Hey guys welcome and welcome back thanks so much for joining me today we're going to do a
Five Minute Friday that's kind of a continuation onwards from a topic that we covered a few weeks
ago so back then essentially we covered two of the main mistakes that nearly every photographer makes
within their retouching that they should always always always try and avoid and seeing as though
you guys thought that was great theoretically I thought why not expand on that a little bit
so I'm going to continue along kind of like in a mini series I guess and therefore this is part
two if you're new here please don't forget to hit the Subscribe button go ahead and hit the
Bell icon Bell icon will help you out because I'll give you a notification every single time
we release a YouTube video which is every single week on a Friday at 12 noon on a Friday at 12 noon
which I've just said so I've said it again to drive it home please do join me in the future
I am Jessica McGovern International multi-award winning portrait photographer Judgy McJudgyson
with the alter ego of picky Patricia and so these little things that I'm going through are
things that I see personally all of the time whether that's through judging whether it's
through critiquing whether it's through one-to-one education whether it's just perusing the social
media accounts on the Internet it's it's really really common and it's so frustrating because it's
so easy to avoid so without further ado let's put five minutes on the clock and get stuck in
on my screen you can see the gorgeous freaking drop dead gorgeous Nala so this is Nala she is
absolutely beautiful we will all hopefully agree with this now this issue that I'm discussing today
tends to come about after you've finish your retouching okay right at the end always tends
to happen at the end however if you use bought action packs aka actions that you've bought off
of the internet from another photographer then you will probably be inadvertently multiplying
this problem with most of those actions that you press okay stick with me stick with me it's
important stuff this is important important stuff so we can see Nala's here she sat on a pathway in
Italy okay so this was shot over at The Pet Photographers Retreat where I was teaching in
Italy Nala was one of our dog models for one of the classes and I shot this shot down a alleyway
I've gone with an autumnal edit because I felt it was appropriate and I finished this edit off
with my usual sharpening procedure which if we go into 100% zoom leaves us here now this for me is
already borderline we're borderline on the problem that we're going to discuss and the problem that
we're discussing today is over sharpening over sharpening is sharpening on some form of a kind of
express service to disaster okay if you look at a photograph and think that looks like somebody has
sprayed hairspray all over the subject especially if it's an animal then the chances are that image
is so over sharpened it's painful now for me if I look at this and zoom in even further we're
now at 225% so a little bit of of leeway given on that you can see that these hairs up here
are almost looking and here too like we've given them a good dose of the Elnet hairspray but this
is kind of my absolute top level of sharpening okay and if we go back to 100% I'm going to go
in a little bit more just for you guys because you might not have a super big screen so I'm
going to go into 150% ish I want to show you what I see most frequently okay I see this
now from zoomed out from zoom out wider wider wide this doesn't look bad in fact it looks
fine it looks actually appropriately sharpened however it's not real because we need to go into
the actual pixel level and even at 100% this looks like I've gone and thrown so much hairspray on it
it's painful if we go in further you can see that we have almost like pixel breakdown the
pixel breakdown is happening and we have this kind of horrendously sharp edge situation this is over
sharpened this is not good this is bad if this image was submitted into an awards competition or
was printed large the image would look horrendous okay it would look horrendous it would never win
purely because it's over sharpened but this isn't even as bad as you can get because on a well-known
action-pack creator okay I'm not going to name any names but on their action pack there is a
sharpening action and most people are going to go ahead and leave this on 100 that leaves you
here so let's go for a before and after on that that's the already horrendously over sharpened
one this is that action on full power can you see how that's gone wrong I'm really hoping
you can see how that's gone wrong we even have haloing introduced around the edges that's the
level of sharpening that we've got to the whole dog looks like it was dipped in hairspray and
left out to solidify in the sunshine it's not a good look guys this is a major major error so
if we revert back to where I was mine now looks like super soft by comparison and even mine was
verging on over sharpened in places so if we deviate between what most photographers are
outputting at the moment which is this one which is the the over sharpened version and my one
mine looks soft as a pancake but mine's actually almost over sharpened in itself so that's why I
really wanted to cover this off today sharpening is perfect you want to do it give it a little bit
of a kiss at the end of your retouching 100% but don't crank it all the way up don't do it keep
it subtle and if you can if you can try and mask it and apply it only to the areas that you really
want the viewer to look at so in this case with this subject it's just going to be the eyes maybe
the tongue as well because it's kind of adorable but you want to keep it really specific on those
areas and get rid of it everywhere else you don't need the floor sharpening to the nth degree okay
you don't need it it just doesn't need to be done so always go in with a less is more approach less
is more lighter gentle be careful be accountable to what you're doing to the image you want to end
up with something that just looks great looks natural you don't want to overcook it so hold
back on the hairspray please guys this is the I guess the third major retouching error that pretty
much every photographer makes just lighter touch lighter touch gentle be a gentle gentle retoucher
wait I mean you can still do crazy things and go from our proverbial before to after which
I will show you because why not so that's the before and that's after I wouldn't particularly
say that was a gentle touch but the sharpening the finishing tweaks gentle gentle gentle okay
hopefully that was useful are you a culprit of over sharpening do you put that hairspray on a
little bit too hot sometimes if you do that's fine because you at least accept that you do
that's okay because I feel like the first step to improving is recognising that we have a problem
so hopefully this has helped really looking forward to seeing your images gentle on the
sharpening gentle gentle gentle I'll see you back next week for another Five Minute Friday