Fine Adjusting your Sharpening

[snead]

I have found in my RGB work flow there is a fine line between sharpening images properly and over sharpening. I have been playing with a simple method of “peaking” the image sharpness without going over the edge (pardon the bun!). Here's how;

After a preliminary modest sharpening, using your normal method, make a duplicate layer using ctrl + J. In the Layers Palette you should see another Layer labeled Layer 1.

Then Image/Mode/Lab. When prompted to “Flatten Image”, choose “Don’t Flatten”.

Go to the Channels Palette and select the Lightness Channel. You should see a monochrome image.

Go to Filter/Sharpen/Unsharpen Mask and set to 100/1/4, more if you like.

Now do Image/Mode/RGB. You should see the image is over sharpened. At this time I magnify the image to 300% (ctrl +).

Go back to the Layers Palette and look in the upper right hand corner for the Opacity indicator which should read 100%.

Select the drop down slider with the arrow and SLOWLY move the slider to the left. As you move the slider you should notice a drop in the image sharpness. With a little training, you can become extremely accurate in the amount of sharpening applied.

When you’ve finished peaking the sharpness of your image, go to Layers and Flatten Image.

You can make a simple action to get you to the Opacity adjustments.

So what do you think? Is it worth the bother?

Snead

[Duv]

Absolutly! In fact many have adopted a 3 phase approach:Capture/Creative/Output Device. I think it was Leah that pointed me to an interesting site:creativepro.com The article was Out of Gamut: Thoughts on a Sharpening Workflow. You might find it interesting. There's many effective ways to sharpen depending on what you are trying to achieve but blindly reaching for the Unsharp Mask filter is a pretty unsophisticated approach to a very important part of the workflow.

Cheers
Duv

[sPECtre]

It is also possible to use the advanced blending "blend if" sliders, as described by Mathias Vejerslev in http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/w...0155@.2ccf89ab