Sharpen smarter in Photoshop: An overview of three common sharpening techniques

 

 

Jesús Ramirez of the Photoshop Training Channel has created an excellent in-depth tutorial about sharpening your images in Photoshop. In the video below, he covers three common sharpening techniques in Photoshop and discusses the pros and cons of each in addition to showing you how to use them.

To make sure all viewers are on the same page, Ramirez starts by covering capture sharpening, creative sharpening and output sharpening. Capture sharpening is applied to recover detail lost through the lens, such as a form of diffraction compensation. By default, Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw apply a sharpening amount of 25 to RAW images, versus 0 to JPEG images which have their own sharpening applied in-camera. Creative sharpening is sharpening applied for artistic intent, oftentimes it is applied selectively. Output sharpening is done when preparing an image for export or printing.

When we sharpen images, we are creating the illusion of detail by adjusting contrast of edge pixels. Sharpening excessively can lead to halos around the edges of objects and can increase visible noise in your image, so a subtle touch is important. To ensure that you can see what your adjustments are truly doing to your image, always view your image at 100 percent when sharpening.

If you liked the video above, you should check out another one we previously covered from Ramirez in which he explains all 27 blend modes in Photoshop.

(Via PetaPixel)