Sharpening... Give us your thoughts and formulas...

[embdude]

There seem to be a great many ways to sharpen an image. Although every image is different there seem to be some tried and true ways to get superior results. I hope to collect in this thread others ideas on.

1. What you like
2. How you do it
3. Some basic formulas / starting points

Some sample photos could be nice too!

Here are some of the methods I have used

Sharpen
Sharpen Brush
Unsharp mask USM
Hight pass filter
Sharpen with Saturation
Sharpen with Levels eyedropper
Shadow & Highlight sliders
Using a B&W layer

[EOS_JD]

LAB sharpening gives (to my eyes) the best results. No colour amendment as it only affects the lightness (greyscale) channel.

To use it I do the following

1. Create a duplicate of the background layer (Ctrl J)
2. Convert Image to LAB - Image>Mode>LAB (I usually choose not flatten)
3. Then go to the Channels pallet and choose the lightness channel.
4. Go to Filter>Sharpen>Unsharpen Mask and use a suitable amount for your image. High Res around 100-150 and low res obviously a lower number. Whatever looks good.
5. Convert image back to RGB - Image>Mode>RGB (Again I usually choose not to flatten)

And that's you done. If you find the sharpening is a little strong you can reduce the opacity of the sharpened layer slightly.

Cheers
Jim

[mizuno]

I'm a High Pass Filter layer fan.

Not only does it not touch your original layer, but it's fully adjustable at any stage in the future.

I might post up a tutorial at some stage.

[EOS_JD]

Yes I do must admit to using the High Pass filter too. Works very well. I'll let Mizuno post the workflow. :-)

[TooManyHobbies]

I experiment with many different sharpening methods that I have made actions for. They all basically use the following principals: Partial Image Selection Thorugh Filtering and Altered Image Blending. There are millions of iterations of selection methods, filtering, and blending. So don't forget about glowing edges, edge find, emboss, extrude, contour, artistic filters, etc. After I use a method, I then experiment with the opacity and blend style till I get what I like.