Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers Tutorials
Output / Sharpening - Unsharp Mask pt. 1
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers / Output / Sharpening - Unsharp Mask pt. 1)
Digital images tend to be just a tad soft due to the digital process itself and so they need to be sharpened. The process of Sharpening adds contrast to edges to create an illusion of increased sharpness but as it does so it may also create halos and artifacts. Applying Sharpening isn't a substitute for good camera techniques. You can make an image that was poorly focused sharp, nor an image that suffers from noticeable motion blur, either yours or the subjects, be sharp. Let's look at this demo image to see just how Sharpening works. I've already converted it into a Smart Object so it's ready to operate as a Smart Filter. I'll make sure that it's selected and we'll come up to Filter, Sharpen, Unsharp Mask. If ever there was an unintuitive name for something this has to be it, but the Unsharp Mask name actually stems from the old darkroom days and a technique they used to use to sharpen images. It's still one of the two main ways to sharpen in Photoshop. When Preview is checked you'll see your image update to reflect the settings that you're using. Placing your cursor over the thumbnail inside the Unsharp Mask dialog and clicking will show you the image with and without the Sharpening settings, so it's another way of seeing before and after. The Amount Slider controls the amount of contrast that you're going to add to the image. The Radius Slider refers to how far out the effect should extend, and the Threshold means how different two pixels have to be before Photoshop considers them an edge because what the Mask is doing is applying contrast to all the edges that it finds. There are a number of ways to configure the Sliders to get good results, but first let's crank them up to see clearly what they do. When I increase the Amount dramatically, and I'll move the dialog over so you can see the image clearly, you can see both in the Preview window, here's before and here's after, as well as in the overall image, that we have contrasting colors applied along all the edges. Where I had a blue line I now have a yellow edge. The red line has cyan, the green has magenta, the white edge has black, the black edge has white, and colors that are not a pure tone have their opposites, both tonally and color wise. Remember that blue and yellow are opposites in the digital world as are red and cyan and green and magenta.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers |
| Author: | Ellen Anon |
| SKU: | 34036 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-74-2 |
| Release Date: | 2009-09-23 |
| Duration: | 8.5 hrs / 112 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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