Section 10.14. Sharpening

10.14. Sharpening

The very last thing you want to do in your workflow is sharpening. In fact, you will likely want to do two different kinds of sharpening at the very end: effects sharpening and detail sharpening. Of course, you you've already done some sharpening to correct the resampling to bring your camera's Bayer Pattern color matrix back to assigning a specific 8- or 16-bit shade of color to each pixel in the imageinitial sharpening. Hopefully, you were very careful not to overdo that sharpening. If you did, there will be some jagged and/or haloed edges. That's not a pretty sight. In fact, it can be downright disgusting.

You don't want to do any sharpening between then and now, either. Otherwise you'll have some of your processes softening the image and others sharpening it and you'll never be able to find the most reasonable compromise.

So why do we want to do two types of sharpening now? Well, one of them isn't really sharpening. It's just a very dynamic illusion of sharpeningeffects sharpening. The other is real image sharpening, but done in such a way that only important edges are sharpened and so that edge artifacts are either minimized or eliminated.

10.14.1. Effects Sharpening

Effects sharpening uses the combination of a few Photoshop manipulations to make small and similarly colored detailssuch as strands of hair or leaves of grass in a landscapepop (see Figure 10-42). I'm sure you've seen prints that make people's jaws drop because of what seems to be a small detail rendered with exquisite sharpness. Chances are excellent that what you really saw was an image made by someone who understands effects sharpening.

Figure 10-42. On the right, effects sharpening using the Overlay Blend Mode and High Pass sharpening. The end result makes it seem that you could feel the texture if you rubbed your fingers across it.

Here's the super-simple routine for doing effects sharpening:

1. Start by not looking for any sharpening filters. Usually, you want to sharpen only the parts of the image that have the most detail so those areas will draw more attention. Start by putting a feathered selection around those areas you want to "super sharpen." In Figure 10-42, those areas were the tree branch and the weeds protruding from the lake.

2. Press Cmd/Ctrl-J to lift the feathered selection to a new layer.

3. Make sure the new layer is still selected and then choose Overlay as its Blend Mode. The colors inside the selection will suddenly look eerily oversaturated and too contrasty, but don't worry about it.

4. Double-click the Zoom tool to enlarge your image to 100 percent. Choose FilterOtherHigh Pass. The High Pass dialog will appear, as seen in Figure 10-43.

   Figure 10-43. The High Pass filter dialog.

5. Be sure to check the Preview button because you want to adjust the Radius slider according to what you judge to be the best effect in the image window. When you like what you see (and there are no halos) click OK.

10.14.2. Using Smart Sharpen

Until Photoshop CS2 came along, with the new Smart Sharpen filter, I had become addicted to using a couple of third-party filters for preprint sharpening. Frankly, I still prefer them in some images. However, Smart Sharpen is such an improvement over the Unsharp Mask filter that I often find it's quicker and easier to use it than the competition.

Before you do any overall sharpening of an image, make sure you convert your Background layer to an ordinary layer, select all the existing layers, and then press Cmd/Ctrl-Opt/Alt-E to merge them all and send the merged result to the top layer. You can see the resultant layer stack in Figure 10-44, along with the image that resulted.

Figure 10-44. Overall sharpening using the Smart Sharpen filter.