A sharpening tip

Probably already known to many, here, but I thought I'd share a sharpening trick I discovered this morning.

You know the way you get annoying halos around things if you get a bit too enthusiastic with unsharp mask?

Well, I've experimented a bit with the 'Refine Edge' tool in Photoshop, in an attempt to prevent this, and discovered that with the thing you want sharpened selected, if you feather the selected area and, in addition, contract the selected area by a few percent, it's just enough to bring the boundary of the sharpening inside the actual edge of the thing you're trying to sharpen.

Very dependent on the type of image, but with a couple of my Farnborough pictures, I've found I can get away with much harder sharpening, without the give-away halos.

It covers a few sins, if not a multitude .

One other tip I have heard is to creat a duplicate layer, over sharpen this and then blend the layers using the opaque setting till the desired affect is achieved. I would be interested to find out how this works in comparison to your method. You can also combine this with layer masking.

Here's a few more in lieu of the Photoshop web-session

* Easiest: duplicate on new layer, sharpen hard, change blend to "Luminosity", and then paint on the layer mask to hide/show masking. You can also adjust overall sharpening with the layer opacity (as mentioned by beakynet)

* For portrait sharpening (e.g. eyes), do the above but sharpen a bit harder than normal. Fill the layer mask with black to hide it all. Now pick a 50% opacity white soft brush and gradually paint white on the mask to show the sharpening (around eyelashes etc)

* To reduce halos - use the "Blend If" facility of Photoshop (sorry - not on Elements). Hold the ALT key down and drag the white point for "this layer" to the left - this will reduce the white halos. Do the same for the black too.

There's a few more ways to stop halos etc.
For a good "one stop" set of actions try the The Lights Right Studio sharpening set - one of the best there is

Matt

I just use a Pentax lens.

G

I also try to use a camera too

When you are as good a photographer as George, you won't need a camera.

Another sharpening method to reduce/eliminate halos is to only sharpen the luminocity channel. For that you need to change the Image Mode to "Lab Color", select the luminocity channel and apply unsharp mask to your needs. Then change the Image mode back to RGB. Job done, no halos. Halos affect the colour channels, if you don't sharpen them, you get no halos.

Matt will correct any inaccuracies in my perception of the procedure, I'm sure.

Sorry Peter - you can get halos even if you switch to Lab mode
Switching the layer blend mode to "Luminosity" will accomplish nearly exactly the same thing as a switch to Lab mode... without the hassle and possible degradation.

Halos arise because of increasing the contrast between the edges. It entirely depends on the subject as to how visible they will be.

The TLR action plug in uses some interesting methods for selecting just the edges and reducing halo effects.

It's a big subject...
Matt

For those with Silkypix instead of Photo$hop......

There is a facility to do a similar thing: False Outline Ctrl. Using Pure Detail instead of Normal sharpening also reduces the halo effect.

Try others way of sharpening, i.e. high-pass, 'smart sharpening', a bit of reading here (read that and next few pages, they say about high pass and smart, just click 'next' button):
http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/unsharp-mask.html