Subtitles of the Movie

Now sharpening landscapes is nowhere near as intricate as working with portraits and that's why we spent so much time on portraits because it is a bit more important to get it right then it is in landscapes. But there are a couple of issues when sharpening landscapes that you need to be aware of and this is a thing that I see in a lot of young photographers on the various discussion boards, they get a little too aggressive with the sharpening and they are not realizing that their really damaging their image and introducing artifacts that really degrade the image. So, let's take a look at what not to do and again we go to Filter, Sharpen, Unsharp Mask and by the way this is the 8X10, 360 DPI image, so just so you know that. Now as we look at this, let's take a look at this magnified area and we see that there's a bit halo going on, but we want to look at this area here and see the halos that are produced on that twig, that's what you don't want. Now I'm going to purposely increase the sharpening on this just to show you what not to do and you can see on this image the halos and those halos are what you don't want. It's before and after the sharpening and what people are looking at when they put this kind of sharpening in there is, right here you've got half dome and half dome looks good at a distance and the rocks and all that and the trees look descent but if you zoom in on the trees they have the halo effect going to and if we look at before and after it's exactly what you don't want. In addition we're bringing out some center noise in the sky with that heavy settings. Now that's purposely over extenuated just so I can demonstrate to you what happens when people get too aggressive with sharpening, especially evident in landscapes. Now here's how to approach sharpening on landscapes, establish our copy layers, Filter, Sharpen, unsharp mask and let's look at a tinier radius. We want to come down on the radius side, that's how to avoid that halo effect. In fact let's go to .75 and if you really think it needs it then we can put it in there and if we look at before and after we see that, that did improve it, but we have nowhere near the halo that we had before. So the way to get rid of the halo is to reduce the radius and increase the amount if you want sharpen a landscape that has this kind of, you know these twigs and the tops of trees and that kind of stuff in your image without degrading it or do a layer mask sharpening where you don't do any sharpening at all on this kind of stuff or the tops of trees and you just do sharpening on say half dome or whichever part of the image that you want the eye to focus on. That also helps you get rid of sharpening noise in this contiguous sky portion of the image and bringing out the center noise. So be careful about how you look at sharpening in landscapes.