Hi! This is Photoshop Mama and welcome back to the final part in our series Mama’s Makeover and we will pick up right where we left off from part two. All right now we are going to do the composite layer so click on the very top layer, zoom, use your scroll bar and make sure you are on the very top layer and what we are going to do is add a blank layer and you are going to name this your high-pass sharpening layer. We will just name it before we do anything.

So what we are going to do on this blank layer is keep it highlighted and this is very important, we do not want to merge all of these adjustments together just in case we have to come back and make any other adjustments, we want to leave in there. There are working layers but we want to create a composite of what the image looks like right now at this point. So to do that, just create this blank layer and this is the key. Hold down your Alt key on a PC, your Option key on a Mac. Now keep that key held down.

Click the fly out arrow of the layers pallet and let me move this over so you can see the full menu. So with Option or Alt held down click the fly out arrow, keep the Option or Alt key held down and choose merge visible. And it is very important do not release your Alt or Option key. When you select merge visible with the Alt or Option key held down, you get this composite picture right up here. If you did not have that key held down, you would essentially be merging all your layers.

So this is going to be our high-pass sharpening layer and there are basically about three steps to using this for your sharpening layer. What you want to do is have the composite here and that means every visible layer that was on when you did this will create a merge copy on that blank layer and then we wanted to saturate it so we can just and we wanted to saturate it directly so just go over to the image menu to adjustments and choose desaturate or use Shift+Ctrl+U on a PC or Shift Command U on a Macintosh.

And that will just take the color out of the layer. The next thing that we want to do is go to the filter menu down to other and over to high-pass. We are putting a high-pass filter on this layer. And what you want to look for as far as the settings that you are using. You may want to zoom in at least to 50% or 100%. You want very fine lines of contrast between these little white and darker gray areas, so for example I am going to bump this up. You do not want it to look like this.

You do not want to see all those freckles in there, you just want to see very fine lines of white and darker gray around the edges of things. So, usually it is under three; three or under is usually going to be the setting that you will use on a high resolution image and then click OK. Now to get this to work as a sharpening layer, you need to change the blending mode of it. In the blending mode, there is a couple that you can use but normally I use overlay.

You can also soft light and hard light. Now you may not think this is made much of a difference but I am going to turn the visibility off. And let me zoom in a bit so you can see these. Especially around the eyes okay here is with the sharpening on and here is it off. Now, if you want more sharpening than what that one layer gave you, you can always duplicate the layer by dragging it to the new layer icon and that is going to give you an even more sharpening effect.

If one layer at 100% does not do it for you, then duplicate the layer. Now what I am going to do if you have to duplicate the layer like this group it so click on one of the layers and then Shift click on the other and then keep the Shift key held down and make a group of it and call the sharpening group. And what you can do with this is lower the opacity to get it to just where you want it. Now, while the eyes look great sharpened and some of the hair looks great sharpened let me back up on this or let me zoom in a little bit first at 100%.

And that really does make a difference and I do not know if the movie software can quite show you the new ounces of it but here it is with the sharpen