a new trick I discovered (new to me at any rate) :-)

[dragon3085]

After reading Photoshop one on one,I was curious about his use of High pass for sharping- basically he recommends creating a new layer, setting it to soft light, and then running high pass and adjusting opacity to create a 'floating layer' of sharpness. HOwever I was playing around, and found that if I duplicate the layer- run USM on it at 500 percent-Radius to taste- and then change the layer to luminosity- I can get what looks to my eye, better sharpening that I can still contol with the opacity slider? Has anybody else tried this? If so have you run across any gotcha's- So far I havent had a lot of time to test it, but on the few photos I have had a chance to use it on, it though the effect was more agreeable to the eye versus the high pass filter.

Regards,
Patrick

[MBChamberlain]

Hey Patrick,

I have used this pretty often to sharpen multiple layers. Just duplicate the image, remove layers you don't want sharpened, flatten the image, then copy the flattened layer back to the original and you can apply this unsharp mask technique without damaging your layer structure. Of course you do the same thing if you are using the high pass sharpening method. In fact sometimes I use both, I like what the unsharp mask does for textures like cloth or hair, but I like the softer high pass sharpening on less textured areas like skin.

Michael

[byRo]

Hi there, Patrick, welcome to RetouchPRO.
Sharpening is a topic discussed in many, many threads around here. If you wish, you can even wade through a couple of tutorials on the subject of high-pass / gaussian filters and there use in sharpening.

Seems to me that your are falling victim of a very commom confusion. Many people will sharpen using a High-pass layer with blending at Soft Light (or Overlay) and forget that there are other alternatives. In fact if you set the blending to Linear Light the effect is exactly the same as using the USM.
In general softer blendings will reforce the texture in the image and Linear Light (USM) will reforce the edges.

But as we say, there are no rights or wrongs in Photoshop and there is always a handful of different ways to do everyhing.

Glad you shared this tip with us all.

Rô

[dragon3085]

thanks for the linear light info, it does indeed seem to give me the same effect. That why I posted the tip as well. I suspected I was not the 1st person to think of this or play around with it. :-)