What do you use for sharpening and why?

Just curious what everyone uses, because I'm a noob to pp and photography in general.

Thanks.

Depends on what you want to sharpen and how much. I usually use either a High Pass filter or Smart Sharpen. Just toy around with them for a while and see what works best for you.

are those stand-alone softwares for sharpening? I have aperture and cs4. I've been toying around w/ aperture, but I really can't see much of a difference when I sharpen. CS4 I haven't even tried to use USM. I'm not really to good w/ photoshop.

What I usually do is duplicate the original layer and set the mode to soft light. Then I do a high pass filter on the duplicate layer, adjusting the settings as needed for the photo.

Copy the red channel. Ctrtl click the red channel and then select RGB. Now unsharpen mask and select an amount of 300. Ctrl H gets rid of the marching ants and keeps the selection live.

Try it on a portrait! Guy Gowan uses this method.

That_Fox wrote in post #9655330
What I usually do is duplicate the original layer and set the mode to soft light. Then I do a high pass filter on the duplicate layer, adjusting the settings as needed for the photo.

EOS_JD wrote in post #9655344
Copy the red channel. Ctrtl click the red channel and then select RGB. Now unsharpen mask and select an amount of 300. Ctrl H gets rid of the marching ants and keeps the selection live.

Try it on a portrait! Guy Gowan uses this method.

So both of you use photoshop?

jonahrei wrote in post #9655510
So both of you use photoshop?

Yes, I use Photoshop CS3.

i follow this...i found it in a thread on here

I also use CS3, and I've found that using the high pass filter with soft light *mostly* or one of the other light options on a duplicate layer works well for me. I like how I can vary the opacity of the sharpened later and paint out what I don't want with a mask. You can't do that when you just apply USM to your entire image.

Just don't go too crazy with the high pass filter. Turn it up just enough to increase the detail of your shot, but not so much that you're sharpening the noise as well. I generally run noise ninja on high ISO photos before using the high pass technique, and it seems to help.

Josh_30 wrote in post #9655571
I also use CS3, and I've found that using the high pass filter with soft light *mostly* or one of the other light options on a duplicate later works well for me. I like how I can vary the opacity of the sharpened later and paint out what I don't want with a mask. You can't do that when you just apply USM to your entire image.

Just don't go too crazy with the high pass filter. Turn it up just enough to increase the detail of your shot, but not so much that you're sharpening the noise as well. I generally run noise ninja on high ISO photos before using the high pass technique, and it seems to help.

That about mirrors my workflow. I always run noise ninja before I duplicate the layer and run the high pass filter. And good point about about the other light options, I use soft light most often, although I do use the other modes as well.

I used to do a lot of high pass sharpening but since I started using Lightroom 2 whose output sharpening incorporates the main features of the Pixelgenius plugin, I usually let LR do the sharpening, although for critical large prints I may still pull a tif just to check its sharpening.

S2K.OGRAPHY wrote in post #9655523
i follow this...i found it in a thread on here

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Thanks for sharing that guide!

Josh_30 wrote in post #9655571
I also use CS3, and I've found that using the high pass filter with soft light *mostly* or one of the other light options on a duplicate layer works well for me. I like how I can vary the opacity of the sharpened later and paint out what I don't want with a mask. You can't do that when you just apply USM to your entire image.

Just don't go too crazy with the high pass filter. Turn it up just enough to increase the detail of your shot, but not so much that you're sharpening the noise as well. I generally run noise ninja on high ISO photos before using the high pass technique, and it seems to help.

Thanks! I'm going to try the high pass filter asap. I have a couple pics that I need to sharpen.