Tutorial 2: Sharpening your photo

Sharpening is a serious issue, there are a lot of things to be said about it. However, for now, we'll stick with the practical sides of it.

To sharpen your photo do the following:

1. Open photo in photoshop.
   
   
2. Select filters -> Sharpen -> Unsharpen Mask.
   
   
3. Values: Well it depends on how much sharpening would you like to achieve (yes, there is such thing as over sharpening and it can ruin your photo too!).
   
   Amount: The amount of the filter to apply, the higher the more sharpened the image will be.
   
   Radius: The filter is applied in a radial manner, therefore the larger the radius the bigger effect of the sharpening.
   
   Threshold: Is the amount of differences between colors that control when this filter is applied, the higher value the less pronounced the effect will be.
4. Click the preview button to see the photo with and without the filter until you decide you like the outcome.

And voila! There you have a sharpened photo.

Contrast recap

After yesterday's first mini-tutorial, I kinda felt that I did not explain the logic of the Curves window only the technique.

So lets discuss the histogram and the Curves Window.

First, what is a histogram? In a photo, a histogram displays the amounts of various colors in a photo, each bar from represents a single color, and the height of the bar indicates the amount of that color in the photo.

Here's an example histogram:

(fig. 1)

One important note: The colors are sorted from black to white (left to right), therefore the bright colors (closer to white) are on the right side, and the darker colors (closer to black) are on the left side.

Usually a well exposed and contrasted photo will have a nice distribution of colors, something like this:

(fig. 2)

Therefore figure 1 lacks a bit of the brighter colors.

Now in order to 'fix' the histogram and by that I mean, adding a bit brighter colors, we can shift the entire histogram in the direction of brighter colors, you can do this like that:

Start position:


You drag the highlighted arrow to the left, this way you brighten the picture.

Final position:



This will surely brighten your photo and will add to the color and balance of the photo.

Obviously it works the other way around, in order to add darker colors you drag the black arrow on the left side to the right.

Hopefully, you now know how to use more skillfully the Curves window.