Frank Piechorowski
New member
If any of you have ever used FM’s Sharpen Pro, you already have an idea of what edge sharpening is. It’s a way to only sharpen the parts of an image where there is a distinct edge while leaving “clean” areas like sky etc unsharpened.
This technique is a little long winded, but it works really well.
Here is our starting image… This is a crop of one of the images of LeLe I got at the zoo last week.
What we want to do in this shot is sharpen the fur, but leave the out of focus part smooth.
Step 1) copy the background layer to a new layer. Front the layer pallet drag the background to new layer icon or from the menu click <Layer><Duplicate Layer>
Step 2) Run <Filter><Styalize><Find Edges> on this new layer. You should have something like this:
Step 3) Now we want to put a curve on this layer. And a pretty aggressive curve at that. Press <ctrl><M> or from the menu select <Image><Adjustments><Curves> to pull up a curves dialog. Put a curve on it something like this:
Notice the white box at the top right of the curves window. See how I’ve dragged it to the left? That is what makes the soft lines in the background go way. Then notice the basic shape of this curve. It’s this shape curve that makes the hard edges very dark. Imitate this basic shape and play with it for your image so that the edges of the object have good hard definition. Then play with that top box to push things you DON’T want sharpened to white. This is my result:
This technique is a little long winded, but it works really well.
Here is our starting image… This is a crop of one of the images of LeLe I got at the zoo last week.
What we want to do in this shot is sharpen the fur, but leave the out of focus part smooth.
Step 1) copy the background layer to a new layer. Front the layer pallet drag the background to new layer icon or from the menu click <Layer><Duplicate Layer>
Step 2) Run <Filter><Styalize><Find Edges> on this new layer. You should have something like this:
Step 3) Now we want to put a curve on this layer. And a pretty aggressive curve at that. Press <ctrl><M> or from the menu select <Image><Adjustments><Curves> to pull up a curves dialog. Put a curve on it something like this:
Notice the white box at the top right of the curves window. See how I’ve dragged it to the left? That is what makes the soft lines in the background go way. Then notice the basic shape of this curve. It’s this shape curve that makes the hard edges very dark. Imitate this basic shape and play with it for your image so that the edges of the object have good hard definition. Then play with that top box to push things you DON’T want sharpened to white. This is my result: