Let me show you a fantastic method to apply selective sharpening in Photoshop.
To follow along with me, you can download this image from my website.
Now before we start, I would like to mention that this
technique is great for local sharpening, but not so great for global sharpening.
So, I wouldn't use this effect on Develop Sharpening, which is the sharpening
that you apply when you're developing an image in Camera Raw or Lightroom.
And this also wouldn't work so well
for Output Sharpening, which is the sharpening that you apply
to images and output to print or when you're outputting to the web.
The first step is to duplicate your background layer.
You can press Ctrl J on Windows, Command J on the Mac
to duplicate the layer.
Then you can go into Filter and go into the Other menu.
From here, select the High Pass Filter.
The High Pass Filter is the opposite of the Gaussian Blur filter.
With Gaussian Blur, you get rid of the details by blurring them
with High Pass you keep the details.
With the slider here, the Radius slider.
You can determine how big the edge pixels are.
Notice that if you go all the way to the end, you essentially get back
something that looks a lot like the original image.
In other words, we're keeping all the details.
We don't want that.
We want to keep a small radius just so that we keep the details.
Generally speaking, I never like to go past 2 pixels.
Once you start going past 2 pixels, the edges become too pronounced and I
don't necessarily think this works.
So, I usually keep it between 1.5 and 1 pixel.
And you want your result to look a lot like this,
just the edge details of your image.
Press OK when you're done.
The next step is to remove the Gray pixels
to make them invisible, but keep the edge pixels and apply them to the image.
To do so, you can click on the dropdown
menu and select Overlay, Soft Light, or Linear Light.
In most cases, I like to go with Linear Light.
So, I'll Select that. And you can see the before
and the after.
It's very important to note
that in Photoshop or any other imaging application you cannot create detail.
You can only create the illusion of detail.
And we're creating the illusion of detail by adding contrast to the edges.
So, that's why we use the High Pass Filter.
Because the High Pass Filter allowed us
to keep the edges and with the Linear Light blending mode
we apply those edges to the image, creating the illusion of more detail.
But a global sharpening effect doesn't really look that good.
Instead, I want to selectively add
the areas where the sharpening effect should be applied.
To do so, I can just hide the contents of the layer
by holding Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac,
and clicking on the Layer Mask icon.
That creates a black Layer Mask that hides the content.
Remember, with a Layer Mask, black conceals and white reveals.
So, by making a black Layer Mask, we're hiding everything in that layer.
I can then select the Brush Tool from the toolbar.
And paint with white to reveal the effect.
I'm going to use my Wacom tablet because I have pressure sensitivity.
If you don't have one, that's okay.
Just bring down the flow so that you can build up the brush strokes as you paint.
Make sure that if you have a tablet,
you enable this icon so that you have pressure sensitivity on.
And if you don't have it,
just bring down the Flow and you can sort of recreate that effect.
I'm going to tap on the left bracket key to reduce my brush size.
And I'm just going to paint with white
wherever I want this effect to appear.
And I'm just going to paint on her sweater, but not everywhere.
Notice that on the bottom left we have
blurring going on because of the depth of field when the photo was shot.
So I don't really want to add a lot of sharpening there.
I just want to keep my sharpening effect
to the areas that are actually in focus on the actual image.
And I'm going quickly here, of course.
So, do spend a little more time in your projects fine tuning the smaller details.
I'm also going to apply some
of the sharpening effect to her eyes just to make her eyes pop a bit more.
All I'm going to do is just Zoom into her face
and with the Brush Tool,
I can just paint on her eyes
to sharpen them up a little bit,
maybe a little bit on her eyebrows as well.
I'll double-click on the Hand Tool to fit the image to screen.
And this is the before
and the after.
If you're a little heavy-handed like I was
here on her eyes, you can always paint with black to hide that effect.
Again, I have pressure sensitivity, so I'm not really painting with pure black.
I'm just painting with a darker Gray, which is minimizing that effect.
But the point is that the High Pass Filter Allows you to create edge pixels and you
can apply those edge pixels to create the illusion of detail on your photos.
And with a Layer Mask, you can selectively target where that effect appears.
And by the way, if you want to learn how
to change background colors in Photoshop,
make sure that you check out this video here!
Thanks so much for watching!