When editing photos, you may find it is common practice to make adjustments directly to your base image. For example, you may open an image that needs sharpening, and apply a sharpening filter to that layer. Although this may work well, and give you the result you need it means that you no longer have the original image to work from – after having edited photos for many years, I have found that it is vital to always have the original image available.
Anyway, the technique I am going to show you works really well, and on top of it being unobtrusive, I find it actually gives a much better result than any of the other Photoshop filters. Here’s how you do it.
Step 1
Step one is simple. Open the image you want to sharpen in Photoshop – I have once again managed to use a picture of my cat for this:
Click to see the full size image
Step 2
Once you have your image open, you will need to duplicate the layer. Do this by right clicking the layer in your Layers window (Window -> Layers or F7), then click Duplicate Layer:
Duplicate your base layer.
You will now have two layers, both of the same image.
Step 3
Select the uppermost layer and click Filter -> Other -> High Pass…. This is where the magic happens. You will be greeted by a simple slider – you need to put it at a level that just highlights the lighter parts of your image, usually around 1px radius, take a look below for reference:
Select a radius of around 1px (Click above for full size image)
Click OK.
Step 4
Your image will strange at the moment, but fear not – the effect you are looking for is just around the corner! Set the layers blending mode to Hard Light. This can again be found in the Layers window:
Select a blending mode of Hard Light
Final Result
You will now find your image looks ridiculously sharp, this can be adjusted to taste by lowering the opacity of your uppermost layer (the one we applied the filter to). My image now looks like this, at 100% opacity:
Final result (with too much sharpening)
As I said, this is way too much sharpening, but it just shows you the full effect of what this method does. I would probably adjust this layer’s opacity to around 50-60%, giving a much nicer effect. I should also mention, this image did not necessarily need sharpening, I just know I won’t have any issues with licensing as I took it!
Conclusion
I hope this method helps you out, it can benefit many web designers looking to improve their website imagery. I may do a few more tutorials on unobtrusive photo editing, as I think it is a very valuable technique to have!
