Selective sharpening advice, please.

I use PS Elements to do what selective sharpening I do and am sometimes not very happy with the results. Are there other programs that do a significantly better job of "selective" sharpening?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Charlie

Is your issue with the selection or with the sharpening? You need to control both to get good results.

I work in Photoshop and usually only apply sharpening to the subject, although sometimes everything in the frame is important and gets sharpened equally.

With a flattened image I duplicate the layer, then select the subject. I use the Quick Select tool most of the time and fine tune ther selection if needed with black and white brushes in Quick Mask mode.

With the selection active I use Smart Sharpen and watch the small window at 100% to judge the effects of the sliders. Typically I'm between 80 and 150 on the top slider and 0.3 on the bottom slider. It is important to adjust these for every image IMO and not rely on a one-size-fits-all setting. I fade this step to Luminosity, although I don't recall ever seeing that it mattered to do so.

At this point my image has two layers, with the selection still active on the top layer where the sharpening has been applied. I convert the active selection to a mask for the upper layer (that may bnot be possible in PS Elements), then toggle the top layer on/off to judge the sharpening. If necessary I can adjust the mask if my selection edges are too wide or too crisp, and I can reduce the amount of sharpening within the subject by painting on the mask with a soft low opacity black brush. Finally, I can reduce the overall sharpening by lowering the opacity of the top layer.

When the sharpening looks right for the image flatten the layers.

I have several ways of selective sharpening. The one I use most is to sharpen a copy on another layer (control or command "J") and then paint out the sharpening where I don't want it using a layer mask. In conjunction with USM or Smart Sharpen you can have total control over what gets sharpened and what doesn't. You can do something similar with feathered selections but I really like avoiding alterations to the original image. A very subtle way of selective sharpening is to use the Dodge & Burn tools. Sharpening is really nothing more than brightening light pixels and darkening darker pixels. If you dodge the highlights at a very low level 3-5% and burn the shadows similarly you can get very precise about sharpening. Again, do it on a copy layer so you can easily back up to the original.

Thanks, Richard, for the precise description of your processes. I am way behind your understanding of the capabilities of PS and must now seek tutorials to bring me up to the basics. I have gotten very comfortable with the software package called "Studio 2" from Olympus for general overall sharpening. There are specific sections of an image, occasionally, that I feel should be sharper. but feel that additional overall boost would make the image too sharp, if you know what I mean. I'm not at all sure I can achieve what I want and of course would need to post an example to ask advice about a specific situation for this to make sense.

Realizing that there are limitations to program sharpening and what it can do for an image that was not optimum to begin with. Anyway thanks for advice.

charlie

Jim, that is advice I can apply immediately with my current knowledge of the programs I use.

Thanks.

Charlie

Realizing that there are limitations to program sharpening and what it can do for an image that was not optimum to begin with.

This is a key understanding. If you miss focus at the time the image is made you cannot "fix" focus in post processing.

For years, I used a close variation on Richard's description, but CS5's vastly improved "Refine Edge" command added a step for me. After I have used the Quick Select tool to select the bird, I use the Refine Edge command to tune the selection. I use the black and white mask, but what really matters is that you feather the edge. I usually use one pixel but if the sharpness of the edge is critical, I use half a pixel. This pretty much eliminate the "halo" effect you can sometimes get.

If you need to blur or do noise reduction, the Invert command will quickly give you everything else.

Well this is certainly a timely post for me. I was working an image recently and needed to do some selective sharpening without a good clue how to do it. So thanks so very much for bringing it up Charlie and to Richard, Jim B and Jim D for your excellent tutorials

I'm printing out this entire thread as a check list for techniques when selective sharpening. Thanks all.