Hey guys what's going on? In this video I'm going to be talking to you about sharpening.
How I do my sharpening for almost all of my wildlilfe pictures
and I'm gonna go over some of the standard sharpening techniques that most people use
and why I think they're not quite as good as this one.
I'm going to be working from a RAW file in Lightroom and Photoshop and I have a Windows PC
so let's get into it.
Alright so here we are in Lightroom. This is the image I'm going to use.
I was going to use a different one but, the trouble is a lot of these shots I was at very low shutter speeds and it
was quiter good light that day, so they were just a bit too clean.
This one was shot at 1/1000 sec & ISO 900
so if you zoom in to 2:1 you'll see there is quite a bit of noise in the background here.
One of the problems I see quite often is when maybe the picture is a bit soft, people really crank the sharpening
and you can see the more I increase the sharpening, the harsher the noise gets in the background.
The details pop nicely, but the background noise is much worse.
So what if there was a way to crank up the detail, but not the noise?
That's selective sharpening. Let's get into it.
So one of the approaches you can use is actually built right into Lightroom.
I'll just turn the sharpening right up so you can see more clearly how this works
You can see it's increased the noise in the background, but the details pop nicely.
If I increase this "masking" slider you can see how the background noise decreases, but the detail still
pops nicely and if you hold [ALT] while dragging you can see how it's doing this/
As you raise the masking slider it's changing the threshold of where it will add sharpening based on
the size of details. So I find around 70 usually works well.
The problem with this is it doesn't give you much control.
It will only add sharpening based on the contrast of the image
And the other thing is you're sharpening right down at the pixel level on the full resolution image.
For web use it's actually better to add your sharpening at the final/output resolution.
So when you're doing selective sharpening basically turn off sharpening in Lightroom.
So I'm going to drag sharpening to 0 and you can see that really improves the look of the noise.
The noise in the background doesn't look so bad now.
It does make the subject look a bit soft, but we can fix that.
Okay so let's say I'm happy with how my image is edited and I want to do the sharpening.
I'm going to right-click and go to Edit in > Photoshop CC.
Here's our image in Photoshop.
You can see I'm zoomed out at 33.3%, so I've got a long way to zoom in [CTRL+plus/minus].
I think one of the most important things about this technique that makes it good
is that you do the sharpening at the output resolution.
If this were a print it would be different, but for web use, like for Instagram or flickr
you want to do your sharpening at the final display resolution.
Now, I know everyone's phone screen or monitor is a different resolution, but we'll make it simple
and do the sharpening at the resolution that I normally export to get the best quality on each platform.
So in this case, say I want to upload the picture to flickr, I would do the image resizing for flickr first
So let's do that first. Go to Image > Image size.
For flickr the long edge (width) should be 2048. The height is contrained due to the aspect ratio so it's fine.
Make sure resample is ticked. Bicubic in general is the best one to use, so make sure it's set to that. Hit OK.
And there we go, this is the output resolution for flickr.
Now we're actually going to add the sharpening, so the way we do that is, I'm going to come over to this
"Background" layer and duplicate it by dragging it down onto the "new layer" icon down at the bottom right.
This gives me a copy. Now with this layer selected go to filter > other > high pass.
This looks a bit crazy, but basically you can think of this filter as extracting only the fine details
and removes everything else. The radius should be 1 pixel. This works best for output resolution.
Hit OK.
By the way, one of the things to note about sharpening is that it doesn't add detail, even though it seems to.
Try to think of it more like a contrast slider for high frequency (fine) details. It makes them pop.
So the next thing I'll do is -
Okay I'm actually re-recording this part. Previously it was a bit too difficult to see the effect in the video.
So I'm just doing the same thing which is to change the blending mode to Overlay.
Double stack these layers by creating a copy - that's just really going to exaggerate the effect
and hopefully you guys watching on Youtube will be able to see it clearly as I'm doing it.
I'm going to select both layers by holding shift and place them into a folder by clicking the folder icon
and then I'm going to add a layer mask to the folder. By holding [ALT] and clicking on the layer mask icon that's
actually going to add a black layer mask which essentially makes the layer transparent.
So both of these layers are set to Overlay and the folder itself is set to Passthrough by default.
So now I'll select the brush tool with a pure white colour. The brush I'm using is a basic soft brush.
Going to make it a bit bigger.
So hopefully you can see this effect as I do it. As I paint over in white it starts to show the sharpening.
Only in the areas where I paint.
I'll just zoom in and do it again. I just want to make sure you can see it happening as I paint.
See how the eye and feathers get a bit sharper?
You can stack more of these layers on top of each other to make it even stronger if you wish.
But I would say this is probably a bit more intense than I would usually do it.
Try to avoid over-sharpening your images. I see it a lot and it looks pretty bad if you overdo it.
Be more subtle, that's my approach.
Just enough to make the details pop, but not enough to make the image look crunchy.
So just paint over any areas that are in focus and have detail. Don't paint over the background.
I'm not going to paint over the out of focus areas like down here on the chest feathers.
So what if I was to overshoot? If I went a bit too far with my brush it will increase the noise in the background.
Don't worry, you can either [CTRL-Z] to undo, or if you press [X] it toggles the colour from white to black
so then you can just paint black over that area to remove the sharpening.
If you want you can take lots of time and paint around these borders really nicely, but generally I find it's
fine to be a little rough, just start with a bigger brush and then scale it down and do a second pass on the edges.
And that's really all there is to it.
So now if I toggle this layer on and off, you should be able to see the difference
even on youtube hopefully you can see this. It just adds a nice bit of extra crispness and pop.
You can especially see it around the neck feathers and eye. It's quite a nice effect.
And then if you wanted to turn the effect down you would just bring down the opacity of this layer/group.
You can see that just reduces the intensity a bit. I would probably go for something like this.
So that's it basically. It lets you give your images a bit more crispness and pop, but without increasing the
noise in the background. So that's why I like this technique so much.
Try it out on your own images.
Well I hope you got something from this video.
If you liked it hit the like button
Subscribe if you want to see more videos like this.
And don't forget to check out my other videos. I do a lot of wildlife vlogs where I go out into nature and
get shots like the one I just showed you.
And with that said, I'll see you in the next one. Bye!
That'll do, right?
Gonna be doing a few more videos soon, uh, one is about...
this lens. I actually don't own this any more, but a friend of mine lent it to me
and I kinda wish I still had mine because it's such a great lens. It's for portraits. Video coming soon.
And I also want to make a video about the Atomos Shinobi. That will be coming soon as well.
This is the monitor I use for manual focusing and for situations (like this) where I'm filming myself.
So subscribe to see those!
Alright, catch you in the next one!
Oh and one more thing before I go. I recently set up a profile on Kit.com.
This isn't sponsored or anything, but if you go there you can check out the gear I use.
You can actually go in and see the products I use with descriptions I've written myself.
And there are Amazon links for each. So if that interests you at all, check it out (link in the description below).