The Best Way to Sharpen Images in Photoshop
Digitally sharpening a photo can be a useful way to emphasize texture in a soft image, but sharpening too much can create an annoying “ghost” effect around hard lines. Here’s the best way to do it in Photoshop without putting too much emphasis on sharp edges.
In this video the photographer Jimmy McIntyre , he demonstrates how to create a mask that will focus on the edges of the image that you do not really want much to improve. This way, you can apply sharpening to the parts of the photo that will benefit the most from it. For your convenience, McIntyre has created a Photoshop action that you can download from his website so you don’t have to do any work. However, you will still find it helpful to see how it works in the video above; in fact, it uses a find edges filter to mask the already sharp edges of the photo.
While the preset action is specific to Photoshop, you can probably achieve a similar effect in similar photo editing software.
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