Sharpening in uniform (sky) backgrounds
To avoid halos when you are sharpening birds in the sky or a fairly uniform background, these simple steps will help you.
In PS, there's a few ways to accomplish the same thing. This is just one of them, an easy one too.
_ Use the Magic Wand tool to select the sky. If there's some clouds, adjust the tolerance of the tool and keep clicking, using the ADD (second little box) in the tool bar.
_ Once your sky is totally selected, go to Select>Inverse, to invert the selection and work on your subject instead of the sky.
_ Go to Select>Modify>Contract and when the prompt box appears, contract by 1 pixel. That will put our selection inside the outline of the subject, thous no sharpening halo will show.
_Go to Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen and use ( one example) 100% as Amount and a Radius of 0.3, Remove Lens Blur.
If this is not enough, duplicate your layer, use the effect again and reduce the opacity of the layer if you over did it.
Remember we are doing this to the file when it is already sized for our desired purpose, since sharpening varies with file size. It's best not to sharpen your Master file, unless you use what is know as Capture sharpening, a very soft, unintrusive effect.
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Originally Posted by Axel Hildebrandt
