Simple Photo Sharpening Techniques

So you’ve got your fancy digital SLR, you go out and you take a lot of photos, come home, donwload hem and are dissapointed with the results. Don’t be. Chances are, even the best photos from the best digital camera will need a little processing. Even though the technology is constantly improving, most consumer-level digital cameras still cannot match the level of sharpness you could achieve with a relatively inexpensive 35mm SLR and good film.

Some photos require more work than others, but here are a few simple shaprning techniques that will work on most every photo.

First of all, we need a picture. Any picture will do. I’m using a rather boring shot of the greenhouses across from my house. First of all, let’s examine the photo. We can quickly notice a few things.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Simple sharpening techniques - Fig 1

  1. We have a little bit of atmospheric haze that’s giving us an overall blue tint to the background. This is your basic Aerial Perspective and in fact it’s supposed to be like that. It’s a bit exaggerated today, though, due to the weather - those hills really aren’t that distant. So, we need to correct some of that.
  2. After resizing the photo to our final outpuut dimensions, we’ve lost a lot of contrast between elements, the texture in the bushes and grass, on the road, etc.
  3. Judging from the tall weeds along the edge of te road, I really need to do some yard work.

So what can we do to help correct these problems? There are a couple of steps we can take.

First off, let’s duplicate the image and place it on a new layer. Now, on our new layer, let’s run a little lesser known filter on this layer to bring out the edge details.

Go to Filter - Other - High pass. Adjust the slider until you can just barely see some color coming into the image, then back off just a tad, until it all but disappears. Click OK. Now set the layer mode to Overlay.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Simple sharpening techniques - Fig 2

Sometimes this works a little too well and the end result looks unnatural or you get a haloing effect. If this happens, just hit undo and run the filter again, with slightly lower settings. If you like the overall effect, but find that there are a couple of areas where the filter is too strong, you can always apply a layer mask to the layer and use it to hide the layer in those areas.

Now let’s work on improving local contrast using the Unsharp Mask filter. This should not replace any other USM work you plan to do, but should be in addition to it. There is a pretty general setting for this that will work on most photos.

So, click on our background layer, go to Filter - Sharpen - Unsharp Mask and apply the following settings. Amount: 20, Radius: 20-50, Threshhold: 0.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Simple sharpening techniques - Fig 3

As you can see, this has done a great deal to improve the sharpness of the image and has gotten rid of a lot of our over-pronounced atmospheric haze.

Finally, go to Image - Adjustments - Hue/Saturation and up the saturation by about 20%. This will give the entire image a little more punch and will help bring out the contrast in the grass. This may or may not be necessary on your photo, depending on the camera, but a lot of digital cameras will leave colors looking a little dull.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Simple sharpening techniques - Fig 4

These effects are often subtle, so now let’s take a look at the two side-by-side to see the real difference.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Simple sharpening techniques - Fig 5

A note on Polarizers: You’ve probably also noticed that the sky is a little washed out in this picture. We could correct some of that by shooting with a polarizer (I didn’t this time because I wanted
to show sharpening techniques on an image straight from the camera). However, depending on the
angle of the sun, your mileage will vary. Polarizers are also great for helping to cut down on the exaggerated haze. I strongly reccommend buying one and spending some time learning to use it. It’s not
as easy as simply attaching it to your lens.

There you have it, a few quick tips for bringing out detail in a digital image. Many photos will need
more work than this, many will be fine with just this (or less). However, whatever level of processing you need to apply, some or all of these steps will be helpful nearly every time, or at least they have been for me.

Like this tutoria? You can download a PDF version of it from my deviantArt page.

Added Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 11:19 pm under Photo Effects.