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Thread: Noob Sharpening Question

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    Default Noob Sharpening Question

    Can someone please recommend the best way to do selective sharpening in Photoshop CC?
    Thanks

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    What are you looking to sharpen? I do birds so say I wanted to select only the bird (or just a part of the bird like the head) and not the background I would do the following:

    Select the quick selection tool (4th from the top on the left side). Set the size of your brush using brackets. Left brackets { makes it smaller and right bracket } makes it bigger.

    Then use it to select the bird. You can go bigger or smaller and fine tune certain parts. When you are mostly there you can go to SELECT and then SELECT AND MASK. Then set size of brush using brackets and go over the edge to get it exactly. Sometimes this is very effective and sometimes not depending on how cluttered your background is. Once it is where you want it in select and mask hit OK.

    Now you have your bird selected then just sharpen how you want to sharpen. For instance hit FILTER, SHARPEN, SMART SHARPEN. Make your selections and hit OK. I often use NIK output sharpener. Just sharpen how you want once it is selected.

    Thats it. There are other ways to select. If you right click on the same 4th icon on left you can select the magic wand tool. That does a great job on certain situations. For instance if I have a bird against a clear sky or consistent background then I just select the magic wand tool. Hold down SHIFT and left click on what I want to select. Follow steps above to fine tune if necessary. Then go to SELECT, INVERSE and your bird is now selected. After you sharpen you can then inverse again and say run noise reduction on only your background.

    You may also want to modify the selection a bit and not have it be so clear cut. Typically once I have it selected (steps above) I will hit SELECT, MODIFY, FEATHER. Then select maybe 2 or 3 pixels and hit OK. Will give you a bit of a buffer zone.

    Plenty of other ways to do this but that is a good start.

    Let me know if you have any questions or have problems following any of that.

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    Thanks very much Isaac. That will help a lot.

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    Any time. Lets see some results and let me know how it went. Any other questions be sure to ask. That is what we are here for.

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    BPN Member Don Lacy's Avatar
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    Isaac's method works well and pretty much how I do it. You can also use a quick and dirty method once your image is sized flatten all layers then copy the BG layer, apply your sharpening on the copied layer click on the add vector mask icon at the bottom of your layer pallet, make sure the mask is selected then go to edit -fill-black, once the mask is filled with black select your brush and set the hardness to 0, then makes sure the back ground color is set to white use the brackets to size the brush and paint in the sharpening adjusting the brush size as needed. Using a soft brush will help eliminate halos and you want to barely touch the edge of your subject. This methods works well when you have a nice OOF BG.
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    Thanks Don,
    I'm studying up on layers, masks and brushes now. I imagine I can use a reverse process to blur a background more if need be.
    I appreciate the input.

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    BPN Member Don Lacy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jonathan Spool View Post
    Thanks Don,
    I'm studying up on layers, masks and brushes now. I imagine I can use a reverse process to blur a background more if need be.
    I appreciate the input.
    Blurring a BG in PS does not have the same look as when it is done in the field a lens has a nice gradual fall off of focus while when it is done in PS it often looks like the subject is pasted onto the BG.
    Don Lacy
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    Super Moderator arash_hazeghi's Avatar
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    What Don said above, blurring the BG in photoshop makes the image look synthetic and unnatural to the trained eye. you can run NR to smoothen it out a bit but the bokeh remains pretty much as captured in the camera

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    Ok. Thanks for that.

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