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How to Sharpen Photos in Photoshop

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One of the core steps in your Photoshop workflow is sharpening your image. There are many methods to
achieve this: running one of the several sharpening filters in Photoshop, or if you have Lightroom, using the Sharpen sliders there. Then there are many other techniques besides for which you can find online-tutorials.

About the best and easiest sharpening technique I have come across was published in a recent edition of Photoshop User Magazine. I will demo this effective 3-step method using my version of Photoshop CS4. It will work in any version of Photoshop that has layers, and if your version of Photoshop is one that doesn't have layers, then "get with it"; layers were introduced in Photoshop 3 back in 1994.

Unfortunately I don't think this will work in Elements as I believe Elements doesn't have "blending modes" associated with its layers, which is an integral part of this method. But I'm not 100% sure as I have never used Photoshop Elements. I'm just going on the features list I viewed at Adobe.com


OK, let's get going and open our picture in Photoshop. I'm going to demo using this picture of a California poppy that I shot recently.

The first step is to create a copy of the image to a new layer. Since there is just one layer in this example I can do that using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J. Photoshop names the new layer "Layer 1". You might like to rename the new layer to something like "Sharpen" as I did (highlighted in yellow). 



Now change the blending mode from "Normal" to "Overlay" as highlighted in the image to the left.

The image will become more saturated, but don't worry about that as our next step will take care of that.



Our next step is the final one, and the one that will sharpen the image. Simply it is is to run the High Pass filter on the "Sharpen" layer. The navigation for the filter is Filter > Other > High Pass.

You will have to apply some judgment as to just how much sharpening to apply. Move the radius slider left and right while keeping an eye on the image itself; not the preview which will be mostly gray. I chose a radius of 10 for this image.


And here is the final outcome. While it's not so obvious here as I have "slimmed down" these images and made them small for display on the web, there is considerable sharpening obvious when viewing this on my computer, and you will find the same on your image too.

If you have Photoshop CS4 or the newly-released CS5, then before applying the High Pass filter, you can convert the "Sharpen" layer to a Smart Object which will allow you to go back and change the radius setting you apply as many times as you like until you get the image just the way you want it.

That's it! One of the most effective sharpening techniques I have seen yet. Happy sharpening!



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A Grunge Botanical Collection — Five Painterly Garden Pieces

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Over the past few weeks I've been building out a small collection of botanical pieces using photos taken in my garden here in Irvine, California, (and in one case out on a hiking trail here in SoCal), and using AI assistance to give each one a grunge, painterly treatment — dark, richly textured backgrounds with warm gold light breaking through, turning garden snapshots and trailside finds into something closer to old varnished still-life paintings than straight photography. Here's the full set so far. Epiphyllum oxypetalum — Queen of the Night, Painterly Botanical Art A night-blooming cactus that flowers just once or twice a year, for a single night — three blooms at different stages caught in one frame from a night it happened in my garden. Kangaroo Paw — Painterly Grunge Botanical Art Australia's velvety-flowered native, grown in my own garden, its stems reaching in different directions the way it actually grows rather than posed into symmetry. ...
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A Steindachner's Ebony Tarantula at Crystal Cove

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I crossed paths with this fellow on a hike at Crystal Cove State Park this morning, along the Fenceline trail. I posted it to iNaturalist as soon as I got home, and within a few hours had it confirmed by several people: a male Steindachner's ebony tarantula ( Aphonopelma steindachneri ). Turns out the timing wasn't a fluke. Males of this species leave their burrows specifically to search for mates between July and October, so this was a textbook-timed encounter rather than an unusual one — good to actually check that before assuming, since my first instinct was that a July sighting seemed early. After his photo session, I gently nudged him with a stick and he scurried off the trail into the chaparral, safe from being run over by a mountain biker or stomped by an arachnophobic hiker.  Aphonopelma steindachneri is native to the coastal ranges of Southern California and northern Baja California, and it's one of the tarantulas you're genuinely most likely to run into ...
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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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