Photoshop tutorial: Sharpen your photo using High Pass Filter

Many people asked me how come I have so sharp images. Well, beside the fact that I do my best to keep my shutter high and keep my camera steady, I retouch the photos in photoshop. You all might think  “Ohh, the unsharp mask”, but i have to tell you that you are wrong. The alternative method I use for sharpening is the High Pass Filter method. This method provides good sharpening while minimizing image degradation.

So here are the steps for using the high pass filter:

1. After opening your photo create a copy of the layer by right clicking on the layer from the “Layer palette” and selecting “Duplicate layer”.
2. Then go to Filter -> Other -> High pass filter.
3. In the “Radius” box put a value between 3 and 5 pixels, depending on the effect desired. And click “OK”.
4. Then change you blending mode (by double clicking on the layer with the high pass filter) and select “Soft light” for a soft sharpening, “Overlay” for a more accentuated sharpening and “Hard light” for heavy sharpening. You can also modify the level of sharpening by decreasing your opacity of the layer.

This is a clean way of sharpening your photograph. You should give it a go and see how it works for you. You can even build an action in photoshop (as i did) so that you will do it faster.

Attention: Tweak the radius in the High Pass filter dialog when using it to sharpen photographs with resolutions lower the 7-8 megapixels. The values (of 3-5 pixels) are intended for photographs with 7+ megapixels. Using this values for smaller photos might give you an undesirable effect.

Examples (the difference might not be very clear, always try it yourself that’s the best way to trust the unaltered differences):

Original photograph:

Sharpened photograph:

Tags: Editing, Photography, Photoshop, Tips & Tricks