today I'm returning to the subject of sharpening because I want to share
another method of sharpening your photos this time though I'm using affinity
photo now although I am in affinity to demonstrate this you can still use the
same method in Photoshop because it's got the same filter I've got up on the
screen this sharp link strip that I use in all the videos like this and I've got
a new layer created over here so that I can show up late and I'm going to apply
to it the filter which is found under sharpening and is called high pass it
looks not very sharp but what you can see is this outlined around the edge
that's being sharpened and if I change the radius you can see that the area
being sharpened by this increases just as we did with the sharpening tools
where we increase the radius so typically you what you'd want to do is
choose a relatively small radius where you can just see the edge that's being
sharpened I'm now going to apply this now you may be wondering why can't you
see the image and that's because the new sharpening layer that we've created
using the high pass filter is set to normal what we need to do is change its
blending mode and we're going to change it to overlay now as soon as I've
changed it to overlay you can see the image again but this time it's got a
sharpened edge around here now you probably can't see that too well on this
test strip let's take a look at a sample photo and see how it works in practice
this is the image we're going to use I shot it the other night
and it was slightly after sunset and there's a lot of atmospheric so what
we'll do is we'll zoom in to an area in the foreground where we can check the
sharpness
and as you can see there's quite a lot of detail in this image already and it
has already had capture sharp link applied to it let's see what we can do
though when we apply the high-pass filter I've already created two layers
and I'm going to sharpen the top layer we'll take our filter again we'll go to
sharpen and high-pass as before the image now looks very different because
all you're seeing is the high pass filter and at the moment it's set to
about naught point 6 pixels I'm just going to increase the width of that very
slightly and we'll take it up to 1 pixel of sharpening and I'll apply that now
I'll change the blending mode of the layer just as I did before and we can go
to overlay watch the detail here in the ground if I turn that layer off now as
you can see it's made a difference but it's not exaggerated any noise at all
you're not seeing any exaggeration of noise but there's plenty of detail being
enhanced now overlay is just one of the blending modes you can use with best
there's others that also work soft light for example is not quite as sharp as
overlay but if you got a hard light it creates more of a sharpening effect as
does vivid light and linear light is stronger still pen light isn't though so
you can use these different blending modes to try to create different
sharpening effects now what if you think you've applied the
wrong radius setting well there isn't really a way back from it because we've
applied a filter to a layer but let's turn this off for a moment and I'll show
you an alternative way so again I've got this pixel layer that we've created and
I'm going to go up here and select layer and then a new live filter layer and I'm
going to select again sharpen and notice you've got another high-pass filter in
here this time rather than applying it
directly to our lair it's creating a live filter now if
you're not familiar with the difference take a look over in the layers window we
now see the high-pass filter attached beneath the layer that it's applied to
and we can set our radius so let's go back and set our one pixel radius and we
can also set here the blending mode so I'm going to select the older layer game
know I can actually move my radius and change the radius setting to increase
the sharpening effect so this time I could use a sharpening radius of say 3.5
pixels and now I can close that I can also collapse or expand that layer if I
turn the layer off you can see the difference it created and I can also
change the opacity of the layer to change how the sharpening effect is seen
if I want to go back in and adjust my radius again I just need to double-click
on the high-pass filter and now I can actually change it again
that's one of the benefits of using this high-pass filter as a live layer it
gives you greater control if you want to adjust your image later and that's the
image no sharpened using the high-pass filter if you liked this video tutorial
there's lots more tutorials on my website I'll put the details in the
information below I'm Robin Whalley you've been watching Lenscraft I'll see
you next time for another video