Hello everybody, Yanik here for Yanik’s Photo Schools once again, for another Photoshop video tutorial.

Today we’re going to be looking at sharpening and image. You’re probably saying to yourself, “Yanik we know how to sharpen an image, you don’t need to tell us, it’s easy. Just go in the unsharp mask or the smart sharpen and filter and just play around with the radius and the amount and wala!” And you’re absolutely right; you can do it that way, but today we’re going to do it in another way. A way that I find is actually a lot better than these unsharp mask or the smart sharpen tool in Photoshop. And it’s by using the high pass filters. It’s not very long to do; it’s actually quite simple to do. And you have a very, very good control over your sharpening amount, and what’s great about it is that it’s done on separate layers. So if you’re the kind of guy that likes to save psd files with layers, then you can always go back and undo the sharpen or modify it at will.

All right, let’s go and play with this. The first thing we need to do is to do duplicate our layer. Let me bring my channels, my layers palette out here so you can see it. And to duplicate layer, you control J and that duplicates your layer. And the next thing we need to do is to change that layer to a high pass layer. And we do this by going into filter, other, and the second one down high pass. A dialogue box appears, and your image becomes this awful looking gray kind of a gray plate, metal plate. Don’t be alarmed, this is normal. This is what high pass does, and we’ll be modifying that. Now, the only function we have in this dialogue box is the radius of our high pass.

Now, what you see as gray is where at the high pass won’t be affected or in other words, the sharpening won’t be affected. So the higher up you bring that, as you can see. The more grossly over processed sharpening will appear. Now I like to have it between 5 and 10 pixels because it’s better to have more than less, because after that, you can just by bringing down the opacity of your layer, decrease the amount of sharpening, and you can’t bring your opacity over a hundred, so you can’t increase the sharpening. So that’s why I like to give it a little bit more umph! And then tone it down after.

So let’s say 6.3 looks good, click Ok. And this is where the fun begins. Now what we need to do to bring back our image is to change the layer blending mode, and you find this right here, on top here. And we click on the arrow. Now of course, when I record with Camtasia it bumps my menu over, but usually it appears right down here. So let me just go here and let’s select overlay. Now we can select overlay- soft light hard light, vivid light, and linear light. And each has their own strength. I like either soft light or hard light overlay, but let’s just click on overlay. And there you go. It brings everything back. Let’s look at a before, and after. I’m not sure if you’re going to see down the video, so let me zoom in at a 100% on the little baby’s eye, before and after. I’m sure that you can see the difference there, before and after.

And of course, as I mentioned, you can play and go to soft light which would be a bit mores subtle. And you can do it with hard light, which I find sometimes a little too extreme. I like overlays kind of in the middle, and if it’s still too much, I can just reduce the opacity of my layer to my liking. And it’s that simple. Now of course, this affects the whole image. Now if you only wanted to affect a certain part of the image. What you would need to do after that is to go and erase where you do not want this sharpening to be applied to. And you can do that by creating a layer mask on your high pass layer. And you do that by clicking on this icon here, and it creates a mask, a white mask. Now what you need to do to erase is to have a black colored brush. Your black needs to be a foreground color, select your brush and then using the size and the hardness that you want, you can go in and erase. Again here, you can select the opacity of the brush, and then it’ll erase more in a gray tone, that a black tone. So, go right ahead and then erase where the high pass filter applied sharpening, and where you don’t want it.

And that’s it! That’s the tutorial for today, I hope you enjoyed it. Post your comments on other ways of sharpening, if you know. I know there’s a method using L-A-B mode, that I’ve never tried but some of you have tried it. Go right ahead, and post your experiences with that technique. This is Yanik Chauvin signing out for Yanik’s Photo School. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.