The ultimate sharpen method for this Pic?!

Viking

I have began reading Dan Margulis book Professional Photoshop. Im on the sharpening shapter. Great book! I hope he will release the update soon!

I have a question about sharpening.

I have a portrait on a girl that is running. I want to do the ultimate sharpening to it! The Best sharpening "I" can do is to sharpen the Red channel, and then the Green a little in RGB. Dont sharpen the Blue at all. Was that the Best way to sharpen that image?

Here is the pic, original pic. No sharpen at all. No sharpen in ACR either.
http://www.jlw.se/sharpen.jpg

I must get Bruce Frasers coming book about sharpening

Duffy Pratt

Another possibility is to convert to LAB, then sharpen the L channel. I tried it with a two step sharpen, first at 45, 18, 12 and then at 350, 1.1, 3. That looked OK to me. Remember, sharpening also depends on final display size. So there is no one best sharpen for an image.

Also, there are some issues when sharpening skin generally, but especially women's faces. So be sure that you haven't exaggerated any skin textures when you do the sharpening unless you know that that is what you want.

Duffy

imann08

According to Margulis, at least, RGB is where you don't want to be for sharpening if you are looking to get the most out of it. CMYK is fun to play with for sharpening issues I think.

In this case, since the runner is the center of attention, I'd have to agree that hiraloam is the best way to go. Conventional sharpening can be rather abusive in this case.

rutt

My current standard sharping practice is to sharpen the L channel twice, first with conventional USM sharpening as described here, and then with HIRALOAM sharpening as described here and here. Naturally I learned this workflow from Dan Margulis.

These days, I've added a new trick to my repertoire. I always sharpen in a layer, giving me the option to use the blend-if sliders to control exactly how the extent and amount of both dark and light halos. This seems to be a superset of the technique using separate layers and opacities for a darken and lighten layer in RGB (described here.)
So to take your image as an example, I sharpened the L channel with



I loved what this did for her eyes and hair, but hated the harsh light halos around the numbers on her big and also the obvious light halos near her left torso. So I opened the blending options and moved the blend-if slider for this layer to until the stuff I didn't like was no longer blended. Then I split the slider and made for a long fade-in so that the remaining light halos would be much less opaque than the dark halos:



Here is the result.

HIRALOAM sharpening can emphasize shapes, particularly large facial features like cheekbones, noses, eye sockets, eye brows, etc. It's often much more important for portraits than conventional sharpening. But there are two potential pitfalls. It can leave telltale halos which look like some sort of exposure correction artifacts. Andy has called me on these a number of times. And it can push already blow highlights or plug shadows. This particular image has a near blown area on the subjects forehead. If we aren't careful, HIRALOAM will blow it.

I sharpened the L channel a second time with:



As hoped for this did add contrast along the strong lines on her face and bring out it's shape. But as feared, it blew the highlights on her forehead and resulted in some very obvious halos, where foreground meets background. I used the following to blend this layer and focus the effect of the move where I wanted it:



Here is the result.

This is the best I can do with this image using sharpening alone, but not the best I can do. The image suffers from a lack of contrast, especially on the subject's flesh. It also has that near blown area on her forehead. By addressing these before sharpening, I can do a lot better. The highlight part of shadow/highlight could help, but instead I used the green channel for a luminosity blend and then added a little more contrast in the subject with an L curve. Here is the result of this and the two sharpening passes.

Ric Grupe

Viking wrote:

I have began reading Dan Margulis book Professional Photoshop. Im on the sharpening shapter. Great book! I hope he will release the update soon!

I have a question about sharpening.

I have a portrait on a girl that is running. I want to do the ultimate sharpening to it! The Best sharpening "I" can do is to sharpen the Red channel, and then the Green a little in RGB. Dont sharpen the Blue at all. Was that the Best way to sharpen that image?

Here is the pic, original pic. No sharpen at all. No sharpen in ACR either.
http://www.jlw.se/sharpen.jpg

I must get Bruce Frasers coming book about sharpening

Like this?

Viking

Dude! You have destroyd her skin! She is to cold. Or is it my monitor? The skin is more green! Its not an alien! ;-) Maybe it was becous I did not convert the picture to sRGB Well, its hard to see if the sharpening is good at that little size. It looks good for webbusage. :-)

I like rutts, but a bit to contrasty in her face I think, after the luminance blend if the green channel and L curve. And what have happend in the girls hair?


I did my own sharpening. And I think I got better result then the LAB rat himself. Im posting a Screenshot that is save in quality 11 in Photoshop. My version is above and Rutts is down under.. Check the hair in Rutts version, its look terrible. Swedish girls dont have such hair! Rutt got a liiitle bit less noise in his picture and no glare in the girls lips. My version have better seperation in details.

Would love to know what you guys thinks about it.

rutt

Good job, Viking! I was so excited about an opportunity to explain the two pass sharpening process and the blend-if sliders that I didn't pay close enough attention to the radius I used in the conventional USM pass. Too much theory, not enough practice.

It's great to see how Dan's ideas have inspired so many dgrinners and how sophisticated people have become about digital post processing.