Selective Sharpening in Photoshop CS

[Jack Breakfast]

Hello there! I was hoping some of you wise folks could enlighten me...I'm looking for some good selective sharpening techniques to be used in Photoshop CS. My self-taught approach (and please feel free to laugh in my face, I can take it) is to make a selection with the magic wand or lasso, copy the selection to a new layer and apply the unsharp mask on that layer. Then, I play with the layer's opacity slider to get the right look. I hope this makes sense? My learning disability makes it difficult for me to write about such things with clarity. Anyhow, I have a feeling there's a better way to do this, perhaps with quick masks, which is something I know very little about. I'd appreciate any tips you folks might have. I hope this isn't a pesky message? I think others on the forum will be grateful for some information also...
Many thanks,
Jack Breakfast

[Charles Glatzer]

Jack,

There are many, many ways to selectively sharpen an image. I prefer to use edge masks with blend modes....but that is getting a bit involved.

Here is one quick easy method.

Duplicate the background layer (Cmd J), change layer blend mode to Luminosity (Alt Shift Y), convert to Filter > Smart filter, change layer opacity to 65%, Apply sharpening (click on the image layer, not the mask), Add a blk layer mask (Alt click the add a layer mask icon) hiding sharpening, select the brush tool with white foreground color (reveals sharpening)....by painting on the mask with a white brush you can selectively apply sharpening to areas desired. You can alter the sharpening effect by changing the brush opacity, size of the brush, hard/soft edge. You can globally increase or decrease the sharpening with layer opacity, and/or by double clicking on the sharpen filter name in layers you can reopen the sharpen dialog box and alter the parameters.

Chas

[Don Lacy]

I use Chas method which works great I also use the quick selection tool found in CS 5 with a slight feather to the edges to help eliminate halos to select the subject before using smart sharpen again duplicate the BG layer and set the blend to luminosity. Also for birds I like to keep the radius between .3 and .7 depending on the type of feathers with the smart sharpen filter.

[John Chardine]

I think you have a good approach Jack. For selection I use the Quickmask method, which really is quick once you get used to it: q to enter quickmask, b for brush- set to zero hardness and an appropriate size ([ or ] keys), 100% flow rate and opacity and foreground colour to black, then paint the mask over the areas you want to select or don't want to select. Painted areas will look translucent red. e for eraser will rub out the mask. q to exit quickmask and you will see that everything you didn't mask is now selected with the marching ants. You can inverse the selection with Shift-Command/Control-i. You can use Select->Refine edges if you want to at this stage but I don't usually bother. You can save the selection under the Select menu. You can place the selection on a separate layer like you do. The areas of the image you don't want to sharpen are exactly the areas on which you may need to run noise reduction so you are killing two birds with one stone with this technique.

[brian simpson]

Thanks John ime going to try this,,you make it sound easy..Do you use noise reduction from cs5? If so what would be the (average)settings .thankyou