that but let me show you real quickly that one of the reasons people are gravitating towards smart sharpen as you do have the option of saving a preset so if you find some settings that work well for your ancient printer or your website you could save those present so that's one advantage of using smart sharpen as your main sharpening tool I see always use on sharp mask but it doesn't give me quite a cz much control nor does that have preset so that's why this works a little better so there you go just a few thoughts about sharpening this is by no means intended to cover everything because again there could be hours of discussion when people have their own sharpening methods they like and say oh don't use this method use that method a lot of it is subject to taste I would say though that that however you do it and it shouldn't surprise you at all to hear me say this that if you do it in a smart filter editable way it's going to give you more control over each image and the bill to reuse it in other images lots of options I hope you find some information there that will help you develop your own method of sharpening