Using a sharpening workflow in Photoshop CS2
Table of Contents
Sharpening techniques
We use a host of techniques in the sharpening workflow—some obvious, others less so. Some attempt to avoid accentuating dust and scratches, noise, and film grain by sharpening through a mask. Others seek to make sharpening nondestructive, and editable after the fact, by applying the sharpening on a layer, and still others use localized sharpening applied with a brush, to pick out specific details in the image. In practice, we often mix these techniques into a single sharpening move, and we’ll provide some examples. However, it’s easier to digest the various techniques separately, so that’s how we’ll present them.
Sharpening layers
We prefer to do most of our sharpening on layers, for much the same reasons we prefer using adjustment layers to burning Curves or Levels directly into an image—it’s nondestructive, it affords us control after the fact, and it allows us to use masking when we need to. In the first stage of the sharpening workflow, layer-based sharpening also provides an easy way to concentrate the sharpening in the midtones through the Blend If sliders in the Layer Options dialog box.
Figure 1 shows the steps for creating a sharpening layer on a flat file, or on a layered one. The layer is set to Luminosity mode to avoid any color shifts or color fringes—it produces essentially the same result as converting the image to Lab and sharpening the Lightness channel. You can then run the Unsharp Mask filter globally on the layer, or apply Unsharp Mask through an edge mask.
Figure 1: Creating a sharpening layer
On a flat file, simply duplicate the Background layer, then set the blending mode to Luminosity.
On a layered file, create a new layer, then choose Option-Merge Visible (or press Command-Option-Shift-E) to merge the visible layers into the new one...
...then, set the new layer’s blending mode to luminosity, to avoid color-fringing.
Tip: Use Fade to Luminosity. If you really don’t want to create a sharpening layer, but you want the benefit of sharpening in Luminosity you can run the Unsharp Mask filter, then choose Fade from the Edit and set the blending mode to Luminosity in the Fade dialog box.
