Sharpening portraits in Photoshop using the High Pass Filter

 

 

PiXimperfect's Unmesh Dinda has a new tutorial showing us how to sharpen portraits in Photoshop. To ensure that we are all on the same page, Dinda spends the first six or so minutes of the video discussing what sharpness is and how you can quantify the sharpness of a digital image.

Following this, we can look at his portrait sharpening technique. The technique relies upon the High Pass Filter in Photoshop. You can continually apply the same technique to increase the sharpness in an image and by utilizing blend modes and layer masks, you can customize where on your image sharpening is applied. It's important to ensure you are not trying to sharpen out of focus areas. Further, sharpening is often best-applied with a light touch. Excessive sharpening often doesn't look good. The idea is not to make your image super sharp, but rather to bring out the sharpness in the in-focus areas and accentuate the work your camera and lens have already done.

(Via PiXimperfect)