Blade Canyon
Senior Member
Saw this tip somewhere and it works great for easy and precise sharpening:
Make a copy of the background layer (CTRL-J).
On the new layer, use the High Pass filter. FILTER -> OTHER -> High Pass.
You will see a gray screen and an option menu to set the radius for the filter.
Set the radius to the very lowest amount where you see a few very small details on the gray screen. Click OK.
Now set the blending mode for that layer to Overlay. What you should see now is your original image with just a small amount of sharpening.
Here's the clever part: With the top layer still selected, just click CTRL-J repeatedly. Each click sharpens the image a tiny bit more. You can easily go too far, but then you can turn the visibility of the layers off until you find exactly the amount of sharpening that looks correct. You can even combine layers and use layer masks if you want to vary the amount of sharpening in different parts of the image.
Maybe everyone already knows this trick, but it was a surprise to me.
Make a copy of the background layer (CTRL-J).
On the new layer, use the High Pass filter. FILTER -> OTHER -> High Pass.
You will see a gray screen and an option menu to set the radius for the filter.
Set the radius to the very lowest amount where you see a few very small details on the gray screen. Click OK.
Now set the blending mode for that layer to Overlay. What you should see now is your original image with just a small amount of sharpening.
Here's the clever part: With the top layer still selected, just click CTRL-J repeatedly. Each click sharpens the image a tiny bit more. You can easily go too far, but then you can turn the visibility of the layers off until you find exactly the amount of sharpening that looks correct. You can even combine layers and use layer masks if you want to vary the amount of sharpening in different parts of the image.
Maybe everyone already knows this trick, but it was a surprise to me.