PSE9 Image sharpening

I have never been that impressed by the sharpening facility in Elements 9, It seems to me that one gets very little sharpening for quite a large increase in noise. Does anyone have experience of a possibly better routine in another program perhaps?

Roger.

Sharpening is a whole subject in itself, but I have two articles here that start you off with Unsharp Mask:

https://www.pentaxuser.com/article/photoshop-sharpening-technique-262

https://www.pentaxuser.com/article/sharpening-method-in-photoshop-263

Try sharpening using the LAB mode, that way you only sharpen the luminosity channel and not the color channels, have a look at this video.

Are you using Unsharp mask in PSE9? What sort of settings are you using?
Do you do any sharpening in RAW before conversion to JPEG (other than the default setting)?

Have you tried Luminosity sharpening? To do this layer via copy (Ctrl-J), apply USM as normal to the duplicate layer, then in the layers palette change the layer from normal to Luminosity. This means it applies the sharpening only to the luminosity (lightness details) so you get more sharpening without halos. Flatten the image.

A couple more ideas:

If you only want edge sharpening you can try using emboss - again duplicate layer, filter - Stylize - Emboss. Leave things at their default unless you want more intense sharpening in which case raise the height to at most 5. Click OK. You layer will turn grey with neon edges. Change the blend mode to hard light and flattent the image. If the sharpening seems too much then before flattening lower the opacity of the layer.

Try playing with the Adjust sharpness control too.

Oh and Snappychappy PSE doesn't have Lab mode.

PSE9 doesn't have Lab mode

But you can duplicate the layer, sharpen the duplicate, and change the layer's blend mode to "Luminosity" (it's practically the same as fiddling about with Lab - even on full PS).

The noise doesn't originate from PSE9, but from the original image
There are many techniques for 'good' sharpening, as well as noise reduction.

www.hiddenelements.com and the associated book are a good place for tips and some freebie plugins.

Matt

Thank you everybody - quite a lot in your suggestions for me to get my teeth into!

Roger.

I included that method in my post Matt .

Crossed in the ether