in my previous video I explained how sharpening work using the Photoshop
unsharp mask in this sharpening wedge I also said that the Photoshop smart
sharpen filter was better than using unsharp mask in this video I'm going to
explain why I've got the same sharpening wedge open that I have last time if you
want to now to create this watch the previous video I'll put the link in the
description below I'm now going to use the smart sharpen filter and you'll find
this under filters and sharpen if I open smart sharpen you can see we've got the
box here with the dialog I can move this around just to zoom in on an area that I
want to watch closely or I can use this little cursor here and just click on the
area at the moment this has got some custom settings and I'm just going to
take those back to the default so we can see what's going on this image here in
the previews set to 100% I can of course zoom it in but I've also got the main
preview window here set to 200% so you can see what's going on when I apply
sharpening at the moment there's a noise reduction being applied and I'm going to
take that down to zero because I don't want it to interfere with the results
I've got the radius set to 1 and the amount set to 200 and you'll recall I
said in the previous video if I move this up what it's doing is enhancing the
contrast along this edge so that dark gray becomes darker and eventually
becomes black whilst light gray becomes lighter and eventually white what
controls how dark or light the Grays are is this amount slider and it does
exactly the same in the smart sharpen dialog the other control we've got
that's the same is this radius and we can use that to make this edge here that
we're sharpening actually wider or narrower now you can see here that this
is actually being created right into the very center of the image here now watch
what happens when I change this remove lens blur to say Gaussian blur
it seems to become a lot stronger now what's happening here is that when
you've got it set to Gaussian Blur it's working in the same way that the unsharp
mask filter did when we use the unsharp mask filter we were able to create quite
a strong sharpening effect but it also created halos around some parts of the
image when you're using smart sharpening it actually can reduce the appearance
their halos so here you can see the halo watch it again as I change now to lens
blur it reduces it quite dramatically now what's happening is that Photoshop
is detecting an edge and it's trying to restrict the sharpening to the edges in
the image it's not trying to apply the sharpening across everything so when you
use lines blur there's a sort of masking effect that's taking place in the
background so rather than having a threshold slider where you have to
adjust this you can just rely on the lens blur to do it automatically for you
and it's actually quite good the other features that you've got in here are
reduce noise and normally you'd have that set to about ten and all it does is
smooths out where some of the noise seems to get enhanced in the image we've
then got the shadows and highlights slider now what these do is they allow
you to control the areas of sharpening that taking place and it gives you a
very fine control so let's take the shadows as an example when we use this
slider what we're doing is we're saying to Photoshop detect where the shadows in
the image are and where you detect a shadow what I want you to do is rather
than sharpen that shadow I want you to fade the sharpening in that area and as
I increase this the fading effect on the shadows becomes greater what determines
whether or not a shadow is being faded is this tonal width here now when it's
set to 50% it's quite a wide range if I set it to 100% it will fade the effect
across all the shadows now while I've been doing that if you've been watching
down here I'll just make this a little bit wider so you can see the effect on
the dark side here has actually been greatly
reduced and we're not seeing such an enhancement as we were before and that's
because of this fading amount now when the tonal width is set at 100%
there's a large degree of treating things as shadows if I move this down to
very narrow it doesn't treat as much as shadows and you can see here we're
getting the sharpening effect much stronger now watch as I move it up and
it fades it out quite nicely now the other control we've got is this
radius and this radius determines how Photoshop detects a shadow at the moment
it's looking at one pixel well typically you don't want to judge if something is
a shadow or a highlight based on one pixel you're going to probably want to
be around 10 or 12 and that makes it more accurate if you make it too wide
what it will do is it will it will check a wide area and it will detect more
shadows than are probably there so really something around 10 to 20 is
probably good advice for using the radius slider
now the other sliders we've got here at the highlights and they work in exactly
the same way so you can fade the effect on the highlights as well now while I've
been doing that you've probably noticed we've got quite a good degree of fading
going on now even though we've got a massive radius let's reduce the radius
back down to something more sensible and let's reduce the amount down to
something sensible as well and what we've got now is a nice crisp edge now
you can see here a very faint halo appearing and that's because we're in a
200% if I turn the preview off it vanishes but it reappears here when
we've got the preview on but it's barely noticeable and if we're at 100% as we
are here you can't detect the raid the edge at all but you can see it's there
and quite clear let's look now how this can work when we apply it to one of our
images here I've got the image open that I want to sharpen I've already created a
layer here to apply the sharpening to and have converted it into a smart layer
now this means that when I apply my sharpening using the smart sharpen
filter I can go back into it later and adjust it further if I need to I'm now
going to zoom into the image but 100% and select an area that I want to watch
and I'm going to use this area here with these shrubs and this gravel because it
will make for good sharp link and you'll see why in a minute
no I'll apply my filter
and the first thing I'm going to do is go back to my default settings now this
has a low setting for the radius and the amount and at the moment the shuttle's
and highlights fading is turned off we're applying a small amount of noise
reduction which is fine for an image like this it's quite a large image but
it was shot as full separate frames on a micro four-thirds camera so it's a
little bit noisy as well compared to today's modern standards there to
demonstrate this I'm gonna push the sharpening amount
quite high and at the moment even though I'm pushing it high you can't see any
halos appearing around the grass let me show you what it would look like if we
use the unsharp mask and we'll move this to the Gaussian blur I'll just turn the
preview off so you can see the difference notice that you're getting
white edges around these grasses and it's making them look a little bit
lighter that is the sharpening halo appearing
around the grass I'll turn it back now to lens blur and you see immediately
that that effect has been greatly reduced and that is without using over
the shuttle's or the highlights fading now I am going to fade the highlights
very slightly I don't want to use a white tonal range I'm going to set it
something like 30% because I only want to detect the brightest highlights at
the moment and I'm going to set the radius to somewhere around 14 and then I
can fade my sharpening in that area and they'll do exactly the same to the
shadows even though I'm not seeing any shadow problems
now looking at the image here it's actually appearing quite sharp now I'm
just going to increase the radius very slightly because I want to make the
effect that bit stronger I'll pull down the amount so that we're not creating
quite as dramatic effect actually the register is a little bit high we'll have
it at 1.2 so let's go and have a look elsewhere around the image if I move up
to the top here and the edge where we've got the mountains meeting the sky it's
appearing very sharp but I'm not seeing an edge that would disturb the eye when
it's passing over it and that effect carries on into the distance and we're
seeing really useful sharp link if I move the main preview window you can see
we've got plenty of detail in these distant hills now and they're looking
very very sharp so actually that's a very good sharpening effect and it's a
lot better than you deceived just by using the unsharp mask we've avoided
halos and we've kept the effect natural but sufficient to sharpen our image
that's looking good so I'll now click OK and we've applied
those changes if I wanted to go back in I could reopen the smart sharpen filter
by double clicking it here I can then make any further changes before closing
it down I'm happy with go back to my fullscreen I can now save
that as the sharpened image for future use
I hope you found this useful I'm Robin Whalley you've been watching lenscraft
I'll see you next time for another video