how do you sharpen in ps

thebaz

i can sharpen photos easily using picasa , is there a similar utility with ps cs ?

thebaz

i tried using the sharpen filter and it seamed to do nothing -- no extra sharpness added !

Takeshi_Kovacs

Have a look in filters in photoshop. Sharpen facility there, although have a google on sharpening with ps, supposedly there is better ways of sharpening using special methods, something to do with only sharpening the luminance...

elven

As a basic sharpening, just go to filters/sharpen/smart sharpen and start playing with the sliders - you'll soon see the effects!

Here's a wee tutorial from a very good site, too:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/smart_sharp.shtml

And a fantastic video tutorial that makes it really easy to understand:

http://www.radiantvista.com/archive/video_tutorials/7/

DaireQuinlan

go to sharpen in filters, and the rather unintuitively titled "unsharp mask". mess around with it ... I normally apply anything from 80 -> 150 % with a radius of between 0.4 to 0.9 on stuff scanned using my coolscan (which does pretty sharp scans anyway). If I'm scanning in a photograph on a flatbed I'd use a slightly higher radius but considerably lower percentage. Dunno what sort of amount you'd normally apply to digicam images. Overdo it though and you get a very dodgy looking halo around areas of contrast.

thebaz

Thanks -- sorted now -- unfortunatly don't have cs2 , so no smart sharpen !

DaireQuinlan

I've never gotten great results from smart sharpen. Never messed around with it that much though. Perhaps I should ...

Unsharp mask is sorta smart anyway :-) It sharpens high-frequency components of the image (edges/areas of sharp contrast) without affecting the rest of the image. Another trick you can do with unsharp mask is apply it to a massive radius (100-150 pixels depending on how big your image is and how much of an effect you're looking for) and maybe 10-20%. This gives you a big contrast boost without the possible colour shifts that curves results in. Of course it has its downsides, as it again leaves a discernable halo around differing portions of the image. Its not as noticeable with a gigantic radius though.

-edit-
Actually just read that first link you posted there Elven. Neat ! I'll have try that out.

Zillah

I love Unsharp Mask. I've gotten such good results out of it that I'm often tempted to over use it.

I've twice heard of a better method that involves using a duplicated layer and some funky blending but I always forget it.

thebaz

Zillah wrote:

I love Unsharp Mask. I've gotten such good results out of it that I'm often tempted to over use it.

I've twice heard of a better method that involves using a duplicated layer and some funky blending but I always forget it.

Using the Unsharp Mask , what do you set Amount and Radius to ?

I seam to have to set amount to 150% and radius to .9 to see any improvement !

Zillah

Depends entirely on the image.

5uspect

Zillah, that way funky high pass sharpening is explained here.
I quite like the way that it applied to another layer as its easier to fix halos and go back and tweak it afterwards.

haz

Zillah wrote:

I've twice heard of a better method that involves using a duplicated layer and some funky blending but I always forget it.

That's the old-fashioned way - duplicate the layer, turn it into a negative, blur it slightly and adjust the normal blend opacity. The blur radius and layer opacity are like radius and amount. You can mess with different blurs (Gaussian, soften, median or bicubic) and with the colour channels - e.g. not sharpening the more noisy blue channel, or sharpening just the blue on dark skin and hair tones.