Practical Photoshop August 2020

“Welcome to issue 113 of Practical Photoshop! If you enjoy the issue, why not subscribe and get a whole year for just $19.99?” For something that is essentially very simple, sharpening often leads to a lot of confusion. This issue, our complete guide to sharpening your photos will help you cut through the jargon and crisp up your photos with ease. Elsewhere, we get creative with time-lapse sequences and craft cinematic portraits. www.digitalcameraworld.com DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT FILES To download this issue's files, type the following link into your web browser on your PC or Mac: https://bit.ly/pho_113 FIND US HERE… http://bit.ly/practweet http://bit.ly/pracface Also available on: http://tiny.cc/4dw9ky http://tiny.cc/rew9ky http://tiny.cc/8ew9ky…

Sharpening is an essential stage in image-editing. It has the potential to make any image look better. However, several questions arise. Which sharpening tools should you use? How strong should the effect be? And at which point in your workflow should you sharpen? In this guide, we’ll look at how and when to sharpen, and the tools that are best suited to the job. Photoshop and Lightroom offer an array of sharpening tools and commands. They’re very capable, but can initially seem a little confusing. Take Unsharp Mask, for example: this sounds like it’s going to make your image less sharp, but it’s called this because it first blurs, then subtracts the blur, hence the ‘mask’ part. Other terms can be confusing too. Sliders named things like radius, threshold, detail, masking…

If you shoot JPEG, your image is sharpened in-camera. By contrast, raw files go through no in-camera sharpening, so naturally come out looking softer. Camera Raw and Lightroom apply a default sharpening amount to your raws to crisp up the details, but often you’ll want to take things further. This stage of sharpening, where raws are enhanced near the start of your workflow, is sometimes called ‘capture sharpening’. This is an initial edit to sharpen the details and improve image softness. Capture sharpening should be thought of separately to ‘output sharpening’, which happens at the end of your workflow after a version of the image has been resized for a specific print or screen resolution. The Detail Panel in Camera Raw or Lightroom has all the sharpening tools you need for capture…

There are no rules when it comes to sharpening. The strength of sharpening is up to you, and will differ depending on the content, details and textures in your image, as well as your exposure settings and ISO. In general, images with lots of high-frequency detail, like landscapes, often benefit from a lower Radius setting; while more low-frequency images, like portraits with lots of smooth skin, usually look good with slightly higher Radius settings. While judging the right amount of sharpening, it’s always best to zoom to 100%, as this shows the actual pixels. Sometimes it can help to push the Amount slider up to 100 so that the image looks over-sharpened, then gradually pull it back. It’s easier to recognise too much sharpening than too little.…

The Masking slider is invaluable for controlling your sharpening. You don’t want to sharpen intentionally soft or blurry areas, as this will only amplify the image noise. Masking lets you protect low-frequency areas of the image, like blurred parts or areas of uniform color. Simply hold Alt and drag the slider. Initially the screen will be white, but as you drag, areas will begin to show in black. These will be excluded from the sharpening. Here it lets us knock out the soft backdrop, so our sharpening only affects the subject.…

Sharpening is a subject that photographers tend to worked up over. But it’s not worth worrying about. Bear in mind that the camera, lens and exposure settings you use to capture the image are far more important for sharp photos than the sharpening settings you apply later. So keep it simple, decide on a setting and forget about it. Just keep in mind the golden rule - don’t sharpen too much. Nobody ever looked at a photo and thought to themselves, “Eurgh, that is horribly under-sharpened!” – but it can certainly happen with over-sharpened images. So, as with most Photoshop edits, just don’t push it too far.…