tallat amhfooz

Make Shrunken Images Look Better
When you shrink an image down, you lose a lot of it's detail. To gain some of this back, go under Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask. Try using a Radius of 1.0 and Threshold of 4, then play around with the Amount.

Better Drop Shadows On Press

In the Layer Style Drop Shadow dialog box, there is a slider for noise.
Add a small amount of noise to make drop shadows appear more realistic
in print.

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Blinky2004

Good tip Tallat, thanks. [righton]

Another great method is to duplicate your photo layer (or a merged copy of a multi-layer file), apply the High Pass filter to it using a small setting, like 2-3.5, then set that layer to either Overlay or Softlight.

:B

pdog182

Mark, I tried the high pass technique and works rather well. I was wondering though, is there an advantage to using this technique over unsharp mask?

I always prefer highpass sharpening because it only sharpens those areas that need to be sharpened. It's also much easier to use than Unsharp Mask, with which it's easy to oversharpen.
An other method to sharpen is Smart Sharpening, that uses several filters; Find Edges, Median, Maximum, Blur and Unsharp Mask.

If it's possible, make sure that you only select those areas that need to be sharpened. For example we don't want to introduce noise in our sky if we're only trying to sharpen someone's face.

I seem to get the best result with a product called Neatimage, even when it's mostly intended to remove noise...

pdog182

Thanks Mark, I think that explanation just about does the trick. NeatImage is great, but I never thought to use it as a sharpening tool.

*pdog goes to experiment with his new toy*

pdog182, you ask Mark a question, I replied before Mark ever got a chance to reply and now you thank Mark for his reply... confusing [confused]

Anyhow, about Neatimage...yes, you can use it purely for sharpening. It even has several presets to do this when you click on the Noise Filter Settings tab.

tranquil222

Another way to sharpen is to sharpen only the edges using an "edge mask" --see this thread....
http://www.photoshopgurus.info/forum...pic.php?t=3296

tranquil222

Mark Says:
Make sure to desaturate the High-Passed layer to leave behind color speckles around your edges....
:}

pdog182

Sorry Gaussian. My face is red [saywhat] [saywhat] [saywhat]

wbiss

Love it! Thanks Mark! [righton]
Makes sense... thanks tranquil! [righton]