Arizona Photoshop Professional

I often hear comments about the sharpness of my work, and photographers are constantly asking me how I get everything so crisp in all of my photographs. The careful process of creating tack-sharp images starts in front of the lens and finishes with the conversion to JPG or printing. I do not use filters on my lenses except for the Polarizer as needed, and turn to my sharp prime Nikon lenses first. I also shoot in the f/8-f/11 range whenever I can, and always use my heavy tripod if practical.  These practices and techniques yield very shap images in-camera.

The other process that yields me the sharpest-looking images possible is my sharpening technique. There's no single setting or acction that will work best on every image, but once you understand the concepts of sharpening and the problem with using the sharpening presets in Photoshop, you are well on your way to creating ultra-sharp, natural looking images without halos or blotchiness.

Sharpening images is something we all do as photographers, but most of us really have trouble getting the best effect without causing halo's around dark edges and other problems that are emblematic of overshaprening. The sharpening algorithm in Photoshop increases contrast along edges - this works great, but it will often overshoot at the edge of a transition leaving a double-image or halo. Photoshop has built in a way to keep this fram happening but hid it in a place outside of the sharpening tool. Under the edit menu, there's a selection called "Fade..." after you use the unsharp mask, it becomes "Fade Unsharp mask" - when you select this, you will be given Fade modes, which are the same as the overlay modes on layers, but only affect the sharpening that was just done on this layer. In this video, we will run through this process and show the before and after :

Here are some before-and-after closeups of his hair: