Adventures in Photoshop, Part __ ?

[red_satin_doll]

Trying to teach myself PS CC is sometimes fun and sometimes sends me screaming into the night. As in last night, trying to correct a photograph of a rose I wanted to have printed and just muffing it up horribly. *le sigh*

The various "sharpen" functions are ones I have not mastered yet at all.  I'm sure I'll love it when I master it but I'm at that stage I was when I transitioned from Photobucket to ipiccy a couple of years ago: "I just want to do this, I just want my little slider bar back, where is the eraser so I can selectively apply this effect?" etc etc etc.  That said I do LOVELOVEOVE the fun effects with fonts - especially drop shadows, contouring and glow effects.

This morning I had a little more luck inmproving contrast, brightness, color, warmth etc on a photo I took yesterday of flowers behind the garage, but it still feels like I'm in the "beginner's luck" stage. I didn't even attempt to sharpen either of these, btw. Baby steps, baby steps.....

Comments

[infinitewhale.livejournal.com]

For sharpening images, the method I've always used is similar to above, but a little different.

1.) Go to channels and select the most crisp-looking. Usually it's green, especially if you're talking Buffy screencaps. Copy it and paste it to a new layer. Make sure you hit RGB so all channels are visible before going back to layers view.

2.) Select the Green (or whatever layer you copied) and run a high pass filter on it. You want it so just the edges are visible. Typically it's around .8-1.2.

3.) Unsharp Mask filter it. Just enough to make it crisp.

4.) Set the layer to Overlay or Soft Light.

It'll be sharper, but without all the noisiness you get from processing all the layers with the sharpen filter.