Photography
I started pursuing photography seriously (well, sort-of seriously) in December 2006. I have read books, forums, bathroom stalls and bridge graffiti trying to learn all I can. As of this writing I am very active on flickr.com, under the pseudonym "Lumberg". I upload new photos every day, and participate in the DeleteMe! group, where we tell each other our photography stinks. It's like chicken soup for the soul, heavy on the lemon.Edge Sharpening Photoshop Action (Right Click & Save-As)
This is an excellent sharpening technique that I found on the web. I don't take credit for the steps, I just assembled them into an action to make it easier to use. This works much better than just running unsharp mask on your image, because it will only sharpen edges that you define, and does not create halos even at high settings. Assign it to a hotkey and bask in your superiority as you use your fancy, complicated process that your friends are too dull to comprehend. Or maybe it would be better if you share it with a friend. Yeah, do that.I will walk you through the steps necessary to use this action:
1. Find a picture that exudes awesomeness:
2. Load up the action and hit play
3. Sharpening Mask Dialog:
When this box pops up, you want to pull the whites down so that you aren't sharpening every little thing in the photo. Pull the blacks up to increase the outline of your image. Use the midtone slider if necessary to bring out a strong outline. This creates a selective sharpening mask that treats the darkest lines full force, and the lighter lines less aggressively.
4. Gaussian Blur Dialog:
Applie blur to the sharpening mask to avoid halos. For my 6 Megapixel images I use a radius of 3.0. You may need to adjust this.
5. Unsharp Mask Dialog: Here's where we apply the sharpening to that mask we create earlier.
You will be able to use a much more aggressive amount than you normally could. I have it default to 150, but you can crank it up to 200 for architecture and still be okay in many cases.
6. Compare & Adjust: After you okay the sharpening, the action deletes the sharpening mask and flattens the image. If you don't want it to flatten, just uncheck this step in the action dropdown. Not flattening is useful if you want to take your sharpened result and change the opacity to tone it down a bit. (I let it flatten and just hit Ctrl+Z if I want to change anything) The reason I throw out the sharpening mask is that if you create new channels, jpeg is not available in the save dialog unless you use 'save-as'. I make it convenient because I love you. (Update - apparently CS3 lets you do whatever you want, so never mind. I still love you though.)
7. Stare in amazement and wonder at the incredible sharpenss:
Okay, so this picture is a terrible example. It has motion blur and can't really be salvaged with sharpening. Choose a better shot and you will get good results.
Here are two shots I have sharpened with this actinon:
