High Pass Filter vs Unsharpen Mask

[AC185]

Hello,

I have been doing some research and came across a sharpening technique called High Pass Filter. The settings I use for this at the moment are Radius 5, Blend method Overlay or hard light and opacity of around 45. I am just wondering if anyone here uses this method or is the Unsharpen mask still the way to go? Also I seem to be a bit confused as to the time I should apply the sharpening. In the past I have applied the sharpening as a last step after I have resized the image and saved as a .jpeg. I have read recently that others apply some level of sharpening to the original sized image (in my case I work on a .TIFF file). Any info would be a great help.

Mark J. Beltrano

[Ween]

One thing that might help is to use the Search function and search for "sharpening." I know there have been some good threads in the past...

[JRMDC]

High Pass is one of the many things that I have never gotten around to investigating. Time is limited and so far Unsharp Mask has been sufficient for my needs.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tu...arpening.shtml

The issue of timing of sharpening has been discussed in these forums a number of times. I sharpen last, so after resizing (USM 80/0.6/0 as a starting point), but when I am doing raw conversion (adobe camera raw within photoshop elements) I have it set for 25% sharpening also. The combo works well enough for web posting so I have never explored it further.

[AC185]

Hey Ween

I did an extensive search though the board and found a lot of good info. I am going to be looking into doing some selective sharpening as I saw in one of your posts. Was just wonering if anyone had tried this method before

[JRMDC]

Originally Posted by AC185

Hey Ween

I did an extensive search though the board and found a lot of good info. I am going to be looking into doing some selective sharpening as I saw in one of your posts. Was just wonering if anyone had tried this method before

I often do selective sharpening when there is catenary. The sky generally does not need to be sharpened and wires often pick up a sharpening halo before other parts of the image, so I will select them out and sharpen the rest. For other types of shots I never do it. But I'm not a sharpening maven.

[troy12n]

IMHO high pass is more effort than it's worth. But I am no photoshop master. Selective sharpening can accomplish more IMHO...

[Rich K]

I use high pass filter sharpening almost exclusively. I shoot RAW exclusively, so I also sharpen the RAW photo a bit in Adobe Camera Raw first.

[JRMDC]

Originally Posted by Rich K

I use high pass filter sharpening almost exclusively. I shoot RAW exclusively, so I also sharpen the RAW photo a bit in Adobe Camera Raw first.

Why do you like it better? What are your usual settings? Tell us more!

[Rich K]

Originally Posted by JRMDC

Why do you like it better? What are your usual settings? Tell us more!

Janusz,

I stumbled upon this technique about a year ago when I discovered this brief article about high pass sharpening.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tu...arpening.shtml

You referenced this earlier.

An even better tutorial can be found here . . .

http://nyfalls.com/article-photoshop...harpening.html

I really like this method of sharpening because . . . .

It is really quite fast and easy once you have used it a while.

It's done on a seperate layer so if I don't like the result I just delete the layer and do it over again.

Using high pass I almost never struggle with jaggies or halos that I seemed to encounter more with USM.

As for my technique, I always do this last after all Photoshop tweaks and resizing.

I shoot RAW and I do some basic sharpening on the full sized out of camera image before I start my Photoshop work. I find that this "pre-sharpening" helps minimize the final sharpening amount needed.

First I change the blending mode of the layer I will use for sharpening to Overlay. Some suggest this be set to Hard Light but I prefer the former.

I typically set the radius at 0.3 or 0.4 to start. This seems sufficient in part because I sharpen first in Adobe Camera Raw. Once the sharpening is applied I control the final effect with the Opacity control. I usually end up with opacity set to between 70% and 80%.

Although it can take slightly longer to do than USM, I love the results and to me high pass is the way to go. I also use it on shots I intend to print, increasing the radius, etc. due to image size being larger for prints. My out of camera image size is 4272 x 2848.

Hope this helps. I encourage anyone who has not tried this technique to give it a try.

[JRMDC]

Great info, thanks.

[travsirocz]

Different shapening techniques and times to do the sharpening depends on each individual image and the look you are going for. I use many techniques. I also find the with some USM and some PS smart sharpening can work well together.