More Focused

[Paulie]

Hi all

Another newbie here! I just wanna say first, what a great site, there certainly is a lot of talent out there. My problem is this photo. I want to make the faces more focused. I've tried unsharpen & other sharpening plug-ins to no avail. Any help would be appreciated. Keep up the good work all!!

[catia]

This is pretty small to try anything on. Having said that, here is a version obtained by selecting their faces and creating a new layer with just the faces. Then ran unsharp mask on that.

Catia

[Mig]

A possibility is to gently use the dodge & burn tools, mostly the burn tool here. The best way is to add a new layer, then fill the new layer with 50% gray. Do that by going to Edit>Fill and in the dialogue box that pops up look for 50% gray and choose that. Then change the blend mode of this layer to soft light. The gray will disappear, but you can dodge and burn on this layer.
Keep it on the subtle side and you can create a nice illusion of the details of the faces being sharper.

Mig

[Paulie]

heres a larger file

[Paulie]

Thanx for those great tips, i cant seem to get the image file size to a maximum to upload without losing quality, but i will tinker about with the techniques u have suggested

[Doug Nelson]

Try posting just a segment, perhaps one including their faces.

I prefer the highpass sharpen method (make a merged dupe layer, use highpass filter, set blend mode to overlay or one of the other contrast blend modes).

Check out our tutorial section for another interesting sharpening technique, this one from Jakaleena (called "faux sharpening", I think).