Problems sharpening certain types of pictures. Help.

[Picture North Carolina]

I've done my reading and I'm pretty knowledgeable about sharpening, but am having problems with certain types of pictures such as below. One thing that is consistently warned about is sharpening so much that a halo effect begins to develop. However, the below slice of a larger picture shows the type of highly detailed areas I am having problems with, mainly in the finely detailed leaves, needles, etc.

No matter how I sharpen, I get haloing effects. I've tried photokit, tlr, usm, smart, etc. Yes, I can crank down the sharpening controls to stop the halos from developing, but it gets cranked down so far hardly any sharpening is applied. Are there any other methods of sharpening that work well with intricate details and minimizes haloing? thanks. /Dan

[rivan]

You can try sharpening single channels and/or sharpening only selected areas.

There are a wide variety of methods to get a desired selection, and you may have to go color range by color range or area by area, sharpening just the right amount per area. When working with a single sharpening level only affecting certain areas, I like to oversharpen a copy of the layer, mask it out and paint "sharpness" in my unmasking the areas I want affected.

There's also the high pass->overlay method that might work for you. Make a copy of your target layer, perform a high pass filter with a smallish value (totally depends on your source image) then set that image to Overlay blend mode.

[twofer]

Have you tried lassoing the trees in the foreground and sharpening them at a different setting than the rest of the image?

[Box Brownie]

Just quickly have you tried the HiPass filter method?

ttfn :)

[howzitboy]

i agree, apply highpass and you are done. fun to play with tool!!

oops, forgot to add, copy layer, set layer to overlay. then apply high pass filter. if too strong, try set the layer option to soft light, it too weak, set layer option to hard light.
then adjust opacity of layer to lessen the effect if u want to.