Selective Sharpening For Portraits

[scottbergerphoto]

Usually when sharpening a portrait, particularly of women, you want to get the eyes and lips nice and sharp but you want to leave the skin soft. Here's what I do:
1.Make a copy of the picture on a new layer prior to shaprening CTRL-J.
2. Apply USM to the entire copy layer to get the sharpening you want on the areas you might want it. Don't worry about how the rest of the picture looks.
3.Type "x" to make the foreground color black
4. At the bottom of the layers palate click on the New Layer Mask Icon while holding the ALT key. This will hide all the sharpening you just did with a Layer Mask filled with black.
5. Type "x" to change the foreground color to white.
6. Use the brush tool from the tool box to paint in the sharpening you want (eyes, lips). Painting with white reveals the sharpening. If you make a mistake just hit "x" to change the foreground color back to black and paint over it. Layer Masks are great!
7. Use the Opacity slider to adjust the intensity of the effect.
Source: Photoshop CS for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby

Scott
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[tim]

Cool idea, thanks :)

You can also have a look at this (http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/DigitalDarkroom/PhotoshopTools/TLRSharpeningToolkit.htm) free toolkit (http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/DigitalDarkroom/PhotoshopTools/TLRSharpeningToolkit.htm).

[pradeep1]

Neat idea...I've got to try this!

[neil_r]

Usually when sharpening a portrait, particularly of women, you want to get the eyes and lips nice and sharp but you want to leave the skin soft. Here's what I do:.................

I will be trying this later, in the mean time, can you point us to some examples please.

N

[scottbergerphoto]

Some examples as requested:
http://www.pbase.com/scottbergerphoto/ayana_bailey
Scott

[JX]

Hi Scott,



I used your technique in reverse to soften the skin tones on your model. I used the Gaussian blur filter in place on the USM filter.

Thanks, I like the technique.

[scottbergerphoto]

You'll forgive me if I say that I like mine better. The results of yours to me are very unnatural. The eyes do not look real. Please identify the original picture with attribution and the altered one as such if you post my images.
Scott

[JX]

Scott, no need to apologize. Just experimenting with your technique. I think I like your selective sharpening better than using the history brush technique.

Your file name did not download to a usable file format. So I had to save it under a different name, otherwise I would have kept it the file name the same.



But thanks for the new technique.