Tor-Ivar Hals Photography

From time to time I get questions about how I do this and that related to photography, so I have decided I will do some blog posts where  share some of my small tricks related to photography and editing. If this can help out one of you out there, my goal with this post is reached

Q: How do you sharpen your images?

A: To me, sharpening is the last step of my photoshop editing workflow. There are lots of ways of doing sharpening in PS, but I prefer the High Pass Filter way of sharpening my images.

1: Open and edit your photo in Photoshop.
2: For simplicity in this tutorial, flatten your image (if you have several layers) by selecting menu “Layer” and “Flatten Image”
3: Create a copy of the background layer by e.g. dragging the background layer down to the “new layer” button, so that you end up having a copy of your background layer:

4: Select the new background copy layer, add High Pass Filter from menu “Filter” – “Other” – “High Pass”. Select a pixel radius where the underlying image BARELY can be shown, like in the example below, and select OK:



5: And here’s the trick; various blending-modes work with a “high passed” filtered layer. Personally I usually prefer “Linear Light” (see black ring in image below), but try out other blending modes like e.g. Overlay, Soft Light or Hard Light. Try it out and find out what you likeIf the sharpening effect is too harsh, reduce Opacity on the high passed layer.

6: And the final result might look like this:

Now you can try it out on your favorite image