Sharpen Photo Like a Pro in Photoshop
There are a hundred ways to improve your photos using Photoshop photo editing. In addittion to color correction, the other important aspect of photo editing that you should be looking at is how to sharpen your photos. Photoshop offers you extraordinary degree of control over the sharpness of your image. One built-in option is to use the Unsharp Mask filter, which has been present even in the older versions of Photoshop. With the introduction of Photoshop CS2, however, Smart Sharpen filter which gives better results and greater control over the Unsharp Mask filter becomes Photoshop users’ favorite to sharpen images. I will not teach you how to perform these two options for sharpening photos in Photoshop. Instead I will discuss how professional photographers sharpen their photos without the help of any third-party plugin in Photoshop.
Interested? Then read this quick tutorial on how to use the so-called LAB Color in Photoshop. LAB by the way stands for Lightness and Color Channel A and B.
How to Sharpen Photo- First Step: Convert your photograph from RGB or CMYK to Lab.
Open your image and select Image>LAB Color. Unlike when converting your photos from RGB to CMYK, converting to LAB does not affect the image color.
How to Sharpen Photo – Second Step: Open the channel palette.
Click Window>Channels.
How to Sharpen Photo – Third Step: Choose the channel
There are three channels: L stands for lightness which is what you get when you convert to grayscale; A is Red to Green, B is Blue to Yellow. In the Channels palette, highlight the Lightness to isolate that channel.
How to Sharpen Photo – Fourth Step: Apply Filter
In the Filter menu click Sharpen>Unsharp Mask and move the sliders to get a nice balance of sharpness before the halo becomes overwhelming.Click OK.
TIP: When sharpening an image, you should watch out for the halo effect that will appear along a hard edge of a line or curve. This is due to how sharpening is applied by contrasting the colors along these edges. Thus you should stop where halo effect becomes too obvious. That is the optimum sharpening amount you need for your image because the halo is what makes the image stand out.
How to Sharpen Photo - Fifth Step: Convert the image back to RGB.
Now you have an image that is sharp with no halo.
Let’s compare the “before” photo with the “after” photo:
Wow, that works like a charm doesn’t it? I’m going to have to give it a try.
@Deric -
Thanks for dropping by.
It does for most of my photos. Let me know if it also worked for you.
Nice. There are a few ways to sharpen a photo, but only methods I knew were in RGB color space
[last week on our image processing seminar we had to implement some convolution functions that blur and sharpen grayscale images using Gaussian, Laplace and Fourier methods and transforms]
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Thanks for the tutorial..realy help my photos with the bad flash config..
Very interesting. I have always just used the unsharp mask in RGB or CMYK mode and got unsatisfying results. I’ll have to give this a try. Thanks!
wow this is nice specially if your photo is taken with your mobile phone with less MP…
hi, this is nice work which you are done photos , i will also use this
methods for my photos also, and also you applied the exact colour to that image , which is not been over sharp and not dull also when we are looking the image and try to some more images also.
Nice job – well explained, well executed. You need to do more tutorials – I’m sick of ‘How to make a glossy button’ or ‘how to make a gamer background’ !
@Multimedia Design -
Thanks. I am actually planning to come up with more tutorials like this.
I have tried and it is veru usefull for me.
I believe that the best way for sharpening images is with the High Pass filter.
simple and effective.
i’d like to see your version of color correction.
Just wanted to give everyone an FYI, conversion to and from Lab DOES effect color. It’s a common misconception that just because the gamut is gigantic and can hold all of the color spaces together, the conversion between them does cause subtle artifacts. Try it yourself and take a look at the RGB or CMYK channels individually before and after a LAB conversion. Because of the rendering intent conversion, there will be a difference. It may not be very noticeable on the image as a whole, but specifically cmyk-lab modifications are not safe
Nice post. Haven’t thought of alot of these points before. Will come back and bookmark your site for future reference.
I am new to photoshop, and after following your tutorial several times, I did not see any changes in two photos which I tried to sharpen.
After changing to channels and Lab modes, I selected “Ligthness” to do my sharpening, but saw no change. So, I used your configurations (above) for the unsharpen mask (Amount, Radius and Threshold) and still no results. Any idea what I am missing here?
Thanks for making this tutorial.
Thank you. Great post
Thank you. Great post
TonyC – Part of it might just be that you’re new to Photoshop. It took me a while to ‘get’ my eyes. I was sharpening somewhere in the 140% range. Now I only go to 60-70% because I want to enhance without it looking ‘photoshopped’.